>>Hey, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of Avis reinvent 2021 here in Las Vegas. Um, John, for your host, the Q with my coach, Dave Nicholson cloud analyst here with SiliconANGLE in the queue. We've got a great guest Rez, the honor, man, SVP cloud hyperscalers transformation TD. Synnex welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on resident. Hey, >>Good morning. Good >>Morning to you guys. You guys just had this big acquisition with billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Take us through, what are you guys do for set the table for the, for the company? Right. >>Okay. Yeah, it is a pretty big one. Uh, we're now foot number 60 on the fortune 100, um, worldwide revenues around just under $60 billion. Uh, we represent somewhere in the region of, uh, 1500 vendors and OEMs and uh, in over a hundred countries. And, uh, we serve over a hundred thousand parts, 150,000 partners now worldwide. So you got everything from the, uh, end points, style products, uh, all the way up to, uh, data center cloud, serving from the retail to SMB, to VARs going go all the way to enterprise specialists, NSIs. So DD >>And X, big company, you won't global reach. You hit everybody. Basically you T you sell a lot of products, software, hardware, you name it. Cloud is here. What is the big trend that you guys are seeing with cloud? Because you you're innate. You're, you're talking to all the customers, you have a lot of services and you have products. You represent a lot of different brands. How are people rolling them together? Are they composing cloud what's? What are you seeing in the global landscape? >>Um, we specialize in cloud. They've been doing that for a number of years and actually depending on where partners are within the journey, uh, they will have different levels of specialization. And, um, the way we like to look at it is a matrix, um, in terms of where is the complexity of the product that they're trying to take to market, um, versus what is the size and their own maturity. So we, uh, tune our services and our support for those partners to help them better understand and onboard all of that technology and address it towards their partners. Um, so if you can imagine, um, you got many, many announcements that were made here, right? And our partners have to consume all of that information, all of that technology and learn how to use it. And that's where we come in. We, we, we effectively act as the bridge to help them get up there, running and lower the barrier of entry for them to execute >>On those products and they want to add services to it all. Good. Cloud's perfect for that. So what's the relationship with AWS? I'm sure they're obviously enabling a lot of value. What is the relationship with AWS partner network? How do you guys, what are you guys enabled? What are you guys enabled with Amazon? >>So, um, if I give you the, uh, picture of our cloud practice builder, that's a good place to start. Our cloud practice builder program starts with, um, looking at the partner, understanding what is their maturity in that path specifically related to the technologies that they want to work on with AWS. And, um, we look at them in terms of have they got the sales capability, have they got the operational capability, the financial setup, and, um, really helped them then on that journey. So, um, so yeah, we, um, can go very, very deep, uh, where we have our own cohorts who help those partners get up to speed with, >>Do a little, you gotta do a little vetting, you gotta make sure people have the right capabilities. And certain people have certain orientation to certain things, maybe levels of certification. Yep. Is there a swim lanes developing in the partner network that you guys are working with? Big trends, they specializing more in application modernization. Is it more infrastructure or what are you guys seeing in terms of the trends? >>There are multiple, uh, uh trend-setter. So as you say, we have one lane specifically for our ifs. Um, one lane for our, um, uh, people who host with infrastructure. We are, um, you know, obviously data centers, one of our biggest focus areas. Um, and, um, so each of our partners goes into a specific lane specifically related to where they want to focus on. So if you consider for instance, um, somewhere in the area of, uh, ISV ISBNs, um, the primary thing that many of the ISV is out there don't have is the ability to understand all of the AWS programs. So we help them understand that, understand how they can get the most optimal, uh, cost and program with AWS. And then you get into, you get into the next level, which is around, um, uh, their cloud operations, how they actually transact with us. Uh, and you can, you can build a stack, you get into security and then you get a well architected frameworks. So this is just one of the swim lanes that you could effectively go, and we can help, help build them, build that out for them. >>Yeah. So, so Raza draw a little map for me, a sort of a mental map from the perspective of an end user customer say, I'm a very large organization, I've got a large it footprint. I'm looking towards modernizing in the future. How am I engaging with what TD Synnex is actually delivering to the market? We've been talking about partners. So give us a hypothetical again, I'm the customer who is, who's the sales rep. Who's calling on me initially, how am I interacting with you versus the partner? And I know that there are a variety of ways, but give me, give us an example. I want to make sure that people watching this understand cause we use the term partner to me in a whole variety of different things. >>Yeah. Very, very good question. Cause, uh, he is index is one of the biggest companies that the vast majority of the consumers out there have inherited, right? Yeah. We are for number 600 fortune 100. Now most organization deal with a local. It trusted it partner that trusted it partner, um, then is who they would go to, whether it is their infrastructure, whether there is there, uh, um, security that we work with that partner, um, to help them manage it. Now, what we do is really support the partner to have the knowledge they need to have the expertise. They need to have the services that they need to have the solutions that they need to have to deploy those technologies. Um, with that customer. Now, in majority of the cases, the customer will never come in contact with us because we are behind the scenes supporting our partners. >>However, increasingly we are seeing three motions that we work with. One is with our partners, we do sell to right partner, knows what they want. They've worked with the customer, they've established a need. Um, they come to us and we help them deliver that technology. We do a cell width. So this is the part where you're talking about more of the newer technologies, where the partner may be lacking some of that expertise. So this is where are our experts and give you an idea. We have over 300 certifications just in the last year with AWS, um, where our experts would then help the partner actually land that technology with the customer. And then the ultimate level is a sell for you're talking about longer sales cycles, very complex, where they really need to get deep. So we have our own, um, experience centers, uh, customer immersion, uh, uh, programs where the customer actually comes to us with a partner where we then help them actually get through that process. >>So you're a multi-tiered distribution system. You provide service layer to the frontline partners before the end-users provide support and it software technology and, and executive services for them to serve their customer because they're probably not staffed up. They don't have the resources, they have a good business model and they want to make a lot of money. They >>Do, they do. And, um, they have good gross >>Profit margins. >>I hope so. I hope we, we, we help them actually deliver better profit margins and as they move to services and recurring revenues with cloud that becomes more predictable and sustainable for them as well. >>Well, just, I was kidding, but I'm, I'm serious. I want to get into this gross margin because think one of the things that you're bringing up with this question is if I'm a re a partner and I'm talking to an end-user, I might, I want to make a lot of profits. So services are naturally important. I make more gross profit on services. So if you have volume discounts on things that I might not have that volume discount, if I'm going direct to the manufacturer or a platform you provide that, is that right? Like getting that right, that you guys get, provide that discount pass through. >>We do. Um, we laid up, yes, we get a lot of support through their programs. They announced many programs this week, for instance, and as the partner gains more specializations and they gain access to more support through us, they also gain access to some preferred, um, uh, pricing. So to an extent it's about volume. It's also about how deep they go, how, how, how much they invest in their own expertise. So really is a, uh, not just a volume game, but it's a quality game as well. >>Operational value that you provide because you guys must have a lot of programs that pass through to the partner, uh, software systems. What kind of examples can you give if I'm the partner and I have an end-user and I have a boutique, let's just say I specialize in data analytics and whatever unique thing you're providing me services. Is there like certain software systems that you guys have? What operational support do you give to your customers? >>So in terms of the, um, technology that the consumer consumes, um, there is a whole range of technologies around data management and data analytics. Um, then if you're talking about, in terms of the support, operational support that we give to the partner, again, there's the bigger the partner, the more transactions, the more volume they do, they need to have that operational optimization as well. Again, that's where we come in and give them the tools and the technologies. They need to optimize that. >>It's going to ask you the re-invent now that we're in person again, been a year and two years since we've been to reinvent. What's the, what, what are you, what's your assessment of the show this year? What's the big takeaway, um, that you see this year, uh, that that's gonna be relevant for you? >>I, I love the way these guys, um, land some incredibly new technologies. Uh, and I love the theme of Pathfinders from yesterday. Um, so when I look at the, uh, 5g, I mean, that sounds like a game changer to me. And I think there should be a lot of partners out there thinking, hold on a minute, this is a massive opportunity for us. Um, yeah, I mean, so >>The serverless stuff is getting better and better. I mean, like >>It's, they do a good job on their announcements. There is a reason why their technologies so highly rated, uh, these guys know how to do technology. >>And I think if, if I'm, uh, I think of the services that you could roll on top of this, I mean, if you're in front of a customer big, medium or large, I mean, if I'm a developer, a service provider, I can make so much more profit by building more of these services because that pathfind opens up these net new things, 5g AI as a service, kind of the anything. >>Yeah. Um, I mean partners with they, they have their business models. They, the ones who have figured out how to wrap the services around the solutions that are out there. Um, typically we find that they are the most successful with the fastest growth rates and they kind of get themselves into very, uh, positive virtual cycle. Um, the more they can wrap around those services, the higher their value, the more margin they tend to make, the more profitable they are. And actually then they continue to invest and expand their footprint. So >>Quick advice pretend that I am about to become essentially a local trusted value added reseller partner for my end user customers. And I'm going to become a partner of your company. What would your counsel be to me about what I should focus, focus on? What's hot. What's the hottest tip of the spear right now. Yes, right now I need to go out and hire these people, >>Data, data, data, and analytics data. I would absolutely zoom in on that. Um, it is the new oil and every organization needs to have insights. And if businesses out there do not have those insights, they are at a disadvantage partners who can figure out how to build services around data. They're the guys who are really winning. >>Awesome. Great insight. Thanks for coming on the cube here at re-invent great conversation with gradients. I thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Okay. Cube covers. You're watching the cube, the leader in worldwide tech coverage here in Raven. I'm Jeffrey with Dave Nicholson, host of the cube. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>> From theCube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported in our last episode tech spending overall continues to be significantly muted relative to 2019. Now, our forecast continues to project a 4 to 5% decline in 2020 spending, and a tepid 2% increase in 2021. This is based on the latest data from ETR surveys of CIOs and other it buyers. Nonetheless, there continues to be some sectors and vendor bright spots in what is generally an overall challenging market. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. My name is Dave Vellante, and in this breaking analysis, we welcome back Erik Bradley from ETR to provide added color from my solo flight from last time. Erik always a pleasure to see you, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. >> I always enjoy it. Happy Friday Dave, We're almost through. >> Happy Friday. They just blend together. Guys, if you would bring up the first slide, I just want to summarize the situation. This is from ETR's latest findings, I just extracted some. And I want to go down very quickly, Erik, and then get your take. As I said, technology buyers expect the downturn for 2020, but this quarter, coming into fourth quarter, minus 3.2% was ETR's forecast, that's year to year spending decline and a 2% uptick in 2021. Now, Erik this is slightly, what I call it slightly less bad, relative to last quarter. So sequentially it's less bad. >> Yeah, there's a couple of things to break down there. So first to begin with, beginning of the year, when we launched not only our spending attention surveys, we did a simultaneous COVID impact survey, and that's where we caught originally a 5% decline was expected. So although negative 3.2 was probably the worst quarter over quarter lapse we've seen, as a matter of fact it is the lowest drop we've had theory, going into 2021, the IT people that we've actually surveyed are actually expecting a 2% increase. So there is a reason for optimism, but if we're looking at the current data set, there is no doubt the picture remains a little bit bleak. We can go into different sectors and vendors where they are impacted, but I think maybe if you're willing, I think it might be worth just sort of breaking down the demographics of the survey a little bit and how we got to that 3.2% survey over survey decline. >> Yeah, and we have a chart on that. But before we get that, I just wanted to lay out some of the other key points of your analysis. The other one, which is we talked about this in the last episode, we call it a slow thawing. Hiring an IT project freezes are thawing, with fewer companies expecting layoffs. So that gives us some bright spots, but there are definitely a widening bifurcation between vendors gaining share and those who are donating share. And then, you know, again, relative to last quarter survey we're seeing government and education and fortune 100, you guys are showing the deepest cuts from the last survey. Where's IT Telco, retail and retail consumer are showing a little bit more stability. And then of course you talked about the work from home which we've covered doubling from pre pandemic. Pretty interesting findings from your COVID survey. >> Yeah, it's a fantastic, and this is the fourth iteration of this survey that we've done now. So we've been able to track it very quickly, launched it in the field when we realized the true impact of what was happening in early March. This is our fourth version, and we've been able to track it overall. Yes, without a doubt government, education are being the biggest impact, the biggest declines without a doubt. Now, clearly the caveat to that is if there's any sort of government policy maybe those could actually help a little bit, but for right now, those are getting hit the most. Retail consumer is fairing much, much better, and the IT companies, as generally, we're seeing in the market as well, they can, you know, are still spending money and still moving. But the reason for optimism actually comes from multiple metrics. And I will say, we have caught a bottom on all of the negative metrics at this point. Now, who knows what will happen the next time we do it, right? The world is always fluid. But based on this, this is our fourth iteration of this survey, whether it be IT projects being frozen, whether it be layoffs, whether it be just overall expected budget increase, everything looks like it is already bottomed and there is some optimism going into 2021. Of course, the January survey that we launched will be able to corroborate that hopefully, and we'll have much more granularity into those findings at that time. >> Great. Okay, now let's get into the demographics that you referenced for. This next slide shows those. The record number of respondents Erik, congratulations on that. And so take us through the makeup of the survey respondents guys, if you bring up this next slide. >> Yeah. So for the October 20, what we're really doing here is we're asking the it decision makers to update the survey responses they gave us in July. We're basically saying, okay, you thought you were going to spend this in the back half, what did you actually do? And in this particular survey we had 1,438 qualified IT decision makers get involved. That's 60% of the fortune 100 is represented, almost a quarter of the global 1000, and we had about 35% of the fortune 500. The industry breakdown is all across the board, whether it's financials/insurance, IT/Telco, we have industrials/manufacturing, we have energy/utilities, we have government. So it's really a great cross section. Now, geographically, that tends to be about 80% North America. We are heavily concentrated in that area, but we also have a 12% EMEA, 5% APAC and remainder is Latin AmErika. If there were any visibility concerns at all would probably be in China. It's just not that easy to get qualified IT decision makers from China to respond to us. But that's an area we are working on going forward, but overall a huge survey response, certainly meaningful end, and we're very happy with the data that we collected this time. >> Okay, thank you for that. Now, I want to go into the next graphic here, and I want to look at how net score has changed over time. And I want to remind people that, so this slide basically goes back to 2016, and shows some ebbs and flows and then some real strength coming in, 'cause you see 17 and 18, and you may forget going into Q4'19 and into 2020, the ETR data was telling us, hey, things are going to slow down a little bit. It's hard to remember that. And so, and the thinking back then was okay, last couple of years, people have spent a lot on digital transformation, and would a lot of experimentation, they were hanging on to their legacy stuff, and with all that technical debt and they were experimenting with a lot of the new technologies. And what we saw coming into Q4 2019 was people beginning to unplug some of that and making bets basically, unplugging some of the legacy stuff. Oh, and by the way, maybe saying hey, the new stuff that we tried didn't work, we're going to do less experimentation. So we saw a somewhat depressed next score, and you can see that in here coming into 2020, and then of course COVID hit and you can see the bottom fell out. But wow what a drop, I mean, that says it all, a lot different than what we're seeing in the stock market. >> Yeah, first of all, just a great recap on what we caught last year. Really well done. So at that time there was concurrent spending. There was a lot of proof of concepts being done. People weren't exactly sure how to transition off, how fast they were going to get into the cloud, how fast they could make that digital transformation. And they were kicking the tires on everything, and there was a ton of spend. It was the golden era of IT spending at the time. But we did catch that some of that was coming down. So what we will see now is obviously that spending was going to cool off either way, but now with the global pandemic impact hitting what we've caught, of course, is the biggest survey over survey decline. 3.2% was matched at one other point in our survey's history, but that was at very elevated spendings, so that drop was not as meaningful. When we're seeing from a more baseline that drop right now is extremely seasonal, and extremely meaningful, my apologies. Now, I do want to make a quick caveat that usually the October survey catches some seasonality, because a lot of people have expected spend in the back half that doesn't always materialize. But make no mistake, this is way beyond our normal seasonality. This trough is a real metric. >> Yeah, and when I talk to buyers and I talk to even salespeople, for if you want the truth, you'll talk to salespeople, if you can get the truth out of them, which you usually can. Sales and engineering, that's really if we want to know what's happening in companies, but they will tell you that their visibility, same with the buyers, they're saying, look, I think I'm going to spend and I think I'm going to get approval on it, but the normal buying signals, you kind of have to take with a grain of salt because it's, the buyers don't know the sellers don't really know. I mean, they think they've got reasonable visibility but things change so fast as we know. So you have to be really, really careful. All right, let's drill in to some of the sectors, and that's really the next two slides, guys, if you bring up the first of the next two. So this shows the change from July to October. So the last survey to this survey, 2020, and the green bars of July, yellow bars are October. And you can see right away, jumps out at you, container orchestration and ML and AI, and we've got some other data on this jump right off the charts. They're still elevated levels, so that's a real positive. You can see AI actually, maybe waning a bit, and I think that's probably, Erik, is a lot of it is just, you don't even see it, it's just embedded. But take us through this first chart and then we'll dig into some of these sectors. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, certainly. So from a sector breakdown point of view, that lesson, none of them were spared, let's be honest, right? There's a slow down in spending. But containers and containerization were by far the most stable. So clearly this is a priority. People are recognizing that they need to go that route. Nobody wants to be tied to any particular cloud provider. So container and containers are moving the best, they are looking about as stable as they can be. When we drill down a little bit further in there, we're seeing Kubernetes of course, Microsoft and AWS really supporting in that sector. Now, when you talk about the ones that had the biggest survey over survey declines, we are looking at ML/AI, but like you said, still elevated spend. So even though there was a big survey over survey decline, the overall spending intentions are healthy. Nobody is getting away from it. Also to corroborate that in the COVID impact study, we asked people, given the current situation where their priorities are, and unfortunately in that area ML/AI and the RPA we're actually not positioned as well. So it actually corroborates the COVID impact survey, corroborates what we're seeing here in our larger intentions. Now, when you look at ML/AI, Microsoft is still very well suited in that area. Virtualization was another big area that dropped, which was interesting because I think the immediate COVID impact and the work from home, we saw a little spike there. I think we definitely saw companies like Citrix, right? F5 and Nutanix and AWS workspaces. They all had a really good impact, positive, when we first hit, but virtualization is dropping quite a bit there. And again, no surprise, Microsoft is well positioned as well. And then lastly, enterprise content management also had a big, big drop-off, and there you're looking at Adobe Box, Open Text, those are the type of companies that seem to be having the biggest survey over survey decline and ECM. >> Yeah. And I just want to make a comment on this first of the two slides. Is you see security, it's okay, there's a little bit of decline, but there's the story of the haves and the have nots. If you're an end point security, you're in cloud security, you're in identity access management, there's some real tailwinds for you right now. You're seeing that with Octa, CrowdStrike and Zscaler, SailPoint, you know, had a really good quarter. So that's the story of kind of the, a mixed bag. If you go to the next slide, guys, what jumps out here on the second sector breakdown, and Erik you alluded to this as RPA, very elevated, although down, somewhat still, again, very elevated and cloud computing. I mean, that's all everybody wants to talk about. This is a large market that continues to grow very, very fast. >> Yeah. It's a A2 cloud, right? I mean, even the cloud, we're kind of shocked and we saw that too. But, you know, again, it's still a healthy survey at 4Cloud. Spending is still there, but what we are seeing is a pretty big survey over-serving decline that is probably, if you had to translate that, it's going to show slower growth. Still double digit growth, but slower than we expected. And interestingly in the cloud, again, Microsoft is very steady, GCP steady. We saw AWS soften a little bit, and that's something that I think we need to keep an eye on there, we are seeing some softening trends. IBM and Oracle, unfortunately, no matter how hard they push, it doesn't really seem to be making a dent, at least with our it decision makers that respond to the survey. But one thing that was interesting was VMware on AWS actually looked much, much better than VMware alone. So on the cloud side, those are pretty interesting takeaways. >> Yeah, we talked about that a couple of episodes back as the, well, couple of things to pick up on your comments. You mentioned IBM and Oracle, they're just so large, they're growing businesses are not growing fast enough and they're not large enough to offset the decline and their declining businesses. Yet they're huge, they have, they throw off a lot of cash and so maybe their stock's not going through the roof, but they're pretty stable companies from that regard. I wonder, maybe AWS is starting to hit some of those, the law of large numbers. I mean, it's still growing very, very rapidly for a 45 plus billion dollar organization, still growing well into the double digits, so it just gets harder. And then, but the other thing I wanted to pick up on is you mentioned VMware cloud on AWS, we're seeing those hybrid solutions really start to pick up the multi-cloud solutions, which I was a real skeptic a couple of years ago 'cause it wasn't really real, now becoming real. And I think when you talk to, you know this well from your Ven discussions, people are looking at options for cloud. They want multiple clouds, the right horse for the right course, they want to reduce their risk, they want to ensure exit strategies and some clouds are just better at some things than others. >> Yeah, completely agree. And as you know, I do interview a lot of these IT decision makers that we survey to get a little more granularity and to dig into the details, and you and I just, great example. We did a session on Data Warehousing as a Service, we're at Snowflake. And the main reason that people love them is 'cause they have cloud portability. They can move across multiple clouds. Nobody wants to be tied to one cloud provider, they need to be agnostic. And if you look at, you know, something like Microsoft, right? Their Software Suite is fantastic. So most people are going to be aligned for them. They provide great active directory, the enterprise applications are absolutely incredible. But if you're looking to do straight ML/AI or straight data warehousing, maybe AWS Redshift, maybe Google Big Query might be a better fit for you. There's no reason to be tied into one. So what we're seeing more and more is those vendors that offer cloud portability or hybrid availability to do some on-prem for security, some cloud, they're really taking a step up in our recent surveys. Another comment you made Dave, if I can just backtrack to it is, you kind of mentioned how some of the vendors are taking more and more share. We are continuing to see this theme of a widening bifurcation, where although the overall spend that pie is shrinking, the leading vendors are taking much bigger slices from that pie. And that is continuing across the entire year. >> Yeah, definitely a time of disruption. So thank you for bringing that up. Okay, the next graphic I want to show you is actually a motion graphic, and what we're showing here is one of our favorite views. On the vertical axis you've got net score, remember, net score, essentially ETR, every quarter like clockwork asks customers are you spending more you're spending less, it's more granular than that, but essentially they subtract the red from the green and that leaves you with net score. So the higher the net score the better on the vertical axis, on the on the horizontal is axis is market share, its presence, its pervasiveness in the dataset. So you want to be up into the right, of course, like all these charts and XY's. And what we're showing here is, we go back to October, 2018. Remember this is the October survey and you can see the movement and what's happening. And a couple of points here really is one is container orchestration and container platforms, cloud, RPA, ML, they all stand out. And now we, you can see the the context of their "market share" as well, and you see that bunching, you see some of the Legacy stuff, the more mature markets like storage and PC tablets and laptops. They don't have a huge next or outsourcing, not a big net score, but they're there and they're kind of bunched up, down in the middle. But you can also see how they've slowly got depressed over time, even the elevated ones. Nobody in the recent survey is over a 60% net net score. I think you guys said that the overall net score was the lowest in history. So this is just a good way to visualize the various sectors and how spending, momentum and share is shifting. >> Yeah, that's a very good point, and you are right. The overall survey net score is actually 25.3% and it is the lowest ever we've captured. So that actually is translating into what we expect to be single digit declines in overall growth in IT budgets, which again is in line with what we've been saying. We caught early on about negative 5 1/2, that is improved now it's in this quarter to about negative 3 1/2, but if you look at the mid point here, we're very clearly in mid single digit declines, and the entire area is being impacted. Now, there are certainly some areas that are more important than others, there's no doubt about it. But yeah, outsourcing is one you mentioned, absolutely getting decimated. Nobody really has the money right now to be doing IT outsourcing, that's just not a priority. The priority is remote connectivity, remote security, how do I get identity access and governance to make sure that my employees are doing what they're supposed to be doing, even though they're not on my network anymore. All of those things are continuing. And as you saw on the COVID-19 Impact Survey, they're not going away. You had mentioned on a solo session you did, I think a week ago, where you have cited our data saying that permanent workforce is going to double from where it was in pre-pandemic levels. So that means a lot of the people that slapped a bandaid on their networking to get their employees to work from home, that bandaid solution is not going to work. They need to find one that's permanent now. So the areas of spend, although it is declining, there are very clear delineations of where that spend is going. >> Yeah, I want to just pick up on something you said about the work from home doubling, 'cause I've shared that data with some folks and had some discussions. We're talking about people that work from home, not come in a couple of times a week, this is the work from home component. And so I think the hybrid is going to increase as well, but the hardcore work from home, I think it was mid-teens, 16% or something doubling in the post pandemic was the expectation. And again, I just wanted to sort of clarify that I think your data there is quite good. How about some of the vendors? I think, now that's Snowflakes public, you guys may be doing some forecasts there. Let's start there. >> Sure, yeah. So it's fun to talk about the high level, right? And talk about the sector breakdown and where we're seeing things, but at the end of the day, people just love to talk about the individual vendors. So there's a few things that were interesting, yeah. We were able to finally come out with a real viewpoint on Snowflake now that they're out in public, and we kind of launched with a positive to neutral viewpoint. I don't think there's going to be anything here that shocks you. We're absolutely outstanding expansion rates. All the commentary we get from our CIOs are just incredible, the market share gains are about as high as you're going to see in the survey, they are extremely well positioned to continue executing, and this is not in the data set, but we also know that that management team is fantastic. I would think that they had set themselves up coming out as a public company not to completely disappoint. And everything in our data set shows absolutely no reason why they would disappoint. >> Well, and so you may be wondering folks, like, well, wait a minute, with all that great news, I mean, how could they be positive to neutral. Maybe it maybe neutral, the reason is because they have a 66, roughly $66 billion valuation. And what ETR is doing is they're taking that into consideration as well relative to, so they're looking at the street forecast, the consensus forecast and saying, okay, how does the data line up to that? And so a lot of people are asking the question, can Snowflake live up to its valuation. I don't think there's any lack of total available market here. I mean, it's very, very large, the data market, it's enormous. And as, just a plug for an event that we're doing on November 17th, it starts, we're doing a global event, and we're going to be looking at this issue very closely, interviewing customers and partners and executives and, you know, you can judge for yourself if you think the vision, they're putting out this vision of a data cloud. You see this, if this vision, you think is going to have a big enough term that they can grow into, and as Erik said, great management team, will they be able to execute? Decide for yourself, but very exciting IPO obviously that we've tracked quite closely. Elastic is another one that you guys have followed quite closely. I know you've got some data there that you want to share as well. >> Yeah, I certainly do. The APM spaces is really interesting. One last quick point on Snowflake. We don't have regression forecasts on them, because they haven't been out public long enough for us to be able to do that sort of back-testing. So without that data science behind us, we will never really go with a full positive. So to your point that saying positive to neutral is not negative or neutral stance whatsoever, it's just without that regression support behind our data, that's what we just tend to do. Because at the end of the day, we're a data science company, so.. >> Yeah. You need some some history there to really make those calls. But yeah, let's talk about Elastic. >> Yeah, sure, you got it. So recently I hosted a panel on the APM and monitoring space. It was incredibly enlightening. It's a very crowded space that our CIOs told us is right for disruption. And it ended up being a little bit of an avalanche in our data, because it wasn't just Elastic, but it was also Splunk and Dynatrace that we ended up putting ratings on. Now, Elastic as we know is an open source model, a freemium to pay type of model. And we normally try to stay away from open source models, 'cause it's kind of hard to predict how that converts to revenue, but the data was so strong that again, we came out with a positive to neutral rating on Elastic. It was based on just elevated spend levels across, there was almost no negativity, we weren't seeing any decrease or replacement indications, really solid positioning in the fortune 500 accounts, which I was a bit surprised about. And the other thing here is that Elastic tends to be really expanding in the information security. This is no longer just about monitoring and logging, they are becoming a very relevant infosec play and they are breathing down the necks of Splunk. They can do the same thing and they can do it much cheaper. The caveat being, you need to have the IT and the human skillset to run Elastic. So it really comes down to, are you sophisticated enough with the human capital management to run it? But everything we saw here just incredibly improved competitive positioning, they actually had the number one net score in all of information security in any vendor that had over 50 citations. It was just too hard to ignore, we had to come out with a positive neutral. >> That's super interesting Erik, and of course, yeah, we covered that space recently. Everybody wants a piece of Splunk and have for a number of years, but, you know, you see in Datadog come after it, then you see some startups getting into the space. Jeremy Burton launched his company, Observe, Honeycomb is in that, they kind of coined the term observability. Kakao Search is another one. Ed Wall's joined that company, and so you see a lot of folks really going after that space, why not? I mean, it's such a successful company. The pickup of SignalFX filling some holes, we talked about that on the Ven, and it's a very interesting space, and one I think has some somewhat depressed levels from a net score standpoint but as some of your Ven observers said, this market is here to stay and it becoming much more important as part of digital transformation, as part of a dashboard of digital transformation. >> Yeah. Coining that term observability really just hit it on the nail on the head. When we just talked about monitoring an application, that's not what it's about anymore, right? You need to have observability in multi hybrid cloud environments, whether it's your infrastructure or people actually writing code for your application. And so that single pane of glass, end-to-end is the holy grail of monitoring, and that's what these guys are pushing for. The New Relics, the Datadog's, the Elastics, they're getting there more quickly than Splunk and Dynatrace or AppDynamics from Cisco are. That's what the people are telling us, the ones I speak to, the CIOs that use it in the field. They're getting there more quickly and they're doing it more cheaply. Now, this is not to say Splunk is not a great company, we know it is. And also Splunk has more API integration into any ecosystem you want. They're not getting pulled or ripped out anytime soon, we're not saying that. But when we look at our data, we had no choice but to come out with a neutral to negative. They are deteriorating and their spending intentions, their customer growth is completely stalling, we're not seeing any more increased perversion in our dataset or among customers. There just wasn't really anything we could really do. Looking at the data set and that's what we do, we had no choice. There's a lot of skepticism heading into the back half of this year and next year, there's so much competition coming after them, and some of these people are just giving it away for free. It's pretty hard to compete with free. >> Yeah, free is very powerful. All right, speaking of skepticism, Rackspace had their IPO, what do you see in there? >> Oh man, I'm not really sure how to start there. But listen, I don't want to beat a company while it's down, but their net scores are actually negative. I think at the negative 20% range, if I could possibly recall that. But listen, Rackspace, when they were private, let's give them some credit, right? They decided to go out and buy a bunch of different managed service providers, they tried to align themselves with AWS, with Oracle. So they've got this whole bundle thing right now that isn't just straight cloud computing anymore. We'll see if that plays out. But clearly we saw that the IPO was not a very special IPO. In this environment the valuations in the technology stocks being very elevated, having a negative IPO was very telling. But sticking straight to the data, basically we're seeing negativity across several years, it's the worst position vendor in cloud computing that we even cover. We just had to take a look at it right now, and just be honest and say according to the data, this is a very negative data set, there just isn't much we can do about it. Wish them the best, I hope their MSP revenue starts kicking in, and hopefully it'll change. But for right now the snapshot of our data was quite dire. >> Okay, Erik, Well, thanks so much. So let's update folks, so the ETR is exiting, it's quiet, period, which I love, because that means I can have the data and share with you. So we'll be updating our cloud scenarios, security, automation, our infrastructure, and many other segments as well. Certainly the data piece, we've been tracking snowflake very closely. And of course, Erik, you guys are already gearing up for your January survey. So, you know... >> It never ends Dave. And I've... >> Well, I got a really... I've got a sizzle panel that I'm doing next week as well, where we got four sizzles talking about security threats and priorities for 2021. So as soon as I wrap that, you'll be the first one I get my summary to. >> Oh, those are great. I mean, there's such deep dives with practitioners, and it's just an open discussion. So Erik Bradley, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. >> Have a great weekend Dave. >> Yeah, you too. And thank you for watching everybody this episode of Cube Insights powered by ETR. Go to etr.plus, that's where all the survey action is. I publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available on podcast. Wherever you watch, you can DM me, I'm @DVelllante. I post on LinkedIn, you can comment there or email me @david.vellanteat, @siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(ambient music) >> Good morning, everyone. Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live at the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference. This is one of my absolute favorite events of the year. We engage with tons of great inspirational speakers, men and women, and what's happening with WiDS is a global movement. I've got two fabulous co-hosts with me today that you're going to be hearing and meeting. Please welcome Tracy Zhang and Hannah Freitag, who are both from the sata journalism program, master's program, at Stanford. So great to have you guys. >> So excited to be here. >> So data journalism's so interesting. Tracy, tell us a little bit about you, what you're interested in, and then Hannah we'll have you do the same thing. >> Yeah >> Yeah, definitely. I definitely think data journalism is very interesting, and in fact, I think, what is data journalism? Is definitely one of the big questions that we ask during the span of one year, which is the length of our program. And yeah, like you said, I'm in this data journalism master program, and I think coming in I just wanted to pivot from my undergrad studies, which is more like a traditional journalism, into data. We're finding stories through data, so that's why I'm also very excited about meeting these speakers for today because they're all, they have different backgrounds, but they all ended up in data science. So I think they'll be very inspirational and I can't wait to talk to them. >> Data in stories, I love that. Hannah, tell us a little bit about you. >> Yeah, so before coming to Stanford, I was a research assistant at Humboldt University in Berlin, so I was in political science research. And I love to work with data sets and data, but I figured that, for me, I don't want this story to end up in a research paper, which is only very limited in terms of the audience. And I figured, okay, data journalism is the perfect way to tell stories and use data to illustrate anecdotes, but to make it comprehensive and accessible for a broader audience. So then I found this program at Stanford and I was like, okay, that's the perfect transition from political science to journalism, and to use data to tell data-driven stories. So I'm excited to be in this program, I'm excited for the conference today and to hear from these amazing women who work in data science. >> You both brought up great points, and we were chatting earlier that there's a lot of diversity in background. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Not everyone was in STEM as a young kid or studied computer science. Maybe some are engineering, maybe some are are philosophy or economic, it's so interesting. And what I find year after year at WiDS is it brings in so much thought diversity. And that's what being data-driven really demands. It demands that unbiased approach, that diverse, a spectrum of diverse perspectives, and we definitely get that at WiDS. There's about 350 people in person here, but as I mentioned in the opening, hundreds of thousands will engage throughout the year, tens of thousands probably today at local events going on across the globe. And it just underscores the importance of every organization, whether it's a bank or a grocer, has to be data-driven. We have that expectation as consumers in our consumer lives, and even in our business lives, that I'm going to engage with a business, whatever it is, and they're going to know about me, they're going to deliver me a personalized experience that's relevant to me and my history. And all that is powered by data science, which is I think it's fascinating. >> Yeah, and the great way is if you combine data with people. Because after all, large data sets, they oftentimes consist of stories or data that affects people. And to find these stories or advanced research in whatever fields, maybe in the financial business, or in health, as you mentioned, the variety of fields, it's very powerful, powerful tool to use. >> It's a very power, oh, go ahead Tracy. >> No, definitely. I just wanted to build off of that. It's important to put a face on data. So a dataset without a name is just some numbers, but if there's a story, then I think it means something too. And I think Margot was talking about how data science is about knowing or understanding the past, I think that's very interesting. That's a method for us to know who we are. >> Definitely. There's so many opportunities. I wanted to share some of the statistics from AnitaB.org that I was just looking at from 2022. We always talk at events like WiDS, and some of the other women in tech things, theCUBE is very much pro-women in tech, and has been for a very long, since the beginning of theCUBE. But we've seen the numbers of women technologists historically well below 25%, and we see attrition rates are high. And so we often talk about, well, what can we do? And part of that is raising the awareness. And that's one of the great things about WiDS, especially WiDS happening on International Women's Day, today, March 8th, and around event- >> Tracy: A big holiday. >> Exactly. But one of the nice things I was looking at, the AnitaB.org research, is that representation of tech women is on the rise, still below pre-pandemic levels, but it's actually nearly 27% of women in technical roles. And that's an increase, slow increase, but the needle is moving. We're seeing much more gender diversity across a lot of career levels, which is exciting. But some of the challenges remain. I mean, the representation of women technologists is growing, except at the intern level. And I thought that was really poignant. We need to be opening up that pipeline and going younger. And you'll hear a lot of those conversations today about, what are we doing to reach girls in grade school, 10 year olds, 12 year olds, those in high school? How do we help foster them through their undergrad studies- >> And excite them about science and all these fields, for sure. >> What do you think, Hannah, on that note, and I'll ask you the same question, what do you think can be done? The theme of this year's International Women's Day is Embrace Equity. What do you think can be done on that intern problem to help really dial up the volume on getting those younger kids interested, one, earlier, and two, helping them stay interested? >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's important to start early, as you said, in school. Back in the day when I went to high school, we had this one day per year where we could explore as girls, explore a STEM job and go into the job for one day and see how it's like to work in a, I dunno, in IT or in data science, so that's a great first step. But as you mentioned, it's important to keep girls and women excited about this field and make them actually pursue this path. So I think conferences or networking is very powerful. Also these days with social media and technology, we have more ability and greater ways to connect. And I think we should even empower ourselves even more to pursue this path if we're interested in data science, and not be like, okay, maybe it's not for me, or maybe as a woman I have less chances. So I think it's very important to connect with other women, and this is what WiDS is great about. >> WiDS is so fantastic for that network effect, as you talked about. It's always such, as I was telling you about before we went live, I've covered five or six WiDS for theCUBE, and it's always such a day of positivity, it's a day of of inclusivity, which is exactly what Embrace Equity is really kind of about. Tracy, talk a little bit about some of the things that you see that will help with that hashtag Embrace Equity kind of pulling it, not just to tech. Because we're talking and we saw Meta was a keynote who's going to come to talk with Hannah and me in a little bit, we see Total Energies on the program today, we see Microsoft, Intuit, Boeing Air Company. What are some of the things you think that can be done to help inspire, say, little Tracy back in the day to become interested in STEM or in technology or in data? What do you think companies can and should be doing to dial up the volume for those youngsters? >> Yeah, 'cause I think somebody was talking about, one of the keynote speakers was talking about how there is a notion that girls just can't be data scientists. girls just can't do science. And I think representation definitely matters. If three year old me see on TV that all the scientists are women, I think I would definitely have the notion that, oh, this might be a career choice for me and I can definitely also be a scientist if I want. So yeah, I think representation definitely matters and that's why conference like this will just show us how these women are great in their fields. They're great data scientists that are bringing great insight to the company and even to the social good as well. So yeah, I think that's very important just to make women feel seen in this data science field and to listen to the great woman who's doing amazing work. >> Absolutely. There's a saying, you can't be what you can't see. >> Exactly. >> And I like to say, I like to flip it on its head, 'cause we can talk about some of the negatives, but there's a lot of positives and I want to share some of those in a minute, is that we need to be, that visibility that you talked about, the awareness that you talked about, it needs to be there but it needs to be sustained and maintained. And an organization like WiDS and some of the other women in tech events that happen around the valley here and globally, are all aimed at raising the profile of these women so that the younger, really, all generations can see what they can be. We all, the funny thing is, we all have this expectation whether we're transacting on Uber ride or we are on Netflix or we're buying something on Amazon, we can get it like that. They're going to know who I am, they're going to know what I want, they're going to want to know what I just bought or what I just watched. Don't serve me up something that I've already done that. >> Hannah: Yeah. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> So that expectation that everyone has is all about data, though we don't necessarily think about it like that. >> Hannah: Exactly. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> But it's all about the data that, the past data, the data science, as well as the realtime data because we want to have these experiences that are fresh, in the moment, and super relevant. So whether women recognize it or not, they're data driven too. Whether or not you're in data science, we're all driven by data and we have these expectations that every business is going to meet it. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. And circling back to young women, I think it's crucial and important to have role models. As you said, if you see someone and you're younger and you're like, oh I want to be like her. I want to follow this path, and have inspiration and a role model, someone you look up to and be like, okay, this is possible if I study the math part or do the physics, and you kind of have a goal and a vision in mind, I think that's really important to drive you. >> Having those mentors and sponsors, something that's interesting is, I always, everyone knows what a mentor is, somebody that you look up to, that can guide you, that you admire. I didn't learn what a sponsor was until a Women in Tech event a few years ago that we did on theCUBE. And I was kind of, my eyes were open but I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. And then it got me thinking, who are my sponsors? And I started going through LinkedIn, oh, he's a sponsor, she's a sponsor, people that help really propel you forward, your recommenders, your champions, and it's so important at every level to build that network. And we have, to your point, Hannah, there's so much potential here for data drivenness across the globe, and there's so much potential for women. One of the things I also learned recently , and I wanted to share this with you 'cause I'm not sure if you know this, ChatGPT, exploding, I was on it yesterday looking at- >> Everyone talking about it. >> What's hot in data science? And it was kind of like, and I actually asked it, what was hot in data science in 2023? And it told me that it didn't know anything prior to 2021. >> Tracy: Yes. >> Hannah: Yeah. >> So I said, Oh, I'm so sorry. But everyone's talking about ChatGPT, it is the most advanced AI chatbot ever released to the masses, it's on fire. They're likening it to the launch of the iPhone, 100 million-plus users. But did you know that the CTO of ChatGPT is a woman? >> Tracy: I did not know, but I learned that. >> I learned that a couple days ago, Mira Murati, and of course- >> I love it. >> She's been, I saw this great profile piece on her on Fast Company, but of course everything that we're hearing about with respect to ChatGPT, a lot on the CEO. But I thought we need to help dial up the profile of the CTO because she's only 35, yet she is at the helm of one of the most groundbreaking things in our lifetime we'll probably ever see. Isn't that cool? >> That is, yeah, I completely had no idea. >> I didn't either. I saw it on LinkedIn over the weekend and I thought, I have to talk about that because it's so important when we talk about some of the trends, other trends from AnitaB.org, I talked about some of those positive trends. Overall hiring has rebounded in '22 compared to pre-pandemic levels. And we see also 51% more women being hired in '22 than '21. So the data, it's all about data, is showing us things are progressing quite slowly. But one of the biggest challenges that's still persistent is attrition. So we were talking about, Hannah, what would your advice be? How would you help a woman stay in tech? We saw that attrition last year in '22 according to AnitaB.org, more than doubled. So we're seeing women getting into the field and dropping out for various reasons. And so that's still an extent concern that we have. What do you think would motivate you to stick around if you were in a technical role? Same question for you in a minute. >> Right, you were talking about how we see an increase especially in the intern level for women. And I think if, I don't know, this is a great for a start point for pushing the momentum to start growth, pushing the needle rightwards. But I think if we can see more increase in the upper level, the women representation in the upper level too, maybe that's definitely a big goal and something we should work towards to. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> But if there's more representation up in the CTO position, like in the managing level, I think that will definitely be a great factor to keep women in data science. >> I was looking at some trends, sorry, Hannah, forgetting what this source was, so forgive me, that was showing that there was a trend in the last few years, I think it was Fast Company, of more women in executive positions, specifically chief operating officer positions. What that hasn't translated to, what they thought it might translate to, is more women going from COO to CEO and we're not seeing that. We think of, if you ask, name a female executive that you'd recognize, everyone would probably say Sheryl Sandberg. But I was shocked to learn the other day at a Women in Tech event I was doing, that there was a survey done by this organization that showed that 78% of people couldn't identify. So to your point, we need more of them in that visible role, in the executive suite. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And there's data that show that companies that have women, companies across industries that have women in leadership positions, executive positions I should say, are actually more profitable. So it's kind of like, duh, the data is there, it's telling you this. >> Hannah: Exactly. >> Right? >> And I think also a very important point is work culture and the work environment. And as a woman, maybe if you enter and you work two or three years, and then you have to oftentimes choose, okay, do I want family or do I want my job? And I think that's one of the major tasks that companies face to make it possible for women to combine being a mother and being a great data scientist or an executive or CEO. And I think there's still a lot to be done in this regard to make it possible for women to not have to choose for one thing or the other. And I think that's also a reason why we might see more women at the entry level, but not long-term. Because they are punished if they take a couple years off if they want to have kids. >> I think that's a question we need to ask to men too. >> Absolutely. >> How to balance work and life. 'Cause we never ask that. We just ask the woman. >> No, they just get it done, probably because there's a woman on the other end whose making it happen. >> Exactly. So yeah, another thing to think about, another thing to work towards too. >> Yeah, it's a good point you're raising that we have this conversation together and not exclusively only women, but we all have to come together and talk about how we can design companies in a way that it works for everyone. >> Yeah, and no slight to men at all. A lot of my mentors and sponsors are men. They're just people that I greatly admire who saw raw potential in me 15, 18 years ago, and just added a little water to this little weed and it started to grow. In fact, theCUBE- >> Tracy: And look at you now. >> Look at me now. And theCUBE, the guys Dave Vellante and John Furrier are two of those people that are sponsors of mine. But it needs to be diverse. It needs to be diverse and gender, it needs to include non-binary people, anybody, shouldn't matter. We should be able to collectively work together to solve big problems. Like the propaganda problem that was being discussed in the keynote this morning with respect to China, or climate change. Climate change is a huge challenge. Here, we are in California, we're getting an atmospheric river tomorrow. And Californians and rain, we're not so friendly. But we know that there's massive changes going on in the climate. Data science can help really unlock a lot of the challenges and solve some of the problems and help us understand better. So there's so much real-world implication potential that being data-driven can really lead to. And I love the fact that you guys are studying data journalism. You'll have to help me understand that even more. But we're going to going to have great conversations today, I'm so excited to be co-hosting with both of you. You're going to be inspired, you're going to learn, they're going to learn from us as well. So let's just kind of think of this as a community of men, women, everything in between to really help inspire the current generations, the future generations. And to your point, let's help women feel confident to be able to stay and raise their hand for fast-tracking their careers. >> Exactly. >> What are you guys, last minute, what are you looking forward to most for today? >> Just meeting these great women, I can't wait. >> Yeah, learning from each other. Having this conversation about how we can make data science even more equitable and hear from the great ideas that all these women have. >> Excellent, girls, we're going to have a great day. We're so glad that you're here with us on theCUBE, live at Stanford University, Women in Data Science, the eighth annual conference. I'm Lisa Martin, my two co-hosts for the day, Tracy Zhang, Hannah Freitag, you're going to be seeing a lot of us, we appreciate. Stick around, our first guest joins Hannah and me in just a minute. (ambient music)

welcome back to thecube's live coverage coming to you from the big apple in new york city we're talking all things aws summit but right now i've got two powerhouses you know them you love them john furrier dave vellante going to be talking about super cloud guys we've been talking a lot about this there's a big event coming up on the cube august 9th and i gotta start dave with you because we talk about it pretty much in every interview where it's relevant why super cloud yeah so john furrier years ago started a tradition lisa prior to aws which was to lay down the expectation for our audiences what they should be looking for at aws reinvent okay john when did that start 2012 2013. actually 2013 was our first but 2015 was the first time when we get access to andy jassy who wasn't doing any briefings and we realized that the whole industry started looking at amazon web services as a structural forcing function of massive change uh some say inflection point we were saying complete redefinition so you wrote the trillion dollar baby yeah right which actually turns into probably multi-trillion dollars we got it right on that one surprisingly it was pretty obvious so every year since then john has published the seminal article prior to reinvent so this year we were talking we're coming out of the isolation economy and john hedwig also also adam silevski was the new ceo so we had a one-on-one with adam that's right and then that's where the convergence between andy jassy and adam celebski kicked in which is essentially those guys work together even though they he went off and boomerang back in as they say in aws but what's interesting was is that adam zluski's point of view piggyback jassy but he had a different twist yeah some so you know low you know people who didn't have really a lot of thought into it said oh he's copying microsoft moving up the stack we're like no no no no no something structural is happening again and so john wrote the piece and he started sharing it we're collaborating he said hey dave take a take a look add your perspectives and then jerry chen had just written castles in the cloud and he talked about sub-markets and we were sort of noodling and one of the other things was in 2018 2019 around that time at aws re invent there was this friction between like snowflake and aws because redshift separated compute from storage which was snowflake's whole thing now fast forward to 2021 after we're leaving you know the covert economy by the way everyone was complaining they are asking jassy are you competing with your ecosystem the classic right trope and then in in remember jason used to use cloudera as the example i would like to maybe pick a better example snowflake became that example and what the transition was it went from hey we're kind of competitive for sure there's a lot of examples but it went from we're competitive they're stealing our stuff to you know what we're making so much money building on top of aws specifically but also the clouds and cross clouds so we said there's something new happening in the ecosystem and then just it popped up this term super cloud came up to connote a layer that floats above the hyperscale capex not is it's not pass it's not sas it's the combination of the of those things on top of a new digital infrastructure and we chose the term super cloud we liked it better than multi-cloud because multiplayer at least one other point too i think four or five years earlier dave and i across not just aws reinvent all of our other events we were speculating that there might be a tier two cloud service provider models and we've talked with intel about this and others just kind of like evaluating it staring at it and we met by tier two like maybe competing against amazon but what happened was it wasn't a tier two cloud it was a super cloud built on the capex of aws which means initially was a company didn't have to build aws to be like aws and everybody wanted to be like aws so we saw the emergence of the smart companies saying hey let's refactor our business model in the category or industry scope and to dominate with cloud scale and they did it that then continued that was the premise of chen's post which was kind of rift on the cube initially which is you can have a moat in a castle in the cloud and have a competitive advantage and a sustainable differentiation model and that's exactly what's happening and then you introduce the edge and hybrid you now have a cloud operating model that that super cloud extends as a substrate across all environments so it's not multi-cloud which sounds broken and like put it distance jointed joint barriers hybrid cloud which is the hybrid operating model at scale and you don't have to be amazon to take advantage of all the value creation since they took care of the capex now they win too on the other side because because they're selling ec2 and storage and ml and ai and this is new and this is information that people don't might not know about internally at aws there was a debate dave okay i heard this from sources do we go all in and compete and just own the whole category or open the ecosystem and coexist with [ __ ] why do we have these other companies or snowflake and guess what the decision was let's make it open ecosystem and let's have our own offerings as well and let the winner take off smart because they can't hire enough people and we just had aws and snowflake on the cube a few weeks ago talking about the partnership the co-op petition the value in it but what's been driving it is the voice of the customer but i want to ask you paint the picture for the audience of the critical key components of super cloud what are those yeah so i think first and foremost super cloud as john was saying it's not multi-cloud chuck whitten had a great phrase at dell tech world he said multi-cloud by default right versus multi-cloud by design and multi-cloud has been by default it's been this sort of i run in aws and i run my stack in azure or i run my stack in gcp and it works or i wrap my stack in a container and host it in the cloud that's what multi-cloud has been so the first sort of concept is it's a layer that that abstracts the underlying complexity of all the clouds all the primitives uh it takes advantage of maybe graviton or microsoft tooling hides all that and builds new value on top of that the other piece of of super cloud is it's ecosystem driven really interesting story you just told because literally amazon can't hire everybody right so they have to rely on the ecosystem for feature acceleration so it's it also includes a path layer a super pass layer we call it because you need to develop applications that are specific to the problem that the super cloud is solving so it's not a generic path like openshift it's specific to whether it's snowflake or [ __ ] or aviatrix so that developers can actually build on top of and not have to worry about that underlying and also there's some people that are criticizing um what we're doing in a good way because we want to have an open concept sure but here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand they're criticizing or trying to kind of shoot holes in our new structural change that we're identifying to comparing it to old that's like saying mainframe and mini computers it's like saying well the mainframe does it this way therefore there's no way that's going to be legitimate so the old thinking dave is from people that have no real foresight in the new model right and so they don't really get it right so what i'm saying is that we look at structural change structural change is structural change it either happens or it doesn't so what we're observing is the fact that a snowflake didn't design their solution to be multi-cloud they did it all on aws and then said hey why would we why are we going to stop there let's go to azure because microsoft's got a boatload of customers because they have a vertically stacking integration for their install base so if i'm snowflake why wouldn't i be on azure and the same for gcp and the same for other things so this idea that you can get the value of an amp what amazon did leverage and all that value without paying for it up front is a huge dynamic and that's not just saying oh that's cloud that's saying i have a cloud-like scale cloud-like value proposition which which will look like an ecosystem so to me the acid test is if i build on top of say [ __ ] or say snowflake or super cloud by default i'm either a category leader i own the data at scale or i'm sharing data at scale and i have an ecosystem people are building on top of me so that's a platform so that's really difficult so what's happening is these ecosystem partners are taking advantage as john said of all the hyperscale capex and they're building out their version of a distributed global system and then the other attribute of super cloud is it's got metadata management capability in other words it knows if i'm optimizing for latency where in the super cloud to get the data or how to protect privacy or sovereignty or how many copies to make to have the proper data protection or where the air gap should be for ransomware so these are examples of very specific purpose-built super clouds that are filling gaps that the hyperscalers aren't going after what's a good example of a specific super cloud that you think really articulates what you guys are talking about i think there are a lot of them i think snowflake is a really good example i think vmware is building a multi-cloud management system i think aviatrix and virtual you know private cloud networking and for high performance networking i think to a certain extent what oracle is doing with azure is is is definitely looks like a super cloud i think what capital one is doing by building on to taking their own tools and and and moving that to snowflake now that they're not cross-cloud yet but i predict that they will be of i think uh what veeam is doing in data protection uh dell what they showed at dell tech world with project alpine these are all early examples of super well here's an indicator here's how you look at the example so to me if you're just lifting and shifting that was the first gen cloud that's not changing the business model so i think the number one thing to look at is is the company whether they're in a vertical like insurance or fintech or financial are they refactoring their spend not as an i.t cost but as a refactoring of their business model yes like what snowflake did dave or they say okay i'm gonna change how i operate not change my business model per se or not my business identity if i'm gonna provide financial services i don't have to spend capex it's operating expenses i get the capex leverage i redefine i get the data at scale and now i become a service provider to everybody else because scale will determine the power law of who wins in the verticals and in the industry so we believe that snowflake is a data warehouse in the cloud they call it a data cloud now i don't think snowflake would like that dave i call them a data warehouse no a super data cloud but but so the other key here is you know the old saying that andreessen came up with i guess with every company's a software company well what does that mean it means every company software company every company is going digital well how are they going to do that they're going to do that by taking their business their data their tooling their proprietary you know moat and moving that to the cloud so they can compete at scale every company should be if they're not thinking about doing a super cloud well walmart i think i think andreessen's wrong i think i would revise and say that andreessen and the brain trust at andreas and horowitz is that that's no longer irrelevant every company isn't a software company the software industry is called open source everybody is an open source company and every company will be at super cloud that survives yeah to me to me if you're not looking at super cloud as a strategy to get value and refactor your business model take advantage of what you're paying it for but you're paying now in a new way you're building out value so that's you're either going to be a super cloud or get services from a super cloud so if you're not it's like the old joke dave if you're at the table and you don't know who the sucker is it's probably you right so if you're looking at the marketplace you're saying if i'm not a super cloud i'm probably gonna have to work with one because they're gonna have the data they're gonna have the insights they're gonna have the scale they're going to have the castle in the cloud and they will be called a super cloud so in customer conversations helping customers identify workloads to move to the cloud what are the ideal workloads and services to run in super cloud so i honestly think virtually any workload could be a candidate and i think that it's really the business that they're in that's going to define the workload i'll say what i mean so there's certain businesses where low latency high performance transactions are going to matter that's you know kind of the oracle's business there's certain businesses like snowflake where data sharing is the objective how do i share data in a governed way in a secure way in any location across the world that i can monetize so that's their objective you take a data protection company like veeam their objective is to protect data so they have very specific objectives that ultimately dictate what the workload looks like couchbase is another one they they in my opinion are doing some of the most interesting things at the edge because this is where when you when you really push companies in the cloud including the hyperscalers when they get out to the far edge it starts to get a little squishy couchbase actually is developing capabilities to do that and that's to me that's the big wild card john i think you described it accurately the cloud is expanding you've got public clouds no longer just remote services you're including on-prem and now expanding out to the near edge and the deep what do you call it deep edge or far edge lower sousa called the tiny edge right deep edge well i mean look at look at amazon's outpost announcement to me hp e is opportunity dell has opportunities the hardware box guys companies they have an opportunity to be that gear to be an outpost to be their own output they get better stacks they have better gear they just got to run cloud on it yeah right that's an edge node right so so that's that would be part of the super cloud so this is where i think people that are looking at the old models like operating systems or systems mindsets from the 80s they look they're not understanding the new architecture what i would say to them is yeah i hear what you're saying but the structural change is the nodes on the network distributed computing if you will is going to run hybrid cloud all the way across the fact that it's multiple clouds is just coincidence on who's got the best capex value that people build on for their super cloud capability so why wouldn't i be on azure if microsoft's going to give me all their customers that are running office 365 and teams great if i want to be on amazon's kind of sweet which is their ecosystem why wouldn't i want to tap into that so again you can patch it all together in the super cloud so i think the future will be distributed computing cloud architecture end to end and and we felt that was different from multi-cloud you know if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0 that's fine but you know frankly you know sometimes we get criticized for not defining it tightly enough but we continue to evolve that definition i've never really seen a great definition from multi-cloud i think multi-cloud by default was the definition i run in multiple clouds you know it works in azure it's not a strategy it's a broken name it's a symptom right it's a symptom of multi-vendor is really what multi-cloud has been and so we felt like it was a new term of examples look what we're talking about snowflake data bricks databricks another good one these are these are examples goldman sachs and we felt like the term immediately connotes something bigger something that sits above the clouds and is part of a digital platform you know the people poo poo the metaverse because it's really you know not well defined but every 15 or 20 years this industry goes through dave let me ask you a question so uh lisa you too if i'm in the insurance vertical uh and i'm a i'm an insurance company i have competitors my customers can go there and and do business with that company and you know and they all know that they go to the same conferences but in that sector now you have new dynamics your i.t spend isn't going to keep the lights on and make your apps work your back-end systems and your mobile app to get your whatever now it's like i have cloud scale so what if i refactored my business model become a super cloud and become the major primary service provider to all the competitors and the people that are the the the channel partners of the of the ecosystem that means that company could change the category totally okay and become the dominant category leader literally in two three years if i'm geico okay i i got business in the cloud because i got the app and i'm doing transactions on geico but with all the data that they're collecting there's adjacent businesses that they can get into maybe they're in the safety business maybe they can sell data to governments maybe they can inform logistics and highway you know patterns roll up all the people that don't have the same scale they have and service them with that data and they get subscription revenue and they can build on top of the geico super insurance cloud right yes it's it's unlimited opportunity that's why it's but the multi-trillion dollar baby so talk to us you've done an amazing job of talking which i know you would of why super cloud what it is the critical components the key workloads great examples talk to us in our last few minutes about the event the cube on super cloud august 9th what's the audience going to who are they going to hear from what are they going to learn yeah so august 9th live out of our palo alto studio we're going to have a program that's going to run from 9 a.m to 1 p.m and we're going to have a number of industry luminaries in there uh kit colbert from from vmware is going to talk about you know their strategy uh benoit de javille uh from snowflake is going to is going to be there of g written house of sky-high security um i i i don't want to give it away but i think steve mullaney is going to come on adrian uh cockroft is coming on the panel keith townsend sanjeev mohan will be on so we'll be running that live and also we'll be bringing in pre-recorded interviews that we'll have prior to the show that will run post the live event it's really a pilot virtual event we want to do a physical event we're thinking but the pilot is to bring our trusted friends together they're credible that have industry experience to try to understand the scope of what we're talking about and open it up and help flesh out the definition make it an open model where we can it's not just our opinion we're observing identifying the structural changes but bringing in smart people our smart friends and companies are saying yeah we get behind this because it has it has legs for a reason so we're gonna zoom out and let people participate and let the conversation and the community drive the content and that is super important to the cube as you know dave but i think that's what's going on lisa is that it's a pilot if it has legs we'll do a physical event certainly we're getting phones to bring it off the hook for sponsors so we don't want to go and go all in on sponsorships right now because it's not about money making it's about getting that super cloud clarity around to help companies yeah we want to evolve the concept and and bring in outside perspectives well the community is one of the best places to do that absolutely organic it's an organic community where i mean people want to find out what's going on with the best practices of how to transform a business and right now digital transformation is not just getting digitized it's taking advantage of the technology to leapfrog the competition so all the successful people we talked to at least have the same common theme i'm changing my game but not changing my game to the customer i'm just going to do it differently better faster cheaper more efficient and have higher margins and beat the competition that's the company doesn't want to beat the competition go to thecube.net if you're not all they're all ready to register for the cube on supercloud august 9th 9am pacific you won't want to miss it for john furrier and dave vellante i'm lisa martin we're all coming at you from new york city at aws summit 22. i'll be right back with our next guest [Music] you

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite a mixed bag of earnings reports from tech companies, negative GDP growth this past quarter, and rising inflation, the cloud continues its relentless expandtion on the IT landscape. AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet of all reported earnings, and when you include Alibaba Cloud in the mix, the Big 4 hyperscalers are on track to generate 167 billion in revenue this year based on our projections. But as we said many times on theCUBE, the definition of cloud is expanding and hybrid environments are becoming the norm at major organizations. We're seeing the largest enterprise tech companies focus on solving for hybrid, and every public cloud company now has a strategy to bring their environments closer to where customers workloads live, at data centers, and at the edge. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis will update you on our latest cloud projections and outlook. We'll share some fresh ETR data and commentary on what's happening in the hybrid zone of cloud. Let's start with the market data for the Big 4 hyperscalers. In this chart, we share our Big 4 cloud share for IaaS and PaaS for 2020, 2021, and the first quarter of 2022, and our estimate for 2022 full year and growth. Remember, only AWS and Alibaba report relatively clean IaaS and PaaS figures, whereas Microsoft and Google, they bundled their cloud infrastructure in with their SaaS numbers. We both firms, however, they do give guidance and we use survey data and other tidbits to create an apples to apples comparison, and that's what we show here. For the quarter, the Big 4 approach to 37 billion in revenue as a group. Azure's growth rate is reported by Microsoft but the absolute revenue is not. Azure growth accelerated sequentially by 49% to just over 13 billion in the quarter by our estimates while AWS's growth moderated, sequentially, but revenue still hit 18.4 billion. Azure, by our estimates, now is more than 2/3 the size of AWS's cloud business. Google and Alibaba are fighting for the bronze medal, but well behind the two leaders. Microsoft's Azure acceleration is quite remarkable for such a large revenue base, but it's not unprecedented as we've seen this pattern before with AWS. Nonetheless, the fact that Azure is growing at the same rate as GCP is quite impressive. Now, a couple of other tidbits of information. Amazon, its stock is getting hammered today because of inflation and slowing growth rates at the top line. But AWS continues to beat Wall Street's expectations. A look at Amazon's operating income this quarter tells the story. Amazon overall had operating income of -3.66 billion and AWS's operating income with 6.5 billion. AWS's operating margin grew sequentially from nearly 30% last quarter to 35.3%. That's an astoundingly profitable figure. This is comparable to insanely profitable companies like Oracle and Microsoft. These are software companies with software marginal economics. Is that level of sustainable? Probably not for AWS, but it's eye opening, nonetheless. ETR survey data shows why these companies are doing so well with customers. This chart shows the net score granularity for the Big 4 cloud players. Net score, remember, measures spending momentum by asking customers, are you adopting new? That's the lime green. Increasing spend by 6% or more, that's the forest green. Flats spend is the gray. Spending dropping by 6% or worse is the light pink. And the red is decommissioning the platform. Subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score which is shown on the right. Anything, by the way, over 40% we consider highly elevated. Now some key points here. Microsoft includes its entire business in this chart, we are including, ETR is including Microsoft's entire business, not just its cloud. Its Azure-only net score is 67%, higher than even AWS's, and that's huge. Google Cloud, on the other hand, while still elevated is well behind the two leaders. Alibaba's data sample in the ETR survey is small and China has had its foot on the neck of Big Tech for a while so we can't read too much into a net score of 26. But notice the replacements in red across the boards single digits for all and low single digits for the two giants, 1% for Amazon and Azure. Very impressive. Now the other really telling reality check is CapEx spending on cloud. CapEx spend tends to be a pretty good indicator of scale. And Charles Fitzgerald who runs the Platformonomics blog spends a fair amount of his time on this topic and we borrowed this chart from a recent post he did, and then we put in some estimates of our own. It shows CapEx spend over time for five cloud companies, the Big 3 US firms that we just talked about, plus IBM and Oracle. And it's always astounding to me to go back to the pre-cloud era and look at IBM. They were in a great position prior to 2006 to really dominate this notion of as a service and the transition to what is now known as cloud. But they really couldn't get their head out of professional services and their outsourcing business. There was some conflicts there as well. And so, you know, IBM you see is that dark blue or black line and spent significantly more than the others way back when, not anymore. Charles is kind of a snark. He loves to make fun of our super cloud concept even though I'm confident it's evolving and is real. But his point above in this chart is right on, the Big 3 US players spend far more on CapEx than IBM and Oracle. He states that Oracle's uptick in CapEx spend puts them past IBM, but the two of them are battling to distance themselves and differentiate from the X-axis. Funny guy, Charles. In its recent earnings report, Amazon stated that around 40% of its CapEx goes to infrastructure and most of that goes to AWS. It expects CapEx to grow this year and around 50% will go toward infrastructure. So we've superimposed our rough estimate of where AWS lands when you subtract out all of Amazon's warehouses for retail. And once again, Microsoft is notable because unlike Amazon, it doesn't have a zillion warehouses to ship products to consumers. And while Google spending is massive, it's mostly on servers to power its ad network. But there's no question that GCP can leverage that infrastructure and the tech behind it, and it does. And by the way, so can everyone else, by the way, leverage all this CapEx spend. We're going to come back to that and talk about super cloud in a moment. Okay, let's close by looking at the ever-expanding cloud landscape. This chart shows a two-dimensional view of the ETR data for cloud computing. On the vertical-axis is net score or spending momentum, and in the horizontal-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. It's like market share within the survey, if you will. The chart insert shows the data for how the dots are plotted on each axis. The red dotted line at 40%, remember, indicates a highly elevated position with net score and significant spending momentum. And the green arrows show the movement for some companies relative to three months ago. Okay, so Microsoft and AWS, they're kind of circled way up in the right-hand corner, very impressive. Just to reduce the clutter, we're not showing AWS Lambda here and some other highly elevated services which would push up, ticked up AWS's net score but it's still really, really good. As is azure, they're both moving solidly to the right relative to last quarters survey. So gaining presence in the data set and presumably in the market as well. Google is, as we've said, well behind and has much work to do. It was announced this past week that the head of sales at Google Cloud, Rob Enslin, is leaving to join UiPath, so some interesting news there. We've highlighted the hybrid zone. Now to the theme of this Breaking Analysis, the ever-expanding cloud, AWS announced that it's completed the launch of 16 local zones in the US and there are 32 more coming across 26 countries. Local zones basically bring cloud infrastructure to regions where there's a lot of IT that isn't going to move. And for proximity and latency reasons, they have to move closer, move the cloud closer, the cloud operating model if you will, closer to the customers. And there's that CapEx build out showing its head again. Now the reason this hybrid zone becomes interesting is you're seeing the large enterprise players finally go after the hybrid cloud in Earnest. It's almost like the AWS outposts announcement in 2018 was a wake up call to infrastructure players like Dell, HPE, and IBM. It took a while, but Oracle is kind of skipping to its own tune, but they're in that hybrid zone as well. IBM had a really good quarter and the Red Hat acquisition seems to be working to support its hybrid cloud strategy. Now VMware several years ago clean up its fuzzy cloud strategy and partnered up with AWS and everyone else. And you see VMware Cloud on AWS doing well as is VMware Cloud, its on-prem offering. Even though it's somewhat lower on the X-axis, based on that green arrow was showing relative to last quarter. It's moving to the right with a greater presence in the data set so that we see that as a positive sign. Now, Dell and HP are interesting. Both companies are going hard after as a service with APEX and GreenLake, respectively. HPE, based on the survey data from ETR, seems to have a lead in spending momentum while Dell has a larger presence in the market, naturally, as a much bigger company. HPE is climbing up on the X-axis, as is Dell, although, not as quickly. And the point we come back to often is the definition of cloud is in the eye of the customer. AWS can say, "No, no that's not cloud." And the on-prem crowd can say, "Ooh, we have cloud too." It really doesn't matter. What matters is what the customer thinks and which platforms they choose to invest. And I'll close by circling back to the idea of super cloud. You are seeing it evolve and you're going to hear more and more about it. Yeah, maybe not the term, many don't like it. We're going to continue to use it as a metaphor for a layer that leverages the CapEx build, the gift that the hyperscalers are providing the industry. This is a real opportunity for the likes of Dell, HPE, IBM, Cisco, and dozens of other companies providing compute and storage infrastructure, networking, security, database, and other parts of the stack. By hiding the underlying complexity of the cloud, dealing with all the API and primitive muck, creating singular experience across on-prem, across clouds, and out to the edge is a definite need from customers. This is a new battle that's shaping up and it's going to be expensive to build and it require an ecosystem cooperating across this API economy, as some like to call it. It's going to have to do that to make it a reality. Now there's a definite, as I say, customer need for this common experience, and in our view, we're seeing it manifest in pockets today and in strategies and in R&D projects, both within startups and established players. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research Breaking Analysis topics. Alex Myerson is on production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen and Martin and Cheryl Knight get the word out on social. Thanks to all, including Rob Hof, our editor in chief at SiliconANGLE. Remember these episodes are all available as podcast wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR website at etr.ai. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm really excited because for the first time in my CUBE career of six years, I have a father daughter duo maybe the first time in CUBE's history. Frank and Emma Arrigo from AWS join me guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here thank you. >> So, Emma, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about how you got to AWS and a little bit about your background. >> Yes, thanks Lisa. So I've joined AWS as a recent graduate from university. So I did my masters of data science and I was going through the grad, the grad job hunt applying for all these different places. And AWS appeared on my radar for an intern program. And Frank was there at the time and so I was like, "Should I do it?" But I still applied cause it was a great program. And so I went did that internship for three months over the summer of 2019-2020, and then I went back and finished my degree. And another grad role came up for in AWS in Tech U to be an associate solutions architect. And so I was approached to apply for that. And I got through to that program and joined the team almost a year ago in March, 2021 through Tech U and yeah, that's how I ended up at AWS. >> Excellent and so Frank, this is a pretty unique situation, father daughter duo at AWS let alone Amazon, let alone probably a lot of companies. Talk to me about it the parental lens. >> Yeah, look it is unique, there's a few family connections within AWS, but you know, definitely here in Australia, it's really rare, but I think the family connection is, you know Emma and we've got four kids, I've got four kids in total. So Emma has three brothers, you know, I've lived in tech, my entire career and so they've been part of it. You know, we've lived in the States, lived in Seattle for a couple of years. And so they'd come to the office and see what dad did. And so it wasn't a big surprise for them to understand what the role was and what we did, so, you know, they kind of grew up with it. And you know, when the opportunity came up for Emma, did the internship, I was excited for it because it was in a different area. It was working in a startup team doing some interesting work that really lined up with some of the interest Emma had. And so she kind of learned what it was like to be Amazonian through that internship and that was... I call that a long audition for a job. And she was then able to join Tech U program, which is a early career bootcamp, I like to think of it, which is the six month program to help our grads learn some of the fundamental skills because the value of a solutions architect or some of these other tech roles is you need experience. You need to have been in the game a while to be a trusted advisor to a customer. And it's hard to do that when you're a grad. So the bootcamp gives them the practical experience and then they get another six months on the job experience where they develop those skills and hone it and get ready to, you know, be a trusted advisor to the customers. >> Right, and that's such a great... I'm sure that's a tremendous opportunity to learn how to become that trusted advisor, especially from peers, such as yourself and I want to go back to you. Talk to me about your interest in IT, in data science. Was this something that you were always interested in primary school or in high school? Or was this something that kind of came on later on? >> Yeah, so my interest in tech kind of emerged as I went along in my education. So when I was younger, I really wanted to be an orthodontist for some reason. I don't know why. And then you just sort of in year eight and like early school sort of didn't really know what I wanted to do. Just sort of going through just trying to survive as a teenage girl at high school at an all girls school, didn't really have many, didn't really have career aspirations, I guess, and then one year I attended a information day at a university about engineering and that just really sparked my interest, I don't know why, but I was like, I've always been obsessed with like factories and those types of things and how things are made. And so that really just sparked my interest and I never really thought of it before. And so then that put STEM engineering on my radar and then I guess spoke with it about with the parents. And then they mentioned that tech would be a like IT, Information Technology would be really useful. And so then we approached the school to ask if I could do IT in year 11. So that's sort of our second last year of high school. And they said, "No, we couldn't do IT." I couldn't go to the boys' school to do IT. That girls don't do it or that not good at it. And I wasn't allowed, and they wouldn't let me do physics either. So I moved school in for the final two of high school to be able to do IT and physics to help, you know, get to the course I wanted to do. And so that was my journey into STEM. So it wasn't really on my radar, but then events like this and at university isn't it? Organizations sparked my interest. And then still when I entered university, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to major in nor where I wanted to work would never have thought it would be where, with my father, like I was aware of the world of IT and everything, but I wouldn't, if you'd asked me in first year, it wouldn't have been that I would probably, we would've said, I don't know an academic or something. I don't know. And then, but again, as the university went on and you attend networking events or club things, you sort of learn a bit more about the ecosystem. And then that's where yeah. Tech company sort of became where I was looking for jobs and roles for when I finished up. So that was kind of my journey to... >> So what I love though, that you and Frank, this is going to be a question for you, how Emma was told. "No, you can't study IT. No, you can't study physics. You can't go to the boys school and do that either." Talk to me about that, Frank, from your perspective as a parent of a daughter, and you said, I think she's got three brothers lucky, Emma, but talk to me about that from your perspective, in terms of going, my daughter has really has an in a strong interest in this and they're telling her no we're going to pivot and actually change schools to be able give her the opportunities that she wants to pursue. >> Yeah. Look, as a parent, we were shocked. You know, it was just an unexpected response, you know, in a lot of ways, the school that she was at was more of a finishing school than anything else, you know, preparing young ladies for marriage and, you know, career as a, I don't know, I will leave it at that. So we were really disappointed. And so very quickly we looked at other alternatives and other options and we pulled Emma out of school and we knew it was like the last two years are critical in Australia. We don't have a middle school and a senior school, it's all one, you know, combined thing. But those last two years are all about getting ready for university. And so we made a really tough call and we picked her up, dropped her into a totally new school. It was co-ed school. And then when we told her previous, her girl's school. I actually spoke to the vice principal and he said, "Oh, I can't believe you're sending her to a co-ed school. She's going to struggle 'cause boys are so much better in tech." And I was totally, I was lost for words, right? Because I felt back in my career and I had some amazing female managers, leaders, role models in my time that I worked for and I followed and they were always struggling because, you know, they were in the minority, but they were incredible, you know, technologists and leaders. And I just couldn't believe it. So as parents we made the tough call. We picked Emma up. We put her into another high school and she flourished, you know, Emma started a club, she got convolved with a whole bunch of other things. When she graduated, the teachers felt that she'd been there six years, right? The whole time of it. So she really made a mark, made an impact at this school and so much so that her younger brother then followed and went to that school and completed his high school there as well. But it, we just can't believe it. And we tell it everyone, this story, you know, we name the school, we won't name. We choose not to name them here, but we name the school because we just think it's really terrible guidance and terrible advice. Like we want people to follow their passion. I tell my kids and I tell the folks when I speak to, you know, early career folks, follow your passion first, guess what the job will appear. Right? You know, there'll be the... The work will come if you do something that you love. And then the second piece that I always say is, "Every future job is going to be a tech job." Technology is embedded in everything that we do. So the fact that you say, "A girl can't do technology," you're limiting yourselves, right? You don't want to think that, you want to think about the possibilities rather than the things you can't do. It's the things you can do. And the things that you haven't even thought about doing. So that's why, you know, it was so exciting to see that experience with Emma, and just seeing her grow through that and she became a bit of a STEM advocate at a high school as well. So, she saw the value of her role model that helped her. And she wants to be a.... Continue being a role model for others as well, which again, I think is admirable, right? It's about- >> Absolutely. >> Shining a light and leading and as a parent, irrespective that we work at the same company as a parent, that's what you want to see. You want to see your kids aim high and inspire others. That's what she does. >> Well, she's already been a role model too, I mean, to your younger brother, but one of the things that we say often, and theCUBE does a lot for women in technology events. And I'm fortunate to get to host a lot of those, we say, "You can't be what you can't see." So needing to have those role models who are visible. Now, it doesn't have to be female necessarily. and Frank you mentioned that you had female mentors and role models and in your illustrious career. But the important point is being able to elevate women into positions where others can see and can identify, "Oh, there's a role model. There's somebody that might be a mentor for me, or a sponsor down the road, it's critically important." And as of course, we look at the numbers in tech, women in technical roles are still quite low, but Emma, tell me a little bit about, you've been through the program. You talked about that. What are some of the things that you feel in like the last six months that you've been able to learn that had you not had this opportunity, maybe you wouldn't have. >> You know, I think that's a great point. So as a solutions architect, I get to be both technical. So hands on building an AWS, helping customers solve their problems, whether it be a data leak or I don't know, an image recognition tool to look for garbage dumped on the street or, and also thinking from the business perspective for the customers, so that's a fun part as the, of the role, but things I get to do. So currently I'm working on a demo for the conference in Sydney. So I'm building a traffic detection model using some computer vision and IOT so I get to bring my data science background to this build and also learn about new areas like IOT, Internet Of Things; Technologies. So that's been a really fun project and yeah, just having the ability to play around on AWS, we have... >> Right. Well, the exposure in the experiences is priceless. You can't put a price on that, but being able to get into the environment, learn it from a technical perspective, learn it from a practical perspective. And then of course get all the great things about getting to interact with customers and learning how different industries work, you mentioned you were in public sector. That just must be a field of dreams, I would imagine. >> I know. >> In some senses for you, right? >> Really have lucked out. I know it's, I'm like, "Wow, this my job is to play around with some new service, just because need to know about that for the customer meeting. Like I'm building a chatbot or helping build a chatbot for a customer, at the university. So yeah, things like that make it very, yeah. It's a pretty amazing role. >> It sounds, it sure sounds like it. And sounds like you're are excelling at it tremendously. Let me ask you Emma. For young girls who might be in a similar situation to where you were not that long ago with the school telling you, "No, you can't do IT." "No, you can't do physics." So you actually switched schools. What would you tell those young girls who might be in that situation about hearing the word, "No." And would you advise them to embrace a career in technology? >> Yeah, I would say that it really..... What makes me so sad is if my family didn't know about tech and had my... Supported me through that like if I would've just gone, "Oh, okay. I won't do it." You know what I mean? Like that just makes me really sad. How many people have missed out on studying what they wanted to study. So by having those types of experiences, so what I would say as advice is, "Back yourself, find supporters, whether it be your family or a teacher that you really sort of connect with, to be able to support you and through these decisions." And yeah, I think having those sponsors in a way, your advocates to help you make those choices and help support you through those choices. >> Yeah. I agree. And I have a feeling you're going to be one of those sponsors and mentors, if you aren't already Emma, I have a feeling that's just around the corner from you. So Frank, last question to you. What's the overall lesson here, if we look at statistics, I mentioned some of the stats about, you know, women in technical roles as usually less than 25% globally. But also we see data that shows that companies are more profitable and more performant when there's at least 30% of the executive suite it's women. So from your parental perspective, and from an Amazonian perspective, Frank, what's the lesson here? >> Well, look from an Amazonian perspective, we need to make sure that we have a team that represents our customers, right? And our customers aren't all boys. You know, they're not all blokes, as we say down here. So you've got to have a team that is made up of what represents your customers. So I think that's the Amazonian view. And so diverse perspectives, diverse experience, diverse backgrounds is what does that. The other from a parent, you know, I said it earlier. I think every future job is a tech job. And I think it's really important that as kids come through, you know, primary school, high school, whatever, they're prepared for that, they're already consumers of technology. You know, they need to be creators or, or participate in that environment. And I can give you an example, a few years ago, I worked for, at a large telco here. And we actually invested in a thing called code club, which was aimed at primary school kids, kids in grade four, five and six. So elementary school for my friends in America, it's kids in grade four, five and six. And they were learning how to use scratch. Scratch is this interactive tool like building lego to write programming and believe it or not, there were more girls interested and were part of code club. It was probably 60-40 was the ratio of young girls doing it compared to boys because it was creative, it was a creative outlet, they were building stuff and assembling and making these things that they loved to make. Right. But then what we saw was there'd be a drop off at high school, whether it's curriculum related or interests or distractions, I don't know what it is, but there things get lost along the way along high school. But I see it at the primary school stage at elementary school that the interest is there. So I think part of it is, there needs to be a bit of a switch up in education or other opportunities outside of school to really foster and nurture and develop this interest because it really does take all kinds to be successful in the role. And Emma talked about a chatbot that she's building and that's a conversational thing. I can't see geek boys having being able to impact and create a interesting conversation, right. Then there's other areas that seems to be skewed and biased based on a predominantly male view of the world. So we need the tech, the industry needs these diverse perspectives and these diverse views, because, you know, to your point, it's going to impact the bottom line. It's going to also deliver a better product and it's going to reflect society. It's going to reflect the customers that are using it because we're made up of every, every race and color, creed, gender. And we need a team that represents that. >> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Well, it sounds like the Arrigo family are quite the supporters of this, but also we need more of both of you. We need more of the sponsors and the parents who are encouraging the kids and making the right decisions to help them get along that path. And we need more folks like Emma and more women that we can see, "Wow, look what she's doing in such a short time period. We want to be just like that." So you guys are, have both been fantastic. I thank you so much for joining me at the International. Women's Showcase, more power to your family. We need more folks like you guys, so great work. Keep it up. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For Frank and Emma Arrigo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. I'm your host Lisa Martin. Clara Bidorini joins me next, a Business Developer for the startups team in Brazil at AWS. Clara, it's lovely to have you on the program. >> Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. >> I want to mention a couple accolades that you got just in 2021. You were one of the top 20 most influential women for open innovation in Brazil in 2021. And you were a finalist for Women in Tech Brazil Awards in the category of Ally in Tech 2021. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much, it was an awesome year and it's always important to be acknowledged for what you're doing in the market, right? >> Absolutely, everyone wants to be appreciated every now and then. Tell me a little bit about your role and your background. >> Of course. So I am living in Brazil, as you said, but actually I'm Italian. So I've been living abroad for the last, I will say 16 years. So I've been living in Portugal, I've been living in Switzerland and now in Brazil for the last, I will say 11 years. I'm a Social Entrepreneur and a Strategic Designer. I've been working with corporate ventures since 2014 and now I am Corporate Venture Manager for startups at Amazon Web Services. I've supported, throughout 10 years, enterprises, startups, public sector with corporate acceleration programs and open innovation initiatives within their customer throughout Latin America. >> What's the female representation like in the startup environment? >> Well it depends a lot, right? We have different trends globally speaking. If we look at, for example, global trends, and that includes United States for example, we see that the number of unicorns that for example are led by female is much lower than the number of total unicorn that you see. So if you talk about United States, for example, that has the highest number of unicorns, we see that between 2013 and 2021 the number of female at a unicorn is only 60 against 500 which is a total number of it. So we see that actually the percentage is 12% only, so we need much more representative in the female startup ecosystem. But numbers are changing, right? So this is promising. >> That is good, it is promising to see the numbers ticking up. In terms of positioning of women in leadership roles, what's the role that you see kind of commonly across startups, or maybe it varies by country. >> It varies by country you're right but definitely when we look at the trends and when we look at the data that we receive from National StartUp Association and startup organization in the different geos, you can see that startup that are founded by female leaders are, I will say as a proxy, from 4% to 12% in some countries, it gets to 18%, of the total number of startups to that country. So it's still a low number, but what we see which is interesting, is that much more startups that are led by both female and male co-founders are rising more and more. For example, in Brazil, it represents 28% which is almost 30% against the 12% of female-only founded startup and the 51% of the male founded startup. So I think it's promising to look at this mix of genders when we look at the foundations of startups because they're also getting, I will say, from five to six more investment than female founded startups. What does it mean? It means that we need to find I think more allies work in allyship with men in order to have more investment in startup by women. But it also means that unicorns and the biggest startup, the scale-up startups, are now starting for example to hire women in the leadership. So maybe we don't have so many startups that are founded by women, but we have more and more scale-ups and unicorns that are led by leaders which are women. So this is an interesting change, if we compare 2022 with 2013, for example. >> That's good that we've seen so much progress in that amount of time. And something that I've seen too, or looking at stats, we know that the number of females and technical roles is still pretty low below 25%, but there's a lot of data that show that companies with even 30% of the executive leadership team being female, are more performant and more profitable. So the data is there. Is that one of the reasons that you think that you're seeing a lot of these kind of co-CEOs, female-male counterparts in the startup community? >> Well, we already know that diversity and diverse teams are much more performative than I will say, non-inclusive ones. So it's always a matter of how you can thrive to success in every kind of environment you're working. So this is true for startups but this is also true for corporations. So it's just a matter of time. I think for the startup environment to start to be working faster with diversity and inclusion, then I will say the traditional corporate world. Many of those startups in Brazil, in these tests, are saying, "We want to work with inclusion. We want to have more equity throughout the journey. Not only in the leadership." They just need more resources. And this is something that is interesting for startup because resources is what a startup normally doesn't have. So we need to be really smart on where they put the resources and how we help them throughout this journey so that they can be as diverse as they can and therefore gain more profit, right? >> One of the things that we often say when we're talking about women in tech and here we are International Women's day is that we can't be what we can't see. And I think that's so important to have those female role models. It's also important to have male role models. Talk to me a little bit about your mentors and sponsors and how they've helped get you to where you are today. >> Okay. This is interesting, because I just had a nice conversation with some friends of mine and today we're going to launch a project which I'm very fond of which is called (foreign language) in Portuguese is leave it with them Them being a positive reinforce to women. And today we have launched the first episode, which is amazing. And we were talking about mentors. So how important are they? And we were discussing the fact that until now if we have to count the number of male mentors that we have of course it's much bigger than number of female mentors but from now on what about having more female role models for everybody in the startup ecosystems? This is not a motion in where women are becoming mentors for other women. Women can be mentors for everybody. And the fact that we are empowering more female founders and female leaders in the ecosystem is just bringing again more diversity and therefore more performance to the entire ecosystem. I had many different mentors from different worlds. I will tell a little bit more about myself. Originally I'm an architect and I've been working with building and houses and hospitals and library during the first part of my career. And that world was a male world actually and I had many great mentors that helped me out throughout my journey. When I changed my career into Service Design and starting working with systems and holistic approach for strategy, again, I found many male mentors especially in Switzerland, especially in Brazil. But when I started the startup ecosystem journey, I started meeting women that actually changed my career. So, I'm talking about investors, I'm talking about co-founders, I'm talking about leaders I'm talking about leaders in the community because we don't have to forget that we need always to rely on the personas that are working in the startup ecosystem such as accelerators, incubators, universities. And I could just tell you so many stories about my mentors, but I don't want to say here that we only need to focus on finding female mentors. We need to find the most meaningful relationship that we can and learn from them. It could be a woman, it could be a man, but we need to encourage more and more in women to have the strength and the courage to be mentored to, to speak up. >> I agree. You don't have to have mentors that are only female. I have many back in my day that were male that got me to where I am today that I just really looked up to. And that sponsored me. And that's important for women to know that you need to have your own personal board of directors, of mentors and sponsors. But I'd love to know a little bit more. You really pivoted in your career. Talk to me about how you got the courage to say, "You know what? I'm going to make a change here. I'm going to go in a different direction." >> Oh Lisa, that's such a question. Thank you so about asking me about this. So I've always have been this I will say status quo challenger. And at some point when I entered architecture I ended up making a master in complexity and using creativity to solve complex problem. So there was already a flag of me not working in architecture anymore in the future but I didn't notice at the time. So this idea of working with complexity and using creativity to work out complex problems in society brought me to start working more with design and then using design as a management approach to solve those problems. So I was pivoting but step by step from architecture to design, from design to branding, sorry, from branding to strategy. At certain point I was working with open innovation already, so was solving big challenges for big corporations. I was designing, innovation, planning, The step from here to join the startup ecosystem world is just really small. So from that moment on, I understood that business was the place where I was working and creating an understanding value proposition was actually the thing that was putting me on stage and letting me be more myself in terms of having more connections, being an agent of transformation in this ecosystem. And actually being the status quo challenger every day. So that's the way I pivoted, but it took a lot of courage and it also took a lot of curiosity. And this is something that I'm always telling the startups to have. You need to look at everything with the eyes of a tourist. You need to be curious about everything. That's also the reason why I've been changing countries. I love to learn about new cultures. I love to learn new expressions. I love to understand how other people think. And this is putting other people and other reality in the center of your attention. And this is what business is about. Building stuff that is interesting for people, for your customers, for your user. This is the center of building a value proposition >> Right you bring up several good points there. And one, the breadth of knowledge and experience that you have. There's so much value there in having that breadth, being courageous enough to be curious but you also bring up a point about some other skills like soft skills, for example, that are so valuable that you don't necessarily learn in school. For example, I think communication, relationship building, those are so important for women and men to have to really bring that breadth to what it is that they're doing so that they can do whatever it is that they want. >> Exactly. You're so, right. So many of these soft skills for women, I think have been censored throughout the years by society behaviors. Let's say negotiating or talking about finance or let's try to create something new and having the courage to say, "I'm going to fail several times before will bring my business to success." So all of these aspects that I'm trying to describe here were kind of silenced throughout century for women. And now the possibility not only to test those situations but also to speak up, to share this this knowledge, and to be mindful with other women that can help us to be courageous enough, to fail so many times that we need in order for us to be successful. This is something that I've learned from my colleagues in the startup ecosystem, both male and female founders. This is so important to fail. Failing first is important. And this is something that actually for women is contradicted, right? We are taught to be perfect. We are taught to be multitasking. We are taught to be everything that is not showing our vulnerabilities and learning from our mistakes. So these are the soft skills that I think are more important. And also sorry, I was forgetting one of the most important, which is resilience. Definitely (chuckles). >> Resilience is critical. But I always say that failure is not necessarily a bad F word and you bring up a good point. But if you think of the theme of International Women's Day this year which is #BreakTheBias where do you think we are with that in the startup entrepreneurial world? >> That's a good question, Lisa. I think we are in the middle of a big change. Many of the things that happened throughout the last two years all over the world brought society to rethink on what we want as a future. The pandemic, the killings of innocent people in the United States, in Brazil, what is happening right now in Ukraine. We are working together throughout the new future and we had to rethink to change completely the way we were controlling our daily life, when the pandemic started, right? I think we are in in the midst of a new change. In the startup ecosystem, more and more women are claiming their right to be mothers, to be workers, to be leaders, to be in the startup ecosystem stages like pitching and selling their businesses to investors or corporates, and at the same time to be part of a family and also our men. So I think we are at the point in which we are kind of looking at each other in the eyes and saying, "Okay, we need to compromise. We need to have a better quality of life. And we need to compromise in being core responsible at what we want to achieve in terms of business." And this is something that is happening in the startup ecosystem world as well. So it's impacting corporates and startup as well. So, I think it was a consequence of the last two three years of events throughout the world. But also we see more investors that are female investors and this is important because they're breaking the bias. If we have more female investors investing in more women, we can definitely have those entrepreneurs having raised more money or the same amount of money as men in less time. Now, as we are talking, it takes longer for women to raise less money than the men. So we need to break the bias in this sense. And I think it's happening already. >> We do need to break the bias and thank you for your insights and the work that you are doing to help that along the way. Clara, it was lovely to chat with you today. Thanks for sharing your background. >> Thank you again, Liz. It was wonderful to be here with you. And I just want to make a call to action for all the women and the men that are listening to us to be closer to the other gender, and to try to be an active listener of what's happening in the other gender's life. Because at the end of the day we are co-sharing this world together. Thank you very much >> Wise words, Clara. Thank you again. From Clara Bidorini, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Women in Tech: International Women's Day, 2022. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> On Friday, December 10th, Oracle announced a strong earnings beat and raise, on the strength of its licensed business, and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock was up sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing 280 billion in market value. Oracle's success is due largely to its execution, of a highly differentiated strategy, that has really evolved over the past decade or more, deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogeneous experience across its application portfolio, and becoming the number one platform. Number one for the world's most mission critical applications. Now, while investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being weighed toward licensed revenue and likely keep one finger on the sell button until they're convinced Oracle's cloud momentum, is more consistent and predictable. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibond CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll review Oracle's most recent quarter, and pull in some ETR survey data, to frame the company's cloud business, the momentum of fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps and opportunities that we see. The numbers this quarter was strong, particularly top line growth. Here are a few highlights. Oracle's revenues that grew 6% year on year that's in constant currency, surpassed $10 billion for the quarter. Oracle's non-gap operating margins, were an impressive 47%. Safra Catz has always said cloud is more profitable business and it's really starting to show in the income statement. Operating cash and free cash flow were 10.3 billion and 7.1 billion respectively, for the past four quarters, and would have been higher, if not for charges largely related to litigation expenses tied to the hiring of Mark Hurd, which the company said would not repeat in the future quarters. And you can see in this chart how Oracle breaks down its business, which is kind of a mishmash of items they lump into so-called the cloud. The largest piece of the revenue pie is cloud services, and licensed support, which in reading 10Ks, you'll find statements like the following; licensed support revenues are our largest revenue stream and include product upgrades, and maintenance releases and patches, as well as technical support assistance and statements like the following; cloud and licensed revenue, include the sale of cloud services, cloud licenses and on-premises licenses, which typically represent perpetual software licenses purchased by customers, for use in both cloud, and on-premises, IT environments. And cloud license and on-prem license revenues primarily represent amounts earned from granting customers perpetual licenses to use our database middleware application in industry specific products, which our customers use for cloud-based, on-premise and other IT environments. So you tell me, "is that cloud? I don't know." In the early days of Oracle cloud, the company used to break out, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS revenue separately, but it changed its mind, which really makes it difficult to determine what's happening in true cloud. Look I have no problem including same same hardware software control plane, et cetera. The hybrid if it's on-prem in a true hybrid environment like exadata cloud@customer or AWS outposts. But you have to question what's really cloud in these numbers. And Larry in the earnings call mentioned that Salesforce licenses the Oracle database, to run its cloud and Oracle doesn't count that in its cloud number, rather it counts it in license revenue, but as you can see it varies that into a line item that starts with the word cloud. So I guess I would say that Oracle's reporting is maybe somewhat better than IBM's cloud reporting, which is the worst, but I can't really say what is and isn't cloud, in these numbers. Nonetheless, Oracle is getting it done for investors. Here's a chart comparing the five-year performance of Oracle to some of its legacy peers. We excluded Microsoft because it skews the numbers. Microsoft would really crush all these names including Oracle. But look at Oracle. It's wedged in between the performance of the NASDAQ and the S&P 500, it's up over 160% in that five-year timeframe, well ahead of SAP which is up 59% in that time, and way ahead of the dismal -22% performance of IBM. Well, it's a shame. The tech tide is rising, it's lifting all boats but, IBM has unfortunately not been able to capitalize. That's a story for another day. As a market watcher, you can't help but love Larry Ellison. I only met him once at an IDC conference in Paris where I got to interview Scott McNealy, CEO at the time. Ellison is great for analysts because, he's not afraid to talk about the competition. He'll brag, he'll insult, he'll explain, and he'll pitch his stories. Now on the earnings call last night, he went off. Educating the analyst community, on the upside in the fusion ERP business, making the case that because only a thousand of the 7,500 legacy on-prem ERP customers from Oracle, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft have moved Oracle's fusion cloud ERP, and he predicted that Oracle's cloud ERP business will surpass 20 billion in five years. In fact, he said it's going to bigger than that. He slammed the hybrid cloud washing. You can see one of the quotes here in this chart, that's going on when companies have customers running in the cloud and they claim whatever they have on premise hybrid, he called that ridiculous. I would agree. And then he took an opportunity to slam the hyperscale cloud vendors, citing a telco customer that said Oracle's cloud never goes down, and of course, he chose the same week, that AWS had a major outage. And so to these points, I would say that Oracle really was the first tech company, to announce a true hybrid cloud strategy, where you have an entirely identical experience on prem and in the cloud. This was announced with cloud@customer, two years, before AWS announced outposts. Now it probably took Oracle two years to get it working as advertised, but they were first. And to the second point, this is where Oracle differentiates itself. Oracle is number one for mission critical applications. No other vendor really can come close to Oracle in this regard. And I would say that Oracle is recent quarterly performance to a large extent, is due to this differentiated approach. Over the past 10 years, we've talked to hundreds literally. Hundreds and hundreds of Oracle customers. And while they may not always like the tactics and licensing policies of Oracle in their contracting, they will tell you, that business case for investing and staying with Oracle are very strong. And yes, a big part of that is lock-in but R&D investments innovation and a keen sense of market direction, are just as important to these customers. When you're chairman and founder is a technologist and also the CTO, and has the cash on hand to invest, the results are a highly competitive story. Now that's not to say Oracle is not without its challenges. That's not to say Oracle is without its challenges. Those who follow this program know that when it comes to ETR survey data, the story is not always pretty for Oracle. So let's take a look. This chart shows the breakdown of ETR is net score methodology, Net score measures spending momentum and works ETR. Each quarter asks customers, are you adding in the platform, That's the lime green. Increasing spend by 6% or more, that's the fourth green. Is you're spending E+ or minus 5%, that's the gray. You're spending climbing by 6%, that's the pinkish. Or are you leaving the platform, that's the bright red retiring. You subtract the reds from the greens, and that yields a net score, which an Oracle's overall case, is an uninspiring -4%. This is one of the anomalies in the ETR dataset. The net score doesn't track absolute actual levels, of spending the dollars. Remember, as the leader in mission critical workloads, Oracle commands a premium price. And so what happens here is the gray, is still spending a large amount of money, enough to offset the declines, and the greens are spending more than they would on other platforms because Oracle could command higher prices. And so that's how Oracle is able to grow its overall revenue by 6% for example, whereas the ETR methodology, doesn't capture that trend. So you have to dig into the data a bit deeper. We're not going to go too deep today, but let's take a look at how some of Oracle's businesses are performing relative to its competitors. This is a popular view that we like to share. It shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Think of it as mentioned share. That's on the x-axis. And we've broken down and circled Oracle overall, Oracle on prem, which is declining on the vertical axis, Oracle fusion and NetSuite, which are much higher than Oracle overall. And in the case of fusion, much closer to that 40% magic red horizontal line, remember anything above that line, we consider to be elevated. Now we've added SAP overall which has, momentum comparable to fusion in the survey, using this methodology and IBM, which is in between fusion and Oracle, overall on the y-axis. Oracle as you can see on the horizontal axis, has a larger presence than any of these firms that are below the 40% line. Now, above that 40% line, you see companies with a smaller presence in the survey like Workday, salesforce.com, pretty big presence still, Google cloud also, and Snowflake. Smaller presence but much much higher net score than anybody else on this chart. And AWS and Microsoft overall with both a strong presence, and impressive momentum, especially for their respective sizes. Now that view that we just showed you excluded on purpose Oracle specific cloud offering. So let's now take a look at that relative to other cloud providers. This chart shows the same XY view, but it cuts the data by cloud only. And you can see Oracle while still well below the 40% line, has a net score of +15 compared to a -4 overall that we showed you earlier. So here we see two key points. One, despite the convoluted reporting that we talked about earlier, the ETR data supports that Oracle's cloud business has significantly more momentum than Oracle's overall average momentum. And two, while Oracle is smaller and doesn't have the growth of the hyperscale giants, it's cloud is performing noticeably better than IBM's within the ETR survey data. Now a key point Ellison emphasized on the earnings call, was the importance of ERP, and the work that Oracle has done in this space. It lives by this notion of a cloud first mentality. It builds stuff for the cloud and then, would bring it on-prem. And it's been attracting new customers according to the company. He said Oracle has 8,500 fusion ERP customers, and 28,000 NetSuite customers in the cloud. And unlike Microsoft, it hasn't migrated its on-prem install base, to the cloud yet. Meaning these are largely new customers. Now this chart isolates fusion and NetSuite, within a sector ETR calls GPP. The very giant, public and private companies. And this is a bellwether of spending in the ETR dataset. They've gone back and it correlates to performance. So think large public companies, the biggest ones, and also privates big privates like Mars or Cargo or Fidelity. The chart shows the net score breakdown over time for fusion and NetSuite going back to 2019. And you can see, a big uptick as shown in the blue line from the October, 2020 survey. So Oracle has done a good job building and now marketing its cloud ERP to these important customers. Now, the last thing we want to show you is Oracle's performance within industry sectors. On the earnings call, Oracle said that it had a very strong momentum for fusion in financial services and healthcare. And this chart shows the net score for fusion, across each industry sector that ETR tracks, for three survey points. October, 2020, that's the gray bars, July 21, that's the blue bars and October, 2021, the yellow bars. So look it confirms Oracles assertions across the board that they're seeing fusion perform very well including the two verticals that are called out healthcare and banking slash financial services. Now the big question is where does Oracle go from here? Oracle has had a history of looking like it's going to break out, only to hit some bumps in the road. And so investors are likely going to remain a bit cautious and take profits off the table along the way. But since the Barron's article came out, we reported on that earlier this year in February, declaring Oracle a cloud giant, the stock is up more than 50% of course. 16 of those points were from Friday's move upward, but still, Oracle's highly differentiated strategy of integrating hardware and software together, investing in a modern cloud platform and selectively offering services that cater to the hardcore mission critical buyer, these have served the company, its customers and investors as well. From a cloud standpoint, we'd like to see Oracle be more inclusive, and aggressively expand its marketplace and its ecosystem. This would provide both greater optionality for customers, and further establish Oracle as a major cloud player. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of both AWS and Azure is the momentum being created, by their respective ecosystems. As well, we'd like to see more clear confirmation that Oracle's performance is being driven by its investments in technology IE cloud, same same hybrid, and industry features these modern investments, versus a legacy licensed cycles. We are generally encouraged and are reminded, of years ago when Sam Palmisano, he was retiring and leaving as the CEO of IBM. At the time, HP under the direction ironically of Mark Hurd, was the now company, Palmisano was asked, "do you worry about HP?" And he said in fact, "I don't worry about HP. I worry about Oracle because Oracle invests in R&D." And that statement has proven present. What do you think? Has Oracle hit the next inflection point? Let me know. Don't forget these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search it. Breaking Analysis podcast, check out ETR website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconANGLE.com. You can get in touch with me on email David.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me @dvellante on Twitter or, comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights. Powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. Two great guests Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Garrick Linn, architect of operations at Match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, Match.com and customer experience. Mainly around cloud migration. So Linda, great to see you and Garrick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. >> Same here. >> Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. we've talked about cloud migration application performance, modern application development, all powered by the Cloud, right? So this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? >> Oh boy, I mean the pandemic has been, it has been rough for our customers, you know, and part of that is what Garrick's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectancy of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly. And frankly, their customers' demands we're engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications. And two the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics and Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. >> John: Garrick, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say, Match.com has been at large-scale for many, many years, and now the pandemic comes in now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game, but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around the expectations and the services and you guys are providing in the digital experiences? >> Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, Match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous, technology, some old stuff, some new stuff. A lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic was, it brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down on dating definitely is something that requires human interaction in multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and you know Match as a premium product tries to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like, by checking the video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we have been using AppDynamics for you know, years now, well before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge, not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, "Hey, you've got these new features, "how do they fit into this huge complex environment?" And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated, And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. >> John: Yeah, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, AppDynamics has been a leader in really accelerating the value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Well, if I can't meet in person Match.com are going to do some things, new things, online chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new way is changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers' journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? >> Well, a big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other and in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful, and it delivers on the needs that you want. But on top of that, you expect it to be performant. You expect it to be secure. You expect there to be frankly, no hiccups whatsoever, because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates. And the last thing you want, is watching your screen pixelate, as you're trying to have an important conversation. And these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly, require a lot more of folks like Garrick and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night. And that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. >> John: Yeah, the whole story on that one point, just to kind of add live in this was that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours but Garrick, this is the challenge. This is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? >> Yeah, so we've had our on-prem data centers for quite some time, and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was a kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and to say, "Hey, this is possible." We started out with a fairly small SWAT team then managed within a couple of months, working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people, you know, with background or overall, just security folks over devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of the day, just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. AppDynamics, if we didn't have that would have been almost impossible to get a read if for no other reason, then just one little tidbit. We used to have a data center in Virginia. And so physics being what it is, you know, there's just been a flight that we have to contend with. And for a couple, few years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Will you be asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the Delta is between, you know, here's how we've done things on-prem. Here's how it looks out here. If you are the cross, you know, calls and, you know, AppDynamics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, "Hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something, it's a starting point. Here's why, we can show you the graphs. We can show you the data. Let's do this thing." So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also going to be okay just in, and so we've been asked to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid mode for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you, we describe. >> {John] If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data points, you double down on that. You're looking at real data, and then you look at success and you double down, that's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttled, right? (John laughs) So, yeah, so I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because when you got a business that's scaling, it's running, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. >> Yup, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product. And so we've got to back that up. And that means, maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what have we already do? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using AppDynamics as part of our containerization initiative. You know, we've got lots of virtual infrastructure, but what is it, again, what does it look like on-prem, in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different. And then to be able to compare that to what it looks like, in the cloud. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, when we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, we know that the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan the capacity, and, you know, get there. (chuckles) >> John: That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports, and the old adage, what inning are we in growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header, game one won by the cloud, game two is happening now. And the trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base. And IT, where IT has shifted to the cloud right now. And they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end, understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because, or do you agree with that? And do you see that as an important part of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that complexity that the IT organizations are seeing now, as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third party applications or SaaS services. These things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs, right? And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise. Because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind. Beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand, you really need tools and systems that come together, and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think, as you talk about those innings, that first inning, second inning, or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem, and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass scale migration. And then we're all in the promised land. And we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever increasing complexity. As we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology, and what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will of cloud operations on-premises because of the reasons. And now you've got the edge. Garrick, this is the whole kind of end-to-end stack conversation view. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Linda was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for Match.com? >> So we have quite a bit of infrastructure, you know, a lot of it is shared, well, most of all, maintaining, sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so now the navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the new things that we have coming out is Star.com It's out there right now. It's a dating site that's geared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but we're realizing what that means, how is that different, how our registration flow is different, how our subscription flow is different. Where are the things that DevOps are actively trying to improve on and rethink? That's one of the things that we try to focus on when we're trying to kind of pick out, like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to be maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure, and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and in front of those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. >> John: What's some of the activity you guys seen? And what's the peak activity on Match.com these days? >> Yeah, so dating apps in general, but not so particular we use a nested or breast fractal peak, and it's a pattern that, from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing. And not just like, oh we changed something and then did this and produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So with taking time zones into account, obviously, in the United States from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this, growing, burst of traffic. So that can be anywhere from 23% sometimes. It kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak where every, you know, Sunday and Monday we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an Archer psychology kind of standpoint where, you know, you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's day. Believe it or not, it's President's day, it's not Valentine's day. And so the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of, what cost squeeze tests, were not quite as I guess, engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%, what happens? where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday in June (chuckles). So we have to predict, we can anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure, a lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for a yearly peak, we really have to pay attention. We have to prep. We have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. >> That's awesome, and AppDynamics to help you to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times, to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study. Great story. How large-scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you, so good to be here. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation about women in tech and women in cybersecurity, two things I'm very passionate about. Lisa Martin here, with two guests, Debbie Briggs joins us, the Area Vice President, and Chief Security Officer at NETSCOUT, and Tyler Cohen Wood is here as well, the Founder and CEO of MyConnectedHealth. Ladies, it's an honor to have you on the program. I'm excited to talk to you. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Completely agree. Tyler and I talked a couple of minutes last week and she has a lot to offer to this. >> I know, I was looking at both of your backgrounds. Very impressive. Tyler, starting with you. I see that you are a nationally recognized Cybersecurity Intelligence, National Security Expert, and former Director of Cyber Risk Management for AT&T. And I also saw that you just won a Top 50 Women in Tech Influencers to Follow for 2021 Award. Congratulations, that's amazing. I would love to know way back in the day, how did you even first become interested in tech? >> Well, it was kind of inevitable that I would go into something like tech because as a kid, I was kind of nerdy. I was obsessed with "Star Trek". I would catalog my "Star Trek" tapes by Stardate. I was just really into it. But when I was in college, I mean, it was the late 90's. Cybersecurity just really wasn't a thing. So I went into music and I worked for a radio station. I loved it, but the format of the radio station changed and I wanted to do something different. And I thought, well, computers. I'll move to San Francisco, and I'm sure I can get a job, 'cause they were hiring anyone with a brain, 'cause it was really the dot com boom. And that's really how I got into it. It was just kind of one of those things. (laughs) >> Did you have, was it like network connection, going from music to tech is quite a jump? >> It's a huge jump. It was, but you know, I was young. I was still fresh out of school. I was really interested in learning and I really wanted to get involved in cyber in some capacity, because I became really fascinated with it. So it was just kind of one of those things, that just sort of happened. >> What an interesting talk about a zig-zaggy path. That's a very, very interesting one. And I have to talk about music with you later. That would be interesting. And Debbie, you also have, as Tyler does, 20 years plus experience in cybersecurity. You've been with NETSCOUT since '04. Were you always interested in tech? Did you study engineering or computer science in school, Debbie? >> Yeah, so I think my interest in tech, just like Tyler started at a very young age. I was always interested in how things worked and how people worked. And some day over a drink, I will tell you some funny stories about things I took apart in my parents house, to figure out how it worked. (Lisa and Tyler laughing) They still don't know it. So I guess I- >> I love that. >> I just love that putting it back together, but I took a more traditional route than Tyler did. I do have a degree in Computer Science, went to school a little bit earlier than Tyler. What I would say is, when I was in college, the Computer Science Center was in the basement of the library and we had these really tiny windows and they sort of hit you in the dark. And I think it was my senior year and I went, "I don't want to sit in a room by myself and write code all day and talk to no one." So, you know, I'm a senior and I'm like, "Okay, I got to, this is not, I did not want to write code all day." And so I happened to fall into a great company and moved onto PCs. And from there went to messaging, to networking and into that, I fell into cybersecurity. So I took that more traditional route and I think I've done every job in IT, except for programming, which is what I really got my degree in. >> But you realized early on, you know, "I don't quite think this is for me." And that's an important thing for anybody in any career, to really listen to your gut. It's telling you something. I love how you both got into cybersecurity, which is now, especially in the last 18 months, with what we've seen with the threat landscape, such an incredible opportunity for anyone. But I'd like to know there's not a lot of women in tech, as we know we've been talking about this for a long time now. We've got maybe a quarter of women at the technology roles are filled by women. Tyler, talk to me about some of the challenges that you faced along your journey to get where you are today. >> Well, I mean, you know, like I said, when I started, it was like 1999, 2000. And there were even less women in cybersecurity and in these tech roles than there are now. And you know, it was difficult because, you know, I remember at my first job, I was so interested in learning about Unix and I would learn everything, I read everything about it. And I ended up getting promoted over all of my male colleagues. And you know, it was really awkward because there was the assumption, they would just say things like, "Oh, well you got that because you're a woman." And that was not the case, but it's that type of stereotyping, you know, that we've had to deal with in this industry. Now I do believe that is changing. And I've seen a lot of evidence of that. We're getting there, but we're not there yet. >> And I agree. I agree completely with what Tyler said. You know, when I started, you were the only woman in the room, you got promoted over your male counterparts. You know, I would say even 10 years ago, you know, someone was like, "Well, you could go for any CISCO role and you'd get the job because you're a woman." And I've had to go and say, "No, I might get an interview because I'm a woman, but you don't get the job just because, you know, you check a box." You know, some of that is still out there, but Tyler you're right, things are changing. I think, you know, three things that we all need to focus in on to continue to move us forward and get more women into tech is the first thing is we have to start younger. I think by high school, a lot of girls and young women have been turned off by technology. So maybe, we need to start in the middle school and ensuring that we've got young girls interested. The second thing is, is we have to have mentors. And I always say, if you're in the security industry, you have to turn around and help the next person out. And if that person is a woman, that's great, but we have to mentor others. And it can be young girls, it could be young gentlemen, but we need to mentor that next group up. And you know, if you're in the position to offer internships during the summer, we don't have to stay to the traditional role and go, "Oh, let me hire just intern from the you know IT, they're getting degrees in IT." You can get creative. And my best worker right now was an intern that worked for me, was an intern for me six years ago. And she has a degree in Finance, so nontraditional route into cyber security. And the third thing I think we need to do is, is there things the industry could do to change things and make things, I don't want to say even 'cause they're not uneven, but for example, I forget what survey it was, but if a woman reads a job description and I can do half of it, I'm not going to apply because I don't feel I'll qualify, where men, on the other hand, if they can do three out of ten they'll apply. So do we need to look at the way we write job descriptions, and use different words, you know, rather than must have these skills. You know, sort of leave it a little bit open, like here are the skills we'd like you to have, or have, you know, a handful of the following. So soften some of those job descriptions. And the second thing is once we get women in, we have to be a little bit more, I'll say inclusive. So, if you're a high tech company, look at, you know, your sales organization. When you go to big shows, do you pay more attention to men on the floor than women on the floor? If you have a sales event where you get different customers together, is it a golf outing or is it something that's maybe a little bit more inclusive than just male? So those are the three things I think as an industry we have to focus in on, start younger, get them, you know, work on mentorships specifically in cyber, and the third thing is, look at some of the things that we're doing, as companies both in our HR and sales practices. >> That's a great, that last piece of advice, Debbie is fantastic. That's one that I hadn't thought about, but you're right. If a job description is written, for must have all of these things and a woman that goes, "I only got three out of the ten. I'm not going to even get past, you know, the recruiter here." How can we write things differently? I also loved your idea of bringing in people with diverse backgrounds. I've been in marketing for 16 years and I've met very few people that actually have marketing degrees, a lot of people. So you get that diversity of thought. Tyler, what are some of your thoughts about how we can help expand the role of women in technology? Do you agree with some of the things that Debbie said? >> I love what Debbie said. I agree 100%. And I started laughing because I was thinking about all the golf outings that I've been on and I don't play golf. (all laughing) I think that there is an untapped resource because there's a lot of women who are now interested in changing their careers and that's a big pool of people. And I think that making it more accessible and making it so that people understand what the different cyber security or cyber jobs are, because a lot of people just assume that it's coding, or it's, you know, working on AI, but that's not necessarily true. I mean, there's so many different avenues. There's marketing, there's forensics, there's incident response. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And oftentimes if people don't know that these types of jobs exist, they're not even going to look for them. So making that more well-known, what the different types of opportunities are to people, I think that that would help kind of open more doors. >> And that goes along beautifully with what Debbie was talking about with respect to mentorship. And I would even add sponsorship in there, but becoming a sponsor of a younger female, who's maybe considering tech or is already in tech to help her navigate the career. Look for the other opportunities. Tyler, as you mentioned, there's a lot to cybersecurity, that is beyond coding and AI for example. So maybe getting the awareness out there more. Did either of you have sponsors when you were early in your career? Are you a sponsor now? Debbie, let's start with you. >> So, I'll answer your first question. I guess I was really fortunate that my first job out of college, I had an internship and I happened to have a female boss. And so, although we may not have called it sponsorship or mentor, she taught me and showed me that, you know, women can be leaders. And she always believed in us and always pushed us to do things beyond what we may have thought we were capable of. Throughout the years, someone once told me that we should all have our own personal board of directors. You know, a group of people that when we're making a decision, that may be life-changing or we're unsure, rather than just having one mentor, having a group of people that you, that you know, they don't have to be in cybersecurity. Yeah, I want someone that's on my board of directors that maybe, is a specialist in cybersecurity, but having other executives in other companies, that can also give you that perspective. You know, so I've always had a personal board of directors. I think I've had three or four different mentors. Some of them, I went out and found. Some of them I have joined organizations that have been fortunate enough to become not only a mentor, but a mentee. And I've kept those relationships up over three or four years. And all those people are now on my personal board of directors, that, you know, if I have a life-changing question, I've got a group of people that I can go back on. >> That is brilliant advice. I love that having a... Isn't that great Tyler? Having a personal- >> Yes Yes! >> Board of directors, especially as we look at cybersecurity and the cybersecurity skills gap Tyler has been, I think it's in its 5th year now, which is there's so much opportunity. What we saw in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months during the pandemic was this explosion and the attack surface, ransomware becoming a word that even my mom knows these days. What do you advise Tyler for, you talked about really making people much more aware of all of the opportunities within cyber, but when you think about how you would get women interested in cybersecurity specifically, what are some of the key pieces of advice you would offer? >> Well, again, I think I love the board of directors. I love that. That is brilliant, but I really think that it is about finding mentors, and it is about doing the research, and really asking questions. Because if you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, you know, they may just not respond, but chances are some someone will and, you know, most people in this community are very willing to help. And, you know, I found that to be great. I mean, I've got my board of directors too. I realize that now. (Debbie laughs) But I also like to help other people as well, that are just kind of entering into the field or if they're changing their careers. And it's not necessarily just women, it's people that are interested in getting into an aspect of this industry. And this is a industry where, you know, you can jump from this, to this, to this, to this. I mean, I think that I've had six different major career shifts still within the cybersecurity realm. So, just because you start off doing one thing doesn't mean that that's what you're going to do forever. There're so many different areas. And it's really interesting. I think about my 11 year old niece and she may very well have a job someday, that doesn't even exist right now. That's how quickly cyber and everything connected is moving. And if you think about it, we are connected, there is a cyber component to every single thing that we do, and that's going to continue to expand and continue to grow. And we need more people to be interested, and to want to get into these careers. And I think also it's important for younger girls to let them know these careers are really fun and they're extremely rewarding. And I mean, I hate to use this as an incentive, but there's also a lot of money that can be made too, and that's an incentive to get, you know, women and girls into these careers as well. >> And Tyler, I think you're right. In addition to that, you're always going to have a job. And I think cyber is a great career for someone that are lifelong learners, because like you said, your 11 year old niece, the job, when she graduates from college, she may have, probably doesn't even exist today. And so I think you have to be a lifelong learner. I think one of the things that people may not be aware of is, you know, for women who may have gone the non-traditional route and got degrees later in life, or took time off to raise children and want to come back to work, cyber security is something that, you know, doesn't have to be a nine to five job. I have, it happens to be a gentlemen on my team, who has to get kids on the bus and off the bus. And so we figured out how, you know, he gets up and he works for a couple hours, puts kids on the bus, is in the office. And then he gets the kids off. And once they've had dinner and gone to bed, he puts in a couple more hours. And I think, you know, people need to be aware of, there is some flexibility, there is flexibility in cyber jobs. I mean, it's not a nine to five job, it's not like banking. Well, if you were teller, and your hours are when the bank is open, cyber is 7/24 and jobs can be flexible. And I think people need to be aware of that. >> I agree on the flexibility front, and people also need to be flexible themselves. I do want to ask you both, we're getting low on time, but I've got to ask you, how do you get the confidence, to be, like you said, back in the day, in the room, maybe the only female and I've been in that as well, even in marketing, product marketing years ago. How do you get the confidence to continue moving forward? Even as someone says, "You're only here because you're a female." Tyler, what's your advice to help young women and young men as well fight any sort of challenges that are coming their way? >> I had a mentor when I first moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency, I had an Office Chief and she said to me, "Tyler, you're a Senior Intelligence Officer, you always take a seat at the table. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot have a seat at the table." And you know, that was good advice. And I think confidence is great. But courage is something that's much more important, because courage is what leads up to confidence. And you really have to believe in yourself and do things that you know are right for you, not because you think it's going to make other people happy. And I think, you know, as women, it's really finding that courage to be brave and to be strong and to be willing to stand out, you know, alone on something, because it's what you care about and what you believe in. And that's really what helps kind of motivate me. >> I love that courage. Debbie, what are your thoughts? >> (laughs) So I was going to say, this is going to be really hard to believe, but when I was 16 years old, I was so shy that if I went to a restaurant and someone served me stone cold food, I wouldn't say a word. I would just eat it. If I bought something in a store and I didn't like it, I'd refuse, I just couldn't bring myself to go to that customer service desk and return it. And my first job in high school, was it a fast food place. And I worked for a gentleman who was a little bit of a tyrant, but you know, I learned how to get a backbone very quickly. And I would have to say now looking back, he was probably my first mentor without even trying to do that. He mentored me on how to believe in myself and how to stand up for what's right. So, Tyler, I completely agree with you. And you know, that's something that people think when they get a mentorship, sometimes it's someone going to mentor them on, you know, something tactical, something they want to know how to do, but sometimes what you need to be mentored in, could be, "How do I believe in myself?" Or "How do I find the courage to be that the only female in the room?" And I think that is where some of that mentorship comes from and, you know, I think, you know, if we go back to mentoring at the middle school, there's lots of opportunities, career fairs, the first robotically, get the middle school level, gives all of us an opportunity to sort of mentor girls at that level. And for all the guys out there who have daughters, this is, you know, how to... It's not like you can get a parenting checklist, "Teach my kid courage." And Tyler, I love that word, but I think that's something that we all need to aspire to bring out in others. >> I love that. I love that. >> Okay with that, I think I love both of your stories, are zig-zaggy in certain ways, one in a more direct cybersecurity path, Debbie with yours. Tyler, yours, very different coming from the music industry. But you both have such great advice. It's really, I would say, I'm going to add that, open your mind to be open to, you can do anything. As Tyler said, there's a very great possibility that right now the job that your niece who's 11 is going to get in the next 10 years, doesn't exist yet. How exciting is that? To have the opportunity to be open-minded enough and flexible enough to say, "I'm going to try that." And I'm going to learn from my mentors, whether it's a fast food cook, which I wouldn't think would be a direct mentor, and recognizing years later, "Wow, what an impact that person had on me, having the courage to do what I have." And so I would ask you like each one more question in terms of just your inspiration for what you're currently doing. Debbie, as the leader of security for NETSCOUT, what inspires you to continue in your current role and seek more? >> So, I'm a lifelong learner. So, I love to learn cybersecurity. You know, every day is a different day. So, it's definitely the ability to continue to learn and to do new things. But the second thing is, is I think I've always been, I don't want to call it a fixer-upper because cybersecurity isn't a fixer-upper, I'm just always wanted to improve upon things. If I've seen something that I think can do better, or a product that could have something new or better in it, you know, that's what excites me is to give people that feedback and to improve on what we've had out there. You know, you had mentioned, we've got this block of jobs that we can't fill. We have to give feedback and how we get the tools and what we have today smarter, so that if there are less of us, we're working smarter and not harder. And so if there is some low-level tasks that we could put back into tools, and talk to vendors and have them do this for us, that's how I think we start to get our way sort of out of the hole. Tyler, any thoughts on that? >> I again, I love that answer. I mean, I think for me, you know, I do like, it's that problem solving thing too. But for me it's also about, it's about compassion. And when I see, you know, a story of some child that's been involved in some kind of cyber bullying attack, or a company that has been broken into, I want to do whatever I can to help people, and to teach people to really protect themselves, so that they feel empowered and they're not afraid of cyber security. So for me, it's also really that drive to really make a difference and really help people. >> And you've both done, I'm sure, so much of that made such a big difference in many communities in which you're involved. I thank you so much for sharing your journeys with me on the program today, and giving such great pointed advice to young men and women, and even some of the older men and women out there that might be kind of struggling about, where do I go next? Your advice is brilliant, ladies. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Debbie Briggs and Tyler Cohen Wood, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this Cube Conversation. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation about women in tech and women in cybersecurity, two things I'm very passionate about. Lisa Martin here, with two guests, Debbie Briggs joins us, the Area Vice President, and Chief Security Officer at NETSCOUT, and Tyler Cohen Wood is here as well, the Founder and CEO of MyConnectedHealth. Ladies, it's an honor to have you on the program. I'm excited to talk to you. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Completely agree. Tyler and I talked a couple of minutes last week and she has a lot to offer to this. >> I know, I was looking at both of your backgrounds. Very impressive. Tyler, starting with you. I see that you are a nationally recognized Cybersecurity Intelligence, National Security Expert, and former Director of Cyber Risk Management for AT&T. And I also saw that you just won a Top 50 Women in Tech Influencers to Follow for 2021 Award. Congratulations, that's amazing. I would love to know way back in the day, how did you even first become interested in tech? >> Well, it was kind of inevitable that I would go into something like tech because as a kid, I was kind of nerdy. I was obsessed with "Star Trek". I would catalog my "Star Trek" tapes by Stardate. I was just really into it. But when I was in college, I mean, it was the late 90's. Cybersecurity just really wasn't a thing. So I went into music and I worked for a radio station. I loved it, but the format of the radio station changed and I wanted to do something different. And I thought, well, computers. I'll move to San Francisco, and I'm sure I can get a job, 'cause they were hiring anyone with a brain, 'cause it was really the dot com boom. And that's really how I got into it. It was just kind of one of those things. (laughs) >> Did you have, was it like network connection, going from music to tech is quite a jump? >> It's a huge jump. It was, but you know, I was young. I was still fresh out of school. I was really interested in learning and I really wanted to get involved in cyber in some capacity, because I became really fascinated with it. So it was just kind of one of those things, that just sort of happened. >> What an interesting talk about a zig-zaggy path. That's a very, very interesting one. And I have to talk about music with you later. That would be interesting. And Debbie, you also have, as Tyler does, 20 years plus experience in cybersecurity. You've been with NETSCOUT since '04. Were you always interested in tech? Did you study engineering or computer science in school, Debbie? >> Yeah, so I think my interest in tech, just like Tyler started at a very young age. I was always interested in how things worked and how people worked. And some day over a drink, I will tell you some funny stories about things I took apart in my parents house, to figure out how it worked. (Lisa and Tyler laughing) They still don't know it. So I guess I- >> I love that. >> I just love that putting it back together, but I took a more traditional route than Tyler did. I do have a degree in Computer Science, went to school a little bit earlier than Tyler. What I would say is, when I was in college, the Computer Science Center was in the basement of the library and we had these really tiny windows and they sort of hit you in the dark. And I think it was my senior year and I went, "I don't want to sit in a room by myself and write code all day and talk to no one." So, you know, I'm a senior and I'm like, "Okay, I got to, this is not, I did not want to write code all day." And so I happened to fall into a great company and moved onto PCs. And from there went to messaging, to networking and into that, I fell into cybersecurity. So I took that more traditional route and I think I've done every job in IT, except for programming, which is what I really got my degree in. >> But you realized early on, you know, "I don't quite think this is for me." And that's an important thing for anybody in any career, to really listen to your gut. It's telling you something. I love how you both got into cybersecurity, which is now, especially in the last 18 months, with what we've seen with the threat landscape, such an incredible opportunity for anyone. But I'd like to know there's not a lot of women in tech, as we know we've been talking about this for a long time now. We've got maybe a quarter of women at the technology roles are filled by women. Tyler, talk to me about some of the challenges that you faced along your journey to get where you are today. >> Well, I mean, you know, like I said, when I started, it was like 1999, 2000. And there were even less women in cybersecurity and in these tech roles than there are now. And you know, it was difficult because, you know, I remember at my first job, I was so interested in learning about Unix and I would learn everything, I read everything about it. And I ended up getting promoted over all of my male colleagues. And you know, it was really awkward because there was the assumption, they would just say things like, "Oh, well you got that because you're a woman." And that was not the case, but it's that type of stereotyping, you know, that we've had to deal with in this industry. Now I do believe that is changing. And I've seen a lot of evidence of that. We're getting there, but we're not there yet. >> And I agree. I agree completely with what Tyler said. You know, when I started, you were the only woman in the room, you got promoted over your male counterparts. You know, I would say even 10 years ago, you know, someone was like, "Well, you could go for any CISCO role and you'd get the job because you're a woman." And I've had to go and say, "No, I might get an interview because I'm a woman, but you don't get the job just because, you know, you check a box." You know, some of that is still out there, but Tyler you're right, things are changing. I think, you know, three things that we all need to focus in on to continue to move us forward and get more women into tech is the first thing is we have to start younger. I think by high school, a lot of girls and young women have been turned off by technology. So maybe, we need to start in the middle school and ensuring that we've got young girls interested. The second thing is, is we have to have mentors. And I always say, if you're in the security industry, you have to turn around and help the next person out. And if that person is a woman, that's great, but we have to mentor others. And it can be young girls, it could be young gentlemen, but we need to mentor that next group up. And you know, if you're in the position to offer internships during the summer, we don't have to stay to the traditional role and go, "Oh, let me hire just intern from the you know IT, they're getting degrees in IT." You can get creative. And my best worker right now was an intern that worked for me, was an intern for me six years ago. And she has a degree in Finance, so nontraditional route into cyber security. And the third thing I think we need to do is, is there things the industry could do to change things and make things, I don't want to say even 'cause they're not uneven, but for example, I forget what survey it was, but if a woman reads a job description and I can do half of it, I'm not going to apply because I don't feel I'll qualify, where men, on the other hand, if they can do three out of ten they'll apply. So do we need to look at the way we write job descriptions, and use different words, you know, rather than must have these skills. You know, sort of leave it a little bit open, like here are the skills we'd like you to have, or have, you know, a handful of the following. So soften some of those job descriptions. And the second thing is once we get women in, we have to be a little bit more, I'll say inclusive. So, if you're a high tech company, look at, you know, your sales organization. When you go to big shows, do you pay more attention to men on the floor than women on the floor? If you have a sales event where you get different customers together, is it a golf outing or is it something that's maybe a little bit more inclusive than just male? So those are the three things I think as an industry we have to focus in on, start younger, get them, you know, work on mentorships specifically in cyber, and the third thing is, look at some of the things that we're doing, as companies both in our HR and sales practices. >> That's a great, that last piece of advice, Debbie is fantastic. That's one that I hadn't thought about, but you're right. If a job description is written, for must have all of these things and a woman that goes, "I only got three out of the ten. I'm not going to even get past, you know, the recruiter here." How can we write things differently? I also loved your idea of bringing in people with diverse backgrounds. I've been in marketing for 16 years and I've met very few people that actually have marketing degrees, a lot of people. So you get that diversity of thought. Tyler, what are some of your thoughts about how we can help expand the role of women in technology? Do you agree with some of the things that Debbie said? >> I love what Debbie said. I agree 100%. And I started laughing because I was thinking about all the golf outings that I've been on and I don't play golf. (all laughing) I think that there is an untapped resource because there's a lot of women who are now interested in changing their careers and that's a big pool of people. And I think that making it more accessible and making it so that people understand what the different cyber security or cyber jobs are, because a lot of people just assume that it's coding, or it's, you know, working on AI, but that's not necessarily true. I mean, there's so many different avenues. There's marketing, there's forensics, there's incident response. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And oftentimes if people don't know that these types of jobs exist, they're not even going to look for them. So making that more well-known, what the different types of opportunities are to people, I think that that would help kind of open more doors. >> And that goes along beautifully with what Debbie was talking about with respect to mentorship. And I would even add sponsorship in there, but becoming a sponsor of a younger female, who's maybe considering tech or is already in tech to help her navigate the career. Look for the other opportunities. Tyler, as you mentioned, there's a lot to cybersecurity, that is beyond coding and AI for example. So maybe getting the awareness out there more. Did either of you have sponsors when you were early in your career? Are you a sponsor now? Debbie, let's start with you. >> So, I'll answer your first question. I guess I was really fortunate that my first job out of college, I had an internship and I happened to have a female boss. And so, although we may not have called it sponsorship or mentor, she taught me and showed me that, you know, women can be leaders. And she always believed in us and always pushed us to do things beyond what we may have thought we were capable of. Throughout the years, someone once told me that we should all have our own personal board of directors. You know, a group of people that when we're making a decision, that may be life-changing or we're unsure, rather than just having one mentor, having a group of people that you, that you know, they don't have to be in cybersecurity. Yeah, I want someone that's on my board of directors that maybe, is a specialist in cybersecurity, but having other executives in other companies, that can also give you that perspective. You know, so I've always had a personal board of directors. I think I've had three or four different mentors. Some of them, I went out and found. Some of them I have joined organizations that have been fortunate enough to become not only a mentor, but a mentee. And I've kept those relationships up over three or four years. And all those people are now on my personal board of directors, that, you know, if I have a life-changing question, I've got a group of people that I can go back on. >> That is brilliant advice. I love that having a... Isn't that great Tyler? Having a personal- >> Yes Yes! >> Board of directors, especially as we look at cybersecurity and the cybersecurity skills gap Tyler has been, I think it's in its 5th year now, which is there's so much opportunity. What we saw in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months during the pandemic was this explosion and the attack surface, ransomware becoming a word that even my mom knows these days. What do you advise Tyler for, you talked about really making people much more aware of all of the opportunities within cyber, but when you think about how you would get women interested in cybersecurity specifically, what are some of the key pieces of advice you would offer? >> Well, again, I think I love the board of directors. I love that. That is brilliant, but I really think that it is about finding mentors, and it is about doing the research, and really asking questions. Because if you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, you know, they may just not respond, but chances are some someone will and, you know, most people in this community are very willing to help. And, you know, I found that to be great. I mean, I've got my board of directors too. I realize that now. (Debbie laughs) But I also like to help other people as well, that are just kind of entering into the field or if they're changing their careers. And it's not necessarily just women, it's people that are interested in getting into an aspect of this industry. And this is a industry where, you know, you can jump from this, to this, to this, to this. I mean, I think that I've had six different major career shifts still within the cybersecurity realm. So, just because you start off doing one thing doesn't mean that that's what you're going to do forever. There're so many different areas. And it's really interesting. I think about my 11 year old niece and she may very well have a job someday, that doesn't even exist right now. That's how quickly cyber and everything connected is moving. And if you think about it, we are connected, there is a cyber component to every single thing that we do, and that's going to continue to expand and continue to grow. And we need more people to be interested, and to want to get into these careers. And I think also it's important for younger girls to let them know these careers are really fun and they're extremely rewarding. And I mean, I hate to use this as an incentive, but there's also a lot of money that can be made too, and that's an incentive to get, you know, women and girls into these careers as well. >> And Tyler, I think you're right. In addition to that, you're always going to have a job. And I think cyber is a great career for someone that are lifelong learners, because like you said, your 11 year old niece, the job, when she graduates from college, she may have, probably doesn't even exist today. And so I think you have to be a lifelong learner. I think one of the things that people may not be aware of is, you know, for women who may have gone the non-traditional route and got degrees later in life, or took time off to raise children and want to come back to work, cyber security is something that, you know, doesn't have to be a nine to five job. I have, it happens to be a gentlemen on my team, who has to get kids on the bus and off the bus. And so we figured out how, you know, he gets up and he works for a couple hours, puts kids on the bus, is in the office. And then he gets the kids off. And once they've had dinner and gone to bed, he puts in a couple more hours. And I think, you know, people need to be aware of, there is some flexibility, there is flexibility in cyber jobs. I mean, it's not a nine to five job, it's not like banking. Well, if you were teller, and your hours are when the bank is open, cyber is 7/24 and jobs can be flexible. And I think people need to be aware of that. >> I agree on the flexibility front, and people also need to be flexible themselves. I do want to ask you both, we're getting low on time, but I've got to ask you, how do you get the confidence, to be, like you said, back in the day, in the room, maybe the only female and I've been in that as well, even in marketing, product marketing years ago. How do you get the confidence to continue moving forward? Even as someone says, "You're only here because you're a female." Tyler, what's your advice to help young women and young men as well fight any sort of challenges that are coming their way? >> I had a mentor when I first moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency, I had an Office Chief and she said to me, "Tyler, you're a Senior Intelligence Officer, you always take a seat at the table. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot have a seat at the table." And you know, that was good advice. And I think confidence is great. But courage is something that's much more important, because courage is what leads up to confidence. And you really have to believe in yourself and do things that you know are right for you, not because you think it's going to make other people happy. And I think, you know, as women, it's really finding that courage to be brave and to be strong and to be willing to stand out, you know, alone on something, because it's what you care about and what you believe in. And that's really what helps kind of motivate me. >> I love that courage. Debbie, what are your thoughts? >> (laughs) So I was going to say, this is going to be really hard to believe, but when I was 16 years old, I was so shy that if I went to a restaurant and someone served me stone cold food, I wouldn't say a word. I would just eat it. If I bought something in a store and I didn't like it, I'd refuse, I just couldn't bring myself to go to that customer service desk and return it. And my first job in high school, was it a fast food place. And I worked for a gentleman who was a little bit of a tyrant, but you know, I learned how to get a backbone very quickly. And I would have to say now looking back, he was probably my first mentor without even trying to do that. He mentored me on how to believe in myself and how to stand up for what's right. So, Tyler, I completely agree with you. And you know, that's something that people think when they get a mentorship, sometimes it's someone going to mentor them on, you know, something tactical, something they want to know how to do, but sometimes what you need to be mentored in, could be, "How do I believe in myself?" Or "How do I find the courage to be that the only female in the room?" And I think that is where some of that mentorship comes from and, you know, I think, you know, if we go back to mentoring at the middle school, there's lots of opportunities, career fairs, the first robotically, get the middle school level, gives all of us an opportunity to sort of mentor girls at that level. And for all the guys out there who have daughters, this is, you know, how to... It's not like you can get a parenting checklist, "Teach my kid courage." And Tyler, I love that word, but I think that's something that we all need to aspire to bring out in others. >> I love that. I love that. >> Okay with that, I think I love both of your stories, are zig-zaggy in certain ways, one in a more direct cybersecurity path, Debbie with yours. Tyler, yours, very different coming from the music industry. But you both have such great advice. It's really, I would say, I'm going to add that, open your mind to be open to, you can do anything. As Tyler said, there's a very great possibility that right now the job that your niece who's 11 is going to get in the next 10 years, doesn't exist yet. How exciting is that? To have the opportunity to be open-minded enough and flexible enough to say, "I'm going to try that." And I'm going to learn from my mentors, whether it's a fast food cook, which I wouldn't think would be a direct mentor, and recognizing years later, "Wow, what an impact that person had on me, having the courage to do what I have." And so I would ask you like each one more question in terms of just your inspiration for what you're currently doing. Debbie, as the leader of security for NETSCOUT, what inspires you to continue in your current role and seek more? >> So, I'm a lifelong learner. So, I love to learn cybersecurity. You know, every day is a different day. So, it's definitely the ability to continue to learn and to do new things. But the second thing is, is I think I've always been, I don't want to call it a fixer-upper because cybersecurity isn't a fixer-upper, I'm just always wanted to improve upon things. If I've seen something that I think can do better, or a product that could have something new or better in it, you know, that's what excites me is to give people that feedback and to improve on what we've had out there. You know, you had mentioned, we've got this block of jobs that we can't fill. We have to give feedback and how we get the tools and what we have today smarter, so that if there are less of us, we're working smarter and not harder. And so if there is some low-level tasks that we could put back into tools, and talk to vendors and have them do this for us, that's how I think we start to get our way sort of out of the hole. Tyler, any thoughts on that? >> I again, I love that answer. I mean, I think for me, you know, I do like, it's that problem solving thing too. But for me it's also about, it's about compassion. And when I see, you know, a story of some child that's been involved in some kind of cyber bullying attack, or a company that has been broken into, I want to do whatever I can to help people, and to teach people to really protect themselves, so that they feel empowered and they're not afraid of cyber security. So for me, it's also really that drive to really make a difference and really help people. >> And you've both done, I'm sure, so much of that made such a big difference in many communities in which you're involved. I thank you so much for sharing your journeys with me on the program today, and giving such great pointed advice to young men and women, and even some of the older men and women out there that might be kind of struggling about, where do I go next? Your advice is brilliant, ladies. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Debbie Briggs and Tyler Cohen Wood, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this Cube Conversation. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series. This series presents announcements on LinkedIn live on a variety of subjects, specifically cloud, security, and work. Three topics that I think all of us are keenly aware of going through the last 18 months of the pandemic. Citrix has taken time to sort of regroup and look at ways that security can be improved so that it isn't a hindrance for members of staff, but instead offers a unified integrated way of dealing with security across all of the variety of situations we find ourselves in today. Everything from a mobile device in a cafe through actually working back in the office when we get the opportunity to, to accessing information on a company issued laptop in a home office, secured networks, unsecured networks, secured browsers, unsecured browsers, the permutations are nearly endless. So Citrix has taken an interesting point of view, starting from the perspective of zero trust, meaning everything must be authenticated. They apply contextualism to their strategies. So the context and the posture of the access, the device, the location, all of those matter so that security protocols are tailored to help enhance productivity and security instead of, again, being a hindrance. So I highly recommend you go to the Citrix launchpad site dedicated to security. Two senior Citrix execs, Tim and Joe, will go through great detail on the announcements, but let's recap a little bit from an overview perspective. The first is this idea of secure private access. You combine that with secure internet access, and now you have a package that allows this contextual security posture that can change and adapt based upon varying conditions. Additionally, they have announced a partnership with Google where all of these capabilities are built into the Chrome OS. So now you have a device level native support for these protocols. They're also talking about bot management as something that is critical to security, moving forward. Bots out fishing, you want to kill them. You don't want them getting into your system, but there are some bots that are okay that have poking around in your environment. So again, go into the details with Tim and Joe. Having said that, I am delighted to have a very special guest here. Friend of theCUBE, veteran of theCUBE, author, advisor, author of the book, Cyber Minds and Tech Executive, Shira Rubinoff, is going to join us in just a moment. (upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series with a focus on the topic of security. Now, whenever we're going to talk security on theCUBE, we have a CUBE veteran and smartest person on cybersecurity that we know, Shira Rubinoff. She's a cybersecurity executive author and advisor, specifically author of the excellent book on the subject, Cyber Minds. Shira, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> How are you today? >> Doing great, always great to be on theCUBE and talk to you folks and certainly be part of something from Citrix. >> Well, that might be the last pleasant thing that we say, because we are surrounded by security threats. So are you ready to get serious? >> Oh, always with a smile, serious with a smile. >> So, one kind of overriding question that a lot of people have now, if you're an IT executive, you've experienced a complete change in the world from so many different angles, but how has the pandemic changed the way you think of security? What are the dynamics at play, things that are different now that we couldn't have anticipated maybe two or three years ago? >> Interesting question. Certainly, if we look at the scope and the ecosystem of the way that organizations operated, it was pretty much in the high 90% of people being in the office with just the few percentage being working from home. And that had to shift literally overnight to literally the flip side of it, having the multitude of the organization work from home, work remotely, and maybe the few people that had to be in the office were there. So all of a sudden organizations were left with this, how do we secure down our organization? How do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our organization safe? How do we connect to the outside world? What do we do to maintain the proper cyber? That's call it cyber hygiene within an organization. And that's a topic that I talk about quite frequently. When you look at cybersecurity as a whole, we look at the cyber posture of an organization. We also have to break it down and say, what does an organization need to do to be fully cyber secure? So of course, the ongoing training and that had to shift as well. We have now training for the organization and employees, but also think about the consumers and who else is interacting with organizations. We have to switch how that is done. And that has to be ongoing in the global awareness, the cybersecurity of course is at top of mind. And then that would lead to us to zero trust. Zero trust is a massive, massive piece of cybersecurity need for organizations. We think about it as who needs the data is king. Whoever has the data, they rule the world. They own the organization, they do what they need to do. Zero trust, limited access, knowledge of who gets in, why they get in, the need to get in, and the need for that within organization. So zero trust is a very key component and Citrix is very focused on as well. We talk about updated security and patching and all that has to happen, think about remotely. So not only are we thinking about all these topics, we have to think about them going at warp speed with people that might be working remote, who also have other things they have to take care of. Maybe they're taking care of elderly parents, maybe they're having to watch their kids on zoom, making sure they're staying on zoom, and all sorts of things with school, and other maybe roommates who are working for other organizations, not having important information in the backgrounds of their zoom while they're having these important conversations with organizations. But also think about the multiple devices people are using. They may have an area that's set up properly in order to do their work, but then again, they have to be in another room at the same time. Oh, let me just grab my device. So the whole area of the multiple devices, the warp speed of working and not, let's call this pause. And this is one of the key elements that I would tell all organizations to stop and pause, to think about what you're doing before you do it. Give the headaches, but that was not interplayed when the height of the pandemic. The height of the pandemic, we were worried about what's going on? Need knowledge of information, where we're getting this information, downloading it, clicking on links. Then we're working at the same time, taking care of people. So all these things are happening simultaneously, leaving these open vectors for the tax surface to be that much more heightened for the bad actors to get in. >> So, you advise some of the largest companies in the world on this subject, and obviously you're not going to reveal any names or specifics, but as a general overall view from your perspective, how are we doing right now? Is the average large organization now sort of back on cruise control, having figured everything out for this new reality? On a scale of 1 to 10, how well are we executing against all of these changes? >> That's a great question. Let me talk about the global whole. I think organizations are actually doing really well. I think there was a quick ramp up to figure out how to get it done, but because of also the shift of sharing of information that some of these largest companies across the world, they came together to share information with bad actors, to share information about the tax, to share information about what to do if something happens, who's out there and buying together almost like a whole. So it wasn't each finger on its own. It's a hand as a whole looking at it from a stronger perspective. So I think that shift coupled with the fact of the knowledge and understanding of what companies needed to do in terms of locking down the organization, but also allowing and helping their employees, empowering them to get their work done, but get it done in a secure safe fashion. And I believe now, obviously, we all know, they obviously, but the ransomware attacks are now prevalent and they're becoming even more intense with the rise of 5G, a way that attacks could happen, the warp speed. We're now having to understand that being reactive is not enough, being proactive is something that is wonderful to see organizations are doing as well. It used to be okay, let's be reactive. If something happens, what do we do? Let's have a plan in place. But that's not good enough and we've seen that happen because these attacks are coming a warp speed. So the proactivity of these organizations that they've taken is applaudable in general. I can't talk for all the companies, but the ones that I've been consulting to and have interactions with, I'm pleasantly surprised and not surprised as well, that the way that they've taken their cyber posture so seriously, and where they focus in, not only on the organization as a whole, but their employees as individuals, what their needs are and being able to give them what they need to do their jobs well. >> Yeah, that makes sense. You can almost think of it like cybersecurity is a team sport and to the extent that all of that proactive work that an organization can do can be absolutely undermined if we don't do our parts as endpoints, as endpoint people. And when someone reads Cyber Minds, I think there's an undercurrent that I definitely sensed. And then when I looked more closely into your background, I realized that, yes, in fact, you do have a background in psychology. I want to shift to a question along that line, if you don't mind. Thinking about the psychology of people who have lived through the pandemic, this concept of our personal hygiene and our personal security has been in the forefront of our mind. As you leave the house, and there's hand sanitizer and masks and maybe gloves, we're very, very aware of this. How has that affected us from a cybersecurity team sport perspective? Has that made us better players on the field? What are your thoughts in that regard? >> I actually love that question. As we saw the pandemic heightened, everyone became hyper aware of their own personal, what's called cleanliness. And in terms of where they are, what they're doing, if they're masking, if they're putting on gloves, the sanitizers are everywhere, six feet apart. Everybody's thinking about that. It's a forefront. It became a way of life. And if you then do you shift that and you're saying, okay, let's look at the technology or the cybersecurity part of it, your own personal safety, your own personal cybersecurity. I think we failed a lot in that area. I think because of the fact, if you think about the human psychology and the pieces that people needed to know information, everybody was hungry for the latest and greatest information. What's going on? What are the stats? How many people? Just terrible, terrible pandemic with so many people getting sick. So many people dying and wanting to know, what is going on? what are the latest rule sets? What can I do? What else can I do to protect myself? What is my business doing? So we also had bad actors sending out the phishing attacks, heightened tremendously. There is information being sent out, click here for the latest here. This is Dr. Fauchi, his latest report. Everything going out there was not necessarily to help us, but to hurt us. And because of people's human psychology of thinking, I need to protect myself, so I need the information. The stop and pause is, is this the right information? Is this a safe place to go? But then there's also the other flip side of, if I'm not interacting, I'm not there. Think about the different generational people we have going on. Gen Z, millennials, all sorts of it. Everybody's all over social media. And everybody needs to and wants to have a presence there, certainly in this world. So putting out lots of information and being present was very critical 'cause people weren't in-person anymore. So people were interacting online, whether it being on social, whether it being telling people where they're going, what they're doing, what they're eating, what their favorite animal is, all sorts of things that they were doing. But they were giving over personal information that made have be utilized as passwords or ways to get to know somebody, to either do a spear phishing attack or any types of attacks to gather information to hurt, not just a personal to steal money or to steal someone's identity or to come in and hurt the company, but information was everywhere. So we were taking care of our personal cleanliness, but our cyber hygiene with our psychologies aspect of cybersecurity itself, I think took a big dive. And I think that people started becoming aware as these attack surfaces grew. There were also different types of attacks that were happening where phone calls were coming in and saying, somebody is breaking into your bank account. Just verify yourself, give me the last four digits. I need to know who you are. So playing on the human psyche of fear, somebody is trying to get you nervous. So what are you going to do? You're going to act quickly without thinking. Or all sorts of, I think we were talking earlier about extended warranties for different things. That also grew extensively, but how did they do that? They were gathering information, personal information to give you something you want. So if you're playing again on the human psychology of people, when people get what they want, they're more likely to give over something they may not give to somebody else anyway. And one of my biggest example or a strong example is back in the day with Candy Crush. If you think about that game, before you sign up for that game, you literally have to give over your kidney. You're giving over access to your camera, to your contacts. If you look back at the permissions you are giving, it's really unbelievable that everybody was clicking yes, because they wanted to play a game. So take that example and transfer that into real life. We were doing the same thing. So the importance of brushing up on that personal cyber hygiene and really understanding what people needed to do to heighten their own security themselves, less sharing on social, not giving over information that they shouldn't, not allowing a trusted source who isn't really a trusted source into it. Having strong zero trust, not just organizations, but for yourself was very important. >> Yeah now, did we, Chuck. Chuck's my producer. Did we get Shira's social security number and her date of birth? Shira, can you give us that? >> Sure, it's 555-55-5555. >> Excellent Aha, phishing attack. >> There you go, go for it. (laughs) >> So you think there could be a little bit of security fatigue that might come into play when we're thinking of living up to our responsibilities as those end points? >> I think there was just fatigue in general and people were tired of being locked in the house. People were tired of having everybody under the same roof all the time, 24/7. Trying to get work done, trying to get school done, taking care of people, what they needed to do, having groceries delivered, going into groceries, all the thoughts that they had to do that was just a way of life before that we all took for granted during the pandemic. It was just a whole shift. People were just antsy, jumpy. We needed to connect and we need to connect in any way we could. So all these open vectors became a problem that ended up hurting us rather than helping us. So this has been something that was a big mind shift as a pandemic continued. People started realizing what was going on and organizations took a good stand on educating the population and telling them, look, these are the things that are happening. This is what we need to do. Certainly a lot of the companies I'm working with did such a great job with that. Giving their employees the wherewithal of wanting to connect, but doing in a secure manner. Giving them the tools of what they needed to do personal, only also in their personal lives, not just for their work lives. So that was helpful too. And as we're coming out of it, hopefully continue to come completely out of it, we'll see the shift back into, let's take that stop and pause. Let's think what we're doing. >> Yeah, well, we are all looking back to whatever resemblance of normal we can get to. Shira, I can spend hours picking your brain on a variety of subjects. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time together. Do you promise to come back? >> Certainly, a big fan of theCUBE. >> Well, fantastic. Shira Rubinoff, thank you so much for your time. This is Dave Nicholson with a very special CUBE conversation, signing out. Thanks for watching. >> Shira: Thank you too. (gentle music)

>>mm We're entering the fourth grade era of VM ware Executive management From its beginnings in the late 90s is a Silicon Valley startup. It's five founders quickly built the company and it ended up as one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of enterprise tech when EMC bought VM ware for $625 million as a public company. But still under EMC's governance, paul Maritz was appointed Ceo in 2000 and eight and set the company on a journey to build what he called at the time. The software mainframe meaning the company's platform would run any application at high performance with low overhead and world class recovery. Pat Gelsinger took over the Ceo reins in 2012 and through organic investments and clever m and a set of course for the software defined data center and after some early miscalculations in cloud, realigned the company strategy to successfully partner with hyper scale hours and position the company for the multi cloud future. The hallmarks of VM where over the course of its history have been great engineering that led to great products, loyal customers and a powerful ecosystem. The other telling attribute of VM where is it? CEOs have always had a deep understanding of technology and its latest Ceo is no different. It's our pleasure to welcome raghu Raghuram back to the cube the fourth Ceo of VM ware and yet another Silicon Valley Ceo graduated from the IIttie rgu, great to see you again and congratulations on your new role. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Okay, five months in 1st 100 days what we have focused on that journey to become the Switzerland of multi cloud, tell us about your early experience as ceo >>it's been fantastic. Uh our customers, all our employees, all our partners have been very welcoming and of course I've given me great input. What we've been able to do in the last 100 days is to really crystallize the strategy and focus it around what I'm sure we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about. And that's about the multi cloud era of computing that most enterprises are going to go through over the next decade. And so that's really what I've been up to and you'll see the results of that in next week's uh we involved and uh where we would be talking about the strategy and some product announcements that go along with the strategy and so it's a very exciting time to be at Vandenberg. >>Yeah, I mean, I referenced it in my intro, it's almost like the light bulb went off when VM ware realized, wow, this cloud build out is just an opportunity for us and that's really what you're doing with the multi cloud as you're building on top of all the infrastructure that the hyper cloud vendors are putting out there. Maybe you can talk about that, that opportunity and what customers are telling you. >>Yeah, it's uh here is how I describe what has happened in the industry. Right, and what will happen in the industry. So, if you look at the the past decade, as cloud became a mainstream thing, most customers pick the cloud, they built their first digital applications into it, the ones that serve their mobile users or end users with digital products and that worked great for them. Then they step back and say, okay, how many modernize everything that we're doing has become a digital company. And when you go from 10, of your portfolio, 100% of your application portfolio being modernized. What has to happen is you got to go from figuring out, okay, how am I gonna put everything in one cloud to what does the application need and how do I put it on the right place? I look at the same time, the industry has also evolved from being uh predominantly supplied by one cloud provider to multiple cloud providers. At the same time, the thanks to companies like IBM where the data center has been transformed into a private cloud. The edges growing up to be its own location for a cloud sovereign clouds are going. So truly what has happened is it's become a multi cloud world. And customers are saying in addition to just being cloud first, I want to be cloud smart. And so this distributed era of computing that we are entering is what we are seeing in the industry. And what the empire is trying to do is to say, look, let's provide customers with the fastest way of getting to this multi cloud era of computing so that they can go fast, they can spend less and most importantly, they can be free, in other words, choose the right application, right cloud for right applications and have control over how they deploy and use their applications and data. That really is a strategy that we are putting in place. This is something that we've been working towards in the last couple of years now. I'm accelerating that and making that the main piece of what we end, where is doing in order to do that, we have a great opportunity to take partner even better with all of our cloud provider partners and that's where the Switzerland of the industry comes in without impending spin, especially, we have great partnership with the cloud players, great partnerships with infrastructure players. We truly can be a neutral partner to the customers as they look at all these choices and make the right choices for their applications. >>So, I want to ask you about this multi cloud when when the early multi cloud narrative came out where I go, I was saying, look, multi cloud is really multi vendor, you you've got workloads and apps running on different, different clouds. And then increasingly, the promise and your promises, we're going to abstract the underlying complexity of those clouds and we're going to give you an experience whether it's on premise, hybrid into a cloud. Across clouds. Eventually out to the edge, it's gonna be a singular, substantially identical, if not identical experience and we're going to manage the whole kit and caboodle. And how where are we in that first of all? Is that the right way to think about it? Where are we in that sort of transition from plugging into any, you know, a cloud? I'm compatible with the cloud to it's a singular sort of VM ware cloud if you will. >>Yeah. So, um, so I wanna clarify something that he said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the uh, cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to. In fact, that's the last thing we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application so that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the deficit cops toolchain, the runtime environment, which turns out to be Cuban aires and how you control the kubernetes environment. How do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. Right. And so really the VM ware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements. Number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. Right. And number two, you can move faster and number three can spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we're trying to do, but not. So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction in terms of their way, we're still, I would say in the early stages, so if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these Greenfield applications and there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Campaneris. There is still kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our towns, our application platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time, be entirely secure, etcetera, etcetera. That's where the we ever cloud assets that are traditionally this fear based come into play and we've got this now in all of the clouds but it's still in the early days from uh on Azure and google et cetera. How do you manage and secure those things again? We're in the early days. So that's where we are. I would say, >>yeah, thank you for that clarification, I want to sort of come back to that and just make sure we understand it. So for example, if I'm a developer and I want to take advantage of, let's say graviton uh and build an app on that, that so maybe it's some kind of data intensive app or whatever it is. I can do that. You won't restrict me from doing that at the same time. If I want to use the VM where management experience across all my clouds, I can do that as well. Is that the right way to think about it? >>Yeah, exactly. So the management experience by the way, and this is the other thing that gets missed in the remember dialogue because we've been so phenomenally successful with this fear. There's a misperception that everything we are doing atmosphere today works only on top. So everything we're doing at BM wear works only on top of the sphere. That's not the case. Take management, for example, our management portfolio is modular and independent of these, which means it can manage the Graviton application that you're building, right. It can manage a traditional, these fear based application, it can manage rage application, it can manage VM based applications, can manage computer based applications. Uh so it's truly uh, overall management layer. So that is really what we're trying to do. Same thing with our kubernetes example. Right, So our communities control plane allows you to control these kubernetes clusters. Whether the clusters are utilizing gravity and whether clusters are utilizing these fear based crew binaries environments. >>Okay, that's great. So it's kind of a set up question because my next question relates to project Monterey, Because, you know, I've always said when I write about about these things, when I saw Nitro, I saw Graviton, I saw project monitor, I said uh everybody needs a Nitro Nitro or a graviton because new workloads are coming. It's not just the X 86 can handle everything anymore asap whether it's sequel server, whatever we've got new workloads that are coming ai ml data intensive edge workloads, et cetera. Is that how we should think of? Project Monterrey. Where are you in Project Monterey? Why is it so important? Help people understand that? >>Yeah. Project mantra is super exciting for a couple of different reasons. One is uh in its first iteration and uh we announced project monitoring and last being well, we continue to build and we're making great progress along with the hardware partners that we are working with um in its first hydration it allows um um some of the functions that you would expect in the software defined data center to be offloaded into these montri processors. The smart nick processes. Right. So what that does, is it clears up the core CPU for other application functions. Right, so you get better scalability, more resource utilization, etcetera, etcetera. The second thing it does is because some of the software defined data center functions are done in the smart make um it gets accelerated as well. Because it takes advantage of the special accelerators that are there security functions, manageability functions, networking functions etcetera, etcetera. So that's that what you're alluding to is overall it's the v sphere, the sX Hyper Visor complimentary itself. That's moving into the specialized processors which allows the hyper Visor will be built into these smart mix, which means the main CPU can be an intel. CPU can be an M D C P. You can be an arm. CPU can be whatever it is you want in the future. So truly enables Monte CPU heterogeneous computing. So that's that's why this is exciting. And of course because it is the sphere, it can happen in the data centers, it can happen in Carlos. It can happen in Sovereign clouds. It can happen in the public clouds all over a period of time. And >>and potentially the Edge I would presume in the future. >>Sorry. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, the Edge is one of the most important places that will happen because we need these low latency applications such as in the telco case for example, right. Or we need these applications that have specialized processing the required. If you're setting up a cashier less store and you need to process and you need a lot of influence engines. So, Monterey helps with all of those things. >>I want to make sure our audience understands. It's because the software defined data center was awesome but but it also created waste in the sense that you have all these offload functions in storage and networking and security running on on x 86 processors which may not be the most efficient way. So emerging architectures around arm might be less expensive, maybe more cost effective, lower power. Uh maybe they do memory management differently. So there are these offload use cases. But as well you we talked about the edge there could be a lot of edge use cases that or whatever whether it's arm or in video etcetera. So now you're driving that optionality for customers so you can support more workloads of the future. >>Yeah, so this is exactly if you think about in europe when you talked about the embers evolution, the inverse core DNA has always been to master hydrogen. Itty right. And what we're seeing is this world of heterogeneous hardware coming alive. Right. You talked about Professor hydrogen Itty including GPU chips and so on. There is a memory architecture heterogeneous, their storage architecture heterogeneous. And so the idea is that regardless of what you use, how do you provide the best workload platform and a consistent way of managing all of these things and reducing the complexity while gaining the efficiency benefits and the other benefits that you talked about. >>So speaking of geniality that brings me to Tansu, you know early on people thought, oh wow containers, that's gonna kill VM where this is the opposite happened. You guys leaned in as as you have as a sign of great leadership these days. You don't get defensive, you just, you know, get the trend is your friend, as they say, give us the update on on Tan xue. Why is that so important to the future? >>Yeah. So if you look at any enterprises portfolio right, they are looking at it and saying look, there's a whole set of applications that I need to modernize. Now. The question becomes how do you modernize these applications in a way that it is essentially done with these microservices architectures and so on and so forth. In that context, how do I maximize the developer productivity and provide a great developer experience because there is not enough developers in the world to modernize every application that that's in every enterprise. Right. So, Tan xue is our answer to help enterprises modernize their applications and deliver in a way that the developed makes the developers very productive on the cloud of their choice. So that is really the strategic intent of Tancill and the core building block for Tan xue is of course kubernetes as you well know, Kubernetes has become the common infrastructure abstraction across clouds. So if you want portability for traditional VM based applications, he used this fear, if you want portability for traditional for containerized microservices applications, you assume kubernetes, that's how companies companies are thinking about it. And so that's the first thing that we did now. The second is you've got developers building applications all over the place. So now, just like you used to have physical server sprawl and now and then VM sprawl these days you have cluster sprawl, kubernetes, cluster sprawl and tons of mission control affects as a multi cloud, multi cluster kubernetes control plan works on the chaos and everything else that some of the Sun. The third point of Tanzania is the developer experience and we have introduced Andrew application platform, which is really focused on delivering a great developer experience on top of any Cuban Aires. So that's really how we're building out the towns of portfolio. And then of course we got Spring and uh as you well know a majority of enterprise applications today are java and if you want to modernize java, you use spring boot and so we had tremendous success with our uh spring boot technology and our startup, Springdale Ohio capabilities and so on and so forth. So that's the entirety of the towns of portfolio. It's multi cloud, it's kubernetes agnostic. Of course it runs great on this fear but it's really the approach making developers productive in the enterprise >>awesome. Thank you for that. I know we're tight on time but it's like speed dating with you raghu. So I'm gonna go on to another topic. Really important topic of security, you've made obviously some big acquisitions, there are things like carbon black, you've got a lot of stuff going on with, with, with endpoint, with end user computing, I'm first interested in sort of how you organize it looks like you're putting security and the networking piece together and then what's your swim lane? It seems like you're, you're focused obviously on your infrastructure. You're not trying to be all things to all people. Help us understand your strategy in that regard. >>Yeah, I mean security is a massive space, Right? And you covered very well. Hundreds and thousands of security problems that customers want to be solving. What we are focused on is how do we simplify the security problem for the customers? And we're doing it through three wells. The first one is we are baking security into the platforms that customers used ones. Right. But there are more obvious fear our workspace one, our container platform etcetera, etcetera. Right? Cloud platforms. So that's the first thing that we're doing. The second is we are putting um, bringing together, we're taking an end to end view of security, which is everything from an end user connecting from home to the corporate network or the sassy, sassy applications to the Windows devices they are using to the data center applications they're using to the club. Right? So we're taking a holistic view of security. So which means we want to combine our network security assets with our endpoint security assets with our workload security assets. That is why we bought all of those things together under one roof. And the third is we are instrumental in all of these and collecting signals from all of these and pulling it into the cloud and turning security into a machine learning and the data problem, right? And that is where the problem. Black cloud comes in and by doing that, we are able to provide a holistic view of where uh customer security posture, right? And these sensors can be on BMR platforms, on non BMR platforms etcetera. And so so that's really how we are approaching it. I mean there's the emerging industry term for a policy XDR. You might follow that. So that's really what we're trying to do. >>Outstanding. Last question and I know, I know we got to go. You mentioned the spin that's happening in november. That's an exciting time for a lot of reasons. I think the ecosystem, you know, emphasizing your independence but also gives you control of your balance sheet, regaining control of your balance sheet, tongue in cheek there. But it's important because all this, this cloud build out this multi cloud, exposing the primitives, leveraging the primitives and the A. P. I. S. Of these clouds making them identical across all these estates. That's not trivial and you're obviously gonna need resources to do that. So maybe you can talk about that and how you see the future playing out organic inorganic, maybe a little lemon A in there. What's your approach? How are you thinking about that? >>Yeah. So we are very excited with the impending spain, which like you said is on track to happen early november. Um and if you think about the spin, there are three aspects that we are excited about. The first aspect is uh we have a great relationship with Dell Tech, the company right. What we have done is we have codified that into a framework agreement that covers the gold market and technology collaboration and we are super excited by that and that baselines against what we do today and then as incentives on both sides to continue to grow that tremendously. So we're gonna continue being, doing that and that's going to continue being a great partner at the same time. From a partnership point of view, is truly going to be a Switzerland of the industry. So previously companies that were otherwise a little bit more competitive with dull now no longer have that reservation in partnering very deeply with us. I'm totally, like you said from a capital structure point of view, it gives us the flexibility to use to do em in a should we decide to do so in the future right? And use both equity and cash for them in a so so that's the capital structure, flexibility, the Switzerland positioning and the continuing great relationship with dull Those are the benefits of the spin >>love and the partner ecosystem has always been a source of, of innovation and it's a big part of the flywheel, the power of many versus the resources of one Ragu, Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Best of luck. We're really excited for you and for the future of VM ware. >>Thank you and thanks for all the great work that you do and look forward to continuing to read your great research, >>appreciate that. And thank you for >>watching the cubes, continuous >>Coverage of VM World 2021. Keep it right there. >>Thank you. Mhm. Yeah.

>>Mhm Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of 80 of his public sector summit live for two days in D. C. In person. CuBA's here is an expo floor that people face to face down here. Adriana guest co founder and Ceo of Girls in tech cube alumni friend of the cube. We've known her for a long time. Watch their success really making an impact. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Wonderful to see you, john, thanks so much for having me. >>You know, one of the things that Sandy carter talks about matt max Peter talks about all of the Amazonian leadership that's about is skills training. Okay, this is a big deal. Okay, so getting talented to the industry is critical and also diversity and women attacking underrepresented minority groups are key. This has been a look at constant focus, you've been successful and and convincing folks about tech and working hard, what's the update, >>wow. So the reason why we're here, not only as Sandy carter are amazing chairman of the board of six plus years, but I heard we heard so many pain points from several of our partners as well as our good friends over at the White House and the Department of State and many other public sector agencies that there is a deficit. It's been very difficult to find diverse groups of talent and talent period to join their companies and populate those important I. T. Jobs stem jobs, whether it's very very technical or more data driven or more sort of design focus, product development focus across the board it's been very hard for them to find talent for those jobs. So girls in tech has partnered with AWS to create an initiative called the next generation public sector leaders and really focusing on creating awareness on career development opportunities for up and coming talent diverse talent that is curious and interested in job opportunities and educational opportunities within the public sector. So it has multi tiers, right? And it's something that we've devised based on the need and based on a lot of data and a lot of interviews from a lot of our partners and within the A. P. N. Network and we're doing a mentorship program which is a six month long program matching these amazing public sector executives, really accomplished leaders as well as our members from around the world um to connect and expose them and provide that nurturing, fostering mentality so that they can succeed in their careers. So >>eight of us getting behind this mission. Yes. And public sector is really fast growing changing. You start to see a lot of public private partnerships go on. So not just the old school public sector business, I mean the pandemic has shown the impact of society. So what does that do for the melting pot of talent out there? Have you seen anything out there? And how does that relate to this? Is that helped you at all or what's that does that mean for the mission? >>So there is a melting pot of talent. I just think we need to do a better job of creating awareness and really knowing where that talent lives. Like what are the blogs that they read? What are the videos that they watch and listen to? Where are they? Right. And we need to do the hard work and investigating and understanding like taking a more empathetic approach to really finding out what um how we can access them what their needs are. What are the things that interest piqued their interest within these jobs within the public sector um And customize it and market it so that they'll be eager and excited. Um And it would be more appealing to them. >>So I looked at the press release I just want to get your reaction to something you got evening with the experts. It's an in person event. >>Yes. When >>is that? Is that here is that going to be on your own event? What's that about? >>All the events that are going to be in person? Will be in D. C. Um There will be some virtual events as well. Our mentorship program is all virtual six month long program with curriculum and matchmaking on a platform that we use the evening with the experts which is a panel discussion with experts from a A. W. S. And beyond the A. P. N. Network. We'll talk about challenges and technology opportunities within a career development and also jobs. Um Well do recruitment like on the fly type of activities as well. Speed and speed interviewing, speed networking? Um We also have a few other programs, our webinar which is about the next gen public sector opportunities and this is more about the challenges that people face that companies face and the new technologies that will be launched very soon. And we're doing a widget on our jobs board to highlight the new career opportunity, new job opportunities from all of the public sector partners. We work with >>a very comprehensive, >>It's very comprehensive on the six >>month guided mentorship program. How does someone get involved in applications? How what's that going on there? >>It will be an application process and we will promote it to anyone who signs up to our newsletter. So go to Girls in tech dot org. Sign up for our newsletter and we will be posting and sharing more information on how people get involved. But we'll definitely send custom uh E. D. M essentially promoting to the people who are here at the conference and also through our Girls in tech D. C. Chapter as well. >>So I have to ask you, I know you've been really busy, been very successful. You've been out and about what's the trend line looked like? Well >>not for the last few years though, >>you've >>been in lockdown now. >>You've been working hard, you know have not not about now. You >>are not >>about what's the temperature like now in terms of the pulse of the industry relative to progress, what's what's what are you finding, what's the current situation >>progress for women in tech in the industry. So Since I started girls in tech in 2007, we've made A lot of progress, I would say it's a lot slower than I thought it would be, but you do see more and more women and people representing bipac actually apply for those jobs. We it is astronomically different than 2006, when I started in my first startup and there's a lot more mentorship, There are a lot more organizations out there that companies are more accountable with the R. G. Groups and they're changing their policies, are changing their training programs are having more off sites, there's now technologies that focus on tracking uh productivity and happiness of employees so that like all of that did not exist or I should say none of that existed, you know? And so we worked hard, we've worked hard, but it takes a village, it takes a lot of different people to create that change. And now one of girls in text mission is not just providing that education that community, that mentorship, we want to get the corporate involved, we want to teach the corporate about D and I training the importance of diversity, different tactics to recruit uh so on and so forth. And and it's been so amazing, so inspirational, I love, I started working more in partnerships and having our monthly calls with partners because I love it. I love collaborating to >>recruit good peer group around you to accelerate and create more territory of awareness and impact more people can get their hands involved. And I think to me that's what I think you're starting to see that with podcasts and media people are starting to go direct to tell their story, apps are out there now as you mentioned. So, but I feel like we're on a crossover point coming soon, totally thinks it's different. Um, but it's still a >>lot more work to do a lot more. We just got the service. I know, I know you've just scratched the surface, but we're so excited to be here. Aws is a huge supporter thanks to Sandy carter and her team. Um, it's been an amazing experience. >>Sandy's got great vision, she takes risks. So she's actually got the Amazonian concept of experiment, try something double down if it works and that's great to see that you guys have extended that relationship with, with her and the team. I like this idea of the fellowship cohort model of the or that program, you have the mentorship program. I think that's super cool. Um, that's something I think will be very successful. >>Uh, it's been successful so far. We typically over sell our mentorship are mentee spots. Uh, we only have 500 spots and last one we had over 2300 like a crazy amount, so we know that our members are really hungry for it around the world. And we know it will just be as just as popular for the public sector. So >>what's next for you? What's the vision? What's the next step was events are coming back in person? We're here in person. >>Yeah, there's just so much going on. I wish I could clone myself and we're busting at the seams. And I think the things that are really exciting to me are being able to produce our programs internationally, specifically in developing countries. So we're working um we haven't made an official announcement yet or anything, but we are working on expanding in african countries with Aws. They're doing some efforts and making some movements there. So places like Cameroon Ghana Nigeria Egypt. Uh we are looking to create chapters there for Girls in Tech and then expand our programming. Uh we're also, as mentioned earlier, we're working a lot with corporations to provide DNA training. So, training about policies, Inclusive leadership. Making sure they have the tools and policies to succeed and for their employees to feel comfortable, safe and productive in their work environment >>is great to see you. Congratulations Girls in tech dot org. Yes. Is the U. R. L. Check it out a great mission, very successful. Making progress any stats you can throw out there, you can share. >>Yeah, of course, you >>wrap it up. >>Yeah. So right now, girls in tech has 58 active chapters in 38 countries with over 70,000 active members. And by the end of the year we will have close to 100 active members. So hopefully we'll see you next year and that number will double or triple sign >>up. Tell him johN sent, you know, don't say that because you won't get no. Great to see you. >>Thank you. Nice to see you too. Thanks so >>much, john. Great to have you on cube coverage here at AWS public Sector summit in Washington, D. C. Is a live event. Were face to face. We had some remote guests. It's a hybrid event. Everything is being streamed. I'm john Kerry with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm

>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >> Throughout the pre-vaccine COVID era, IT buyers indicated that budget constraints would constrict 2020 spending by roughly 5 percent relative to 2019 levels. But the forced march to digital, combined with increased cyber threats, created a modernization mandate that powered Q4 spending last year and this momentum has carried through to 2021. However, COVID variants have delayed return to work and business travel plans and as such our current forecast for global IT spending remains strong at 6 to 7 percent but slightly down from previous estimates. Notably, CIOs and IT buyers expect a 7 to 8 percent increase in 2022 spending, reflecting investments in hybrid strategies in a continued belief that technology remains the underpinning of competitive advantage in the coming decade. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll share the latest results of ETR's macro spending survey and update you in industry and sector spending patterns. First, let's summarize the key take-aways from ETR's latest demand-side survey. Based on ETR's latest survey. Currently with 869 responses as shown here at the bottom, we expect a slight pull-back in spending expectations from CIOs and IT buyers to roughly 6 to 7 percent, down from 7 to 8 percent earlier this year. This reflects caution over return to office strategies but buyers continue to expect robust spending as we said into next year as they support hybrid models, modernize their HQ infrastructure and continue to move forward on digital transformation initiatives. Cyber security and cloud remain the top 2 priorities with data initiatives overtaking collaboration and productivity on the priority list. Although all of these remain strong. Organizations now expect around 44 percent of employees to be working in a hybrid model over the long-term with 37 percent currently working in a hybrid fashion. Now here's the data behind the revised projections it compares the spending growth expectations from the March, June, and September 21 surveys. This by no means is a radical change as you can see from the downward trajectory of the yellow bar. It reflects the reality of the continued injection of uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Organizations are dealing with the reality and remaining flexible with regard to strategies and spending outlook, but the 2022 bar on the far-right at 7 and a half percent stands out in its telling as buyers expect spending levels in 22 to outpace historical norms by quite a large margin. Now as shown here, the spending compression is an across the board trend. Only Latin America, industrial materials manufacturing, and retail consumer show an uptick from previous surveys. With non-profits, education, energy, and APAC showing the steepest declines. But the longer term spending outlook remains robust across the boards. This chart shows that generally the outlook for 2022 spending is strong with retail consumer and government leading the charge. Only the historically cautious education sector stands out as softer, but even so its spending outlook is comparable to historical norms. Now be careful putting too much emphasis, by the way, on Latin America as the ends are small as ETR noted here. Now let's take a look at the sector analysis. This picture has been amazingly consistent. ETR asks respondents to rate their spending priorities and the chart shows the ratings from highest to lowest priority for the top technology sectors. Now this data only shows the top 7 sectors, so even though for instance RPA appears down the list, it remains one of the highest in the survey. In fact, although we are not showing this data, we went in and looked at this. Machine learning, containers, cloud, and RPA remain the top 4 areas from a net score or spending momentum standpoint. Well above the 40 percent mark we talk about all the time. Back to the priorities we asked the CIOs. Cyber security is noticeably above the rest with cloud migration remaining very strong. The data sector i.e. analytics and data warehousing have overtaken collaboration and productivity as priorities. However, collaboration remains strong as do networking, AI, and RPA. Now when we dig into some of these sectors to see which vendors are showing spending momentum, let's take a look. In addition to the large cloud players, especially AWS and Microsoft, we saw that snowflake continued to hover at around 80 percent net score level. Some others that we haven't cited as much recently are popping up either with spending momentum, or showing a larger presence in the market or both within these sectors. Toughtsbot has popped up now this AI specialist has shown up every now and then in the survey but they seem to be getting traction in the data set and they have an elevated net score. Datadog also stood out as did Cockroach Labs and Databricks is starting to show some strength even though they have shown strength in past surveys, they're starting to show larger presence in the survey. Now Networking Arista who has always had strong momentum shows continued strong momentum. And Maraki which has a large presence in the data set, is also notable. Not as high, but as a much larger share. Monday.com is also hitting the radar in collaboration and Twilio is popping up as well. Let's take a look at the return to office trends and the actions organizations have taken as a result of COVID and see how that's changed over time. This data shows the time series going back to the June 2020 survey. Let's start with the percent of organizations with employees working from home and you'll note that has ticked up since June and is now back up to 75 percent. And you can see the noticeable drop in the percentage of companies that have employees fully returning to the office. Also, more organizations are canceling business trips. So these are some of the factors that contribute to the slightly more cautious spending outlook that we're reporting here. Now continuing on the chart even though layoffs are trending downward, it's no surprise given the skill shortage you see a slight uptick in hiring freezes and a downtick in new hiring. New IT deployment freezes they remain low but there is a slight down tick in accelerating new IT deployments. So look, these are not radical changes, but they do reflect the on-going day-by-day, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter adjustments that we've seen companies make throughout the COVID era. And it underscores the need for organizations to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and responsive to change. What does that mean? It means modernizing infrastructure and apps, better leveraging data, applying AI, and taking care of governance, compliance, and security. And CIOs expect these spending priorities to continue for the foreseeable future, at least for the next 15 months. Now as we've declared in previous episodes, every CEO, CXO, corner office, boards of directors, they're trying to get hybrid right. Interestingly, we see some companies mandating a return to work. We've seen this with some of the Wall Street firms, for example, but tech is a leading example of advocating for remote or hybrid work. To it, Michael Dell's public posture that he's wide-open for remote and, or hybrid work and Frank Slootman has moved Snowflakes' executive offices to Bozeman, Montana reflecting his sentiment that the days of big corporate towers are over. And why not? Productivity is through the roof, and the cost savings from working remotely can be enormous. This chart shows data back to the December 2020 survey. And we've seen a steady decline in remote work, but it's still the dominant model of 53 percent of the work force. In other words, people are starting to come back to office but still very, very high remote. Now jump to the third set of bars. And organizations expect a 39 percent of employees to be working remotely in 6 months. Now jump back to the second set of bars, 37 percent of employees are currently working in a hybrid model and that's up from 33 percent in June. Now jump to the fourth set of bars and the expectation is around 44 percent will be working in a hybrid model within the next 6 months. Organizations expect remote workers to settle in and level around 30 percent. Now that's down from previous highs of 35 percent last December but it's up significantly from the historical average of 15 to 16 percent. And the expectation as you can see in the last set of bars is that more than 40 percent of employees will be working in a hybrid model, on a permanent basis. So look, the world is going hybrid. It's the future and that requires technology investments to support new ways to work. And that's one main reason why we see the spending momentum continuing into 2022. So let's drill a little bit into what this means. In order words, how are organizations thinking about their hybrid models. This chart shows the responses from the June and September surveys when ETR began asking organizations to describe their hybrid approaches in more detail. The dominant model, around 50 percent of organizations say time will be split between remote and required on-site days. This is where leaders will ask employees to come to the office at designated times for whiteboard sessions, or planning meetings, et cetera. So hybrid is the dominant model. Then we see a big drop to primarily on-site with exceptions as needed and a low single digit number of organizations with no hybrid option. So the message is clear: Hybrid is the way forward and IT infrastructure will evolve to support these models and this bodes well for tech spending in our view. It speaks to continued cyber investments, leverage the cloud for flexible capacity shoring up on-prem infrastructure as we now see more vendors offering flexible capacity on-prem. Modernizing applications, building layers with micro-services and kubernetes that can actually connect to the cloud or assist in moving workloads, evolving the network architecture, flattening that out we hear a lot of talk about the edge, driving automation, and new ways to work and putting data at the core of digital business strategies. These are the technology approaches that organizations are tapping to deal with the changing dynamics of the pandemic, and adapting to new business models. Across the board, technology has become one of the most important enablers for competitiveness ain the coming decade and we expect that momentum to continue until some exogenous factors derail the spending trend. At the moment, that risk doesn't appear to be a slow-down in an economic recovery, although we continue to watch uncertainties around interest rates, inflation, tax policy, and global economic tensions, especially with China. And as always, we'll be here to update you as the data changes. Okay we're going to leave it there for now, remember these episodes are all available as podcasts you just got to search "breaking analysis podcasts" and we publish each week on wikibon.com and silliconeggle.com. You can connect with me on twitter @Devalante or email me at david.valante@silliconeggle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Valante for the Cube insights powered by ETR, be well, and we'll see you next time. (music)