>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.

(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event. I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick. Jeff, this is a really interesting event. The first time we've been here with The Cube, and one of the first things I said to you this morning was "Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as "farm to fork, right, farm to table." But it's really interesting mix of investors here, people that are very educated in food and agriculture and one of the things they're focused on is connecting people who are feeding the world, billions and billions of people, with the people who are changing the world through technologies. And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm which I found really interesting. >> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl and we were talking about the Conference. I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up? "Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?" But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer and what they want to eat, like everything else, is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows is driving now what the food producers have to create. And what's interesting is they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications of those decisions upstream and downstream. And so that's a big topic of the theme here. The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors: Yamaha is here >> Yes. >> And one of the main sponsors. Google is here as one of the main sponsors. And we just had one of the opening keynotes from one of the guys from Google talking about how they've taken really just the task of feeding the employees to a much greater responsibility in both what people eat, how it gets produced, and really more sustainable longterm food kind of as a circle he called it. So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited. We've got Deans from a lot of big schools, we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha. I'm really curious to find out what they're doing in this space. And it's fun to get, you know, out of the tech infrastructure space to see what's really happening on the front lines. I really want to get into edge computing, I really want to get into cloud, data, you know, all of the themes that we follow over and over and over again, but now a real specific application. And doing some of the research, you know, we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years and we're not growing any more land. So how are those challenges being addressed with technology? How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems? And then how are the consumer driven prioritization impacting all of this? So it should be a great day. >> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum of guests on the show today. And we think of food and agriculture as one of the largest industries globally and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility feeding billions of people in a very short period of time. Having to deal with environmental sustainability, we're going to be talking about that on the program today, climate change, and also the consumer. But there's tremendous potential for big data and IOT and analytics to improve farming efficiencies from planting to weeding to fertilizing to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability. There's, you know, opportunities for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines, as well as robotics and automation. We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics, who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and I'm really curious to see how these, from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors, how Venture Capital is really seeing big data as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary, for the entire food supply, the food chain. >> Right, right. And another topic that's come up is really transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of where their food comes from, how it was raised, but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes, there's no perfect solution, right? There's always trade offs. So how are people creating values, making trade offs based on those values, and how are the food producers now being able to deliver to those values? So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day. We're going to go wall to wall. We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests, a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in. And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited. >> Alright. >> A lot of great topics. >> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special coverage of Sapphire Now we're here in Palo Alto. Sapphire now SAPs premier conference in Orlando. We are in Palo Alto, we have folks on the ground in Orlando. Special three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Taking you through all the action from our new studio in Palo Alto, 4,500 square feet. Our chance to cover events when we can't get there in person we certainly can cover it from here. And that's what we're going to be doing for the next three days; we're going to have stories on the ground, no story is too small. We're going to chase 'em all down. We have people calling in, we have folks on the ground that'll be Skyping in, calling in, whatever it takes to get the story out to you, we're going to do it and, certainly, expert coverage from inside the studio here. We got George Gilbert from Wikibon and a variety of folks who did not make it to Orlando will be coming into Palo Alto to sit down and talk with us. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Jeff Frick. Jeff, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll cover from our studio, we'll go to Orlando virtually we got the Twitter hashtag, Sapphirenow, we're on that. We have folks on the ground, a lot of great news coming out of Sapphire. >> What do ya think? I mean, you were just as Dell EMC World last week and the story was all about, kind of, hybrid cloud and customer choice and it sounds like that's a recurring theme here at SAP, where they've got a lot of cloud options based on what their customer wants to do. >> I mean, if you, I mean this sounds really bad to say for someone who follows the tech industry but I just think this digital transformation thing is just over-played. But it's the, it's the Groundhog's Day moment. The movie just keeps replaying itself. Digital transformation, digital transformation, and, again, just like every other commerce, like Dell EMC World and every other one, digitally transforming your business is the theme. Little bit played, I would say business transformation is, I would say, the next chapter of what's happening and what you see from these shows. Specifically, at Dell EMC World, US ServiceNow, OpenStack, all the different events, Red Hat's been the one we been going to this past couple weeks is the business impact of the technology and SAP highlights that with their results and their keynotes in the news letter drops today, which is, look it, they have been doing SAP for all the top companies powering with SAP. As in Oracle. But now the customers want to go beyond the legacy SAP. And this has been a challenge for SAP over the past five years. They've had all the right messaging, digital dashboards, real time for business, all there. But the problem was they were missing a big piece of it. That is a cloud native and really aligning with the explosive growth of cloud computing, cloud native. Which is the new application developer. This new class of developer is emerging and that's different than the in-house SAP guys, by the way, which is still a massive market. >> Sure. >> That's the big trend. And of course, machine learning, AI, the kinds of design tooling that you'd expect to see, they're calling that Leonardo. >> I think it really shows the power of the consumer and the impact that the big public clouds have had on the marketplace, right? With Google, and with Amazon, especially Microsoft, as well, coming into play. And I think it's, what's interesting on the SAP tact is they have their own cloud. But now they've, you know, are very aggressively following up on an earlier announcement at Google Cloud Platform Show. With more announcements at this show and then they continue to strengthen their relationship with Amazon. So, it's a pretty interesting place, if you're an SAP customer, really having options around where, what cloud and what cloud deployment is really no longer an argument. You've got a lot of options at SAP, very different than Oracle, which is still pretty much exclusively Oracle on the Oracle cloud. Very different kind of a tact. >> Yeah and just reading the hard news from from hitting the ground today down in Orlando is the key points, I'll just summarize it real quick. Expanded SAP Leonardo, Digital Innovation System, SAP Google Expand the Strategic Partnership, SAP Cloud Platform accelerates adoption and proves choice advances consumption for customers. That, essentially, is it. And there's a lot of other subtext going on on Enterprise Cloud, a lot of other massive pockets. But in terms of top-level news, it's Leonardo, okay? Leonardo Da Vinci, dead, creative genius. Okay? But that is all about providing the tools for business to be successful in a digital world. But to me, the big story, Jeff, is the transformation of what used to be called HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. This is their platform as a service bet around winning the new developers, the cloud native. Last year at Sapphire, we actually had theCUBE on the ground they announced a deal with Apple computer around iOS and developers. That, now, has chip as a general availability so you're seeing SAP bringing two worlds together. The Cloud Native World, which they never played in much to the SAP Eco System, which is flush with cash. There's a ton of money to be made in that world. The install base is massive, now you have Cloud-Computing Hybrid Cloud with the HANA Cloud Platform, I mean the SAP Cloud Platform to bring that in. Again, I still can't even get it right. >> And so, let's just break it down as simply as you can, John. Why do they change the name? And what exactly do they have today? >> Well, here's the first of all problem. I'm so used to saying HANA because they have been branding HANA on >> They been bangin' HANA for the decade, or forever. >> It's just like, in my brain. I just can't get it out. SAP HANA, so anytime, and they actually called it HANA Cloud Platform before. >> Right, right. >> But HANA is such a massive set of capabilities that they really wanted to break out the platform as a service, which is the Cloud Native play, where all the action is for developers. From HANA, a viable product that they have that everyone's using. So, they have two clouds that we can say. SAP Cloud Platform, that's in Cloud Native, and then, HANA Enterprise Cloud. One's a delivery mechanism and one's a developer environment; it's the way I like to think about it. I'm a HANA customer, I'm going to need Enterprise Cloud to take my HANA solution and extend it up with self-service or provisioning, some partnership with AWS Google and the different clouds, getting my legacy HANA Enterprise software to be cloud enabled. That's HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP Cloud Platforms for folks who don't, who like DevOps, the Cloud Native world that we cover deeply. >> Okay, and then, how do you look at the kind of Google partnership, Google Cloud Platform versus AWS partnership. SAP's goin' dual-track, is it just simply to have choice based on what their customers, are they fundamentally different relationships? How do you read that? >> This is where I think SAP's got genius going on. But if they might screw it up because they can't get out of their own way. >> Jeff: Can't use genius anymore, we've had enough geniuses. >> So, so, this could be a brilliant strike of move for SAP. I think it's a brilliant move in the way they're playing it out. But, again, like I said, SAP, they might not be able to get out of their own way. That's going to be their issue. But from a functionality standpoint, this multi-cloud opportunity; they've been with Amazon for many many years. They announced a partnership with Google which is just kind of toe in the water. That's tryin' to advance pretty quickly. Not a lot of meat on the bone there. And Azure relationships. So, SAP wants to put their cloud platform, that platform as a service, in all the different major clouds so that their legacy can work on pram and in whichever cloud the customer chooses. >> Yeah, I think there is, >> I think, that is a multi-cloud strategy that is viable for SAP. Unlike, say, Oracle, which isn't multi-cloud, it's Oracle Cloud. >> Right, right, right. >> So, you know the SAP Oracle, you know, head-to-head thing has been kind of, like, taking completely different paths. Someone will be right. >> Right. But I think there's more meat on the bone with the Google thing than, maybe, maybe we know of, or are aware of, or whatever. I mean, Burnt did come and get in the keynote with Diane Greene at Google Cloud Platform. And, you know, I think it's relatively significant. What'll be interesting to see how it shapes out and, again, what are the customer choices that are going to drive them to Amazon or to SB Cloud or to the Google cloud. I guess at the end of the day it's about choice and I know that was a big theme at Dell EMC World. Is that everyone has to cater to the choice of the customer or else it's just too easy for them to flip a lot of these other clouds. >> I mean, when I say, "not ready for primetime," I mean, Google's got a lot of work to do. SAP as a company is not as far down the road with Google as they are with Amazon and Azure, just to make my point clear. >> Okay. >> But the do have our announcing additional certifications of the coinnovation between SAP and Google. Between SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Platform. IOT, machine learning, they certified SAP NetWeaver in a variety of S4 HANA, business warehousing; essentially more market place to accelerate the digital transformation. And, again, this is all about SAP co-locating in Google. >> Right, right. >> If a customer wants to take advantage of TensorFlow and all the goodness of, say, Google. That's a good move for SAP and, again, I think this is a brilliant strategy for SAP if they don't screw it up. >> Right, right. And potentially, that's the bridge to, like you said, it's been a little bit of Groundhog Day with cloud, cloud, cloud. But what's really the theme of 2017 is AI machine learning and it's an interesting bridge with Google Cloud, to their TensorFlow as another way to bring AI machine learning into the application learning into the application. >> So, Jeff, we've been covering a lot of events. One comment, I will say, is that SAP always has great messaging. >> I got to say, because we've been covering out eighth year covering Sapphire Now. We've only missed, like, two years over that time span. It's a lot like Oracle on the sense that it's a very business oriented event, but they have good pulse. Bill McDermott, great communicator, great customer-focused person. Always has his hand on the pulse. They have great messaging. And they tend to pick the right waves. And they've had some false starts with cloud, they've bought, had some acquisitions, things been cobbled together, but they've never wavered from their mission. And the mission has always been powering the speed of business, great software solutions. The issue is, they're moving off of SAP to new cloud solutions, so SAP is taking a proactive strike to say, look here, we can play in the cloud, therefore this multi-cloud game is critical for the growth of SAP, in my opinion. >> How much of the SAP in cloud will be new greenfield opportunities, or people want the flexibility, and a lot of the attributes of cloud versus, they're not migrating old R3 instances into the cloud. I mean, this is, I would assume, mainly new greenfield opportunities. >> Well, I think it's both. I mean, I think you have greenfield developers basically that are being hired by their customers to build apps, top line driven apps, and also, you know, some consolidation apps. But mainly, you know, their customers are hiring developers. Hey, we need a mobile app for our business, so you need to have data, you need to have some domain expertise. But at the end of the day, the system of records probably stored in some SAP system somewhere. So what they're trying to do is decouple the dependency between that developer, but still use SAP, but and offer an extension of SAP. It really is an opportunity, in my mind, for that to happen, and also partners. Look at Accenture, Capgemini, all these different partners. They are poised to create some great value and make some cash along the way. Remember the minicomputer boom. People who lined their pockets with cash were the integrators. The large global system integrators. So I think that, and the channel partners are going to have a great opportunity to take advantage of preexisting legacy accounts and to grow them further. >> Well, they certainly have a giant ecosystem. There's no doubt about it. It's one of the startup challenges that, new company starters to build that ecosystem. I mean, they have a giant ecosystem. So, what are you looking for this week besides the obvious announcement? And kind of tells that you want to see to let you know that SAP continues to be on track and move with the shifting tides of the market trends? >> Well do me, I'm looking at the multi-cloud story. It's a good story. Not sure how baked it is, but from a story standpoint, I really like it. I think that whoever can really crack the code on multi-cloud in a viable way is going to be a winner. So to me, I'm going to be looking heavily at the multi-cloud stuff coming out of Orlando. I'm interested to see how the developer traction pans out. I'm really interested in following up on the Apple relationship and see how that pans out. And then ultimately, how the rest of SAP can transform as a business. Because SAP tends to have a lot of buzzwords, a lot of word salad, not a lot of, you know, breaking it down and orchestrating. So to me, SAP, where I'm critical of them is, they kind of can't get out of their own way, Jeff. So, sometimes they kind of get caught in that old world thinking when the world is moving very very fast. Look at Amazon Web Services, you look at what Google's doing, you look at where Vmware is changing. Vmware started Pat Gelsinger. He was in the dumps in 2016, now he's flying high. He went from almost being fired, stock had a 52 week low, to them soaring. They have a market cap that's greater than HPE. So these old incumbent like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant, and get real. And if they can't show the proof points with customer wins and partners, and multi-cloud, then they're going to be on shaky ground. So that's what I'm looking for. >> Jeff: All right, so should be a good week. I'm looking forward to it. >> Okay, we are here in the Palo Alto studio, our new 4,500 square foot operation. We can do coverage here, and then have on the ground coverage of which we will be doing all week Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for our SAP Sapphire Now. We've got great guests coming in, great editorial coverage. I want to thank our sponsors, SAP, for, you know, allowing us to do this and continuing theCUBE tradition at Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. More coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. Today we're going to have a CUBE conversation really about this kind of ongoing evolution of cloud, and it was a huge deal, and AWS came on the scene and really launched kind of the public cloud evolution, which not only was a different technology stack, but really a different way to think about things, a different way to think about workloads. And that has evolved to hybrid cloud and multicloud, and it just continues to evolve over time. So we're going to get some of the experts in from IBM to talk about their perspective and what they're doing all about it. So we're excited to invite our next guest. She is Briana Frank. She's the director of product management for IBM. Briana, good to see you. Where are you joining us from today? >> I am joining you from Wake Forest, North Carolina. And as you can see, I'm from my home office, but always busy working and fun doing things in the cloud and thinking about new technologies even when we're at home. >> Excellent. And also joining us, many-time CUBE alumni Jason McGee, IBM fellow, vice president and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform. Jason, great to see you again. I looked it up before we turned on the cameras. I think you've been on, like, eight times. So you're definitely a VIP in the CUBE alumni world. Where are you joining us from today? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm in Apex, which is outside of Raleigh, and great to be here again. It's always fun to talk to you guys. It's been a little while, but great to be back. >> Yeah, so let's just jump into it, right? You've all seen the memes revolving around what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CIO, or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. It's really been an interesting time, right? It was kind of a light switch moment in mid-March. And then people are saying, you know, years and years of digital transformation kind of suddenly compressed into this light switch moment. But now we're months and months and months later, we're in October, and it's clear that this is not just a a one-time fix and wait till we all go back to work. This is going to continue for a while. And cloud is such a huge enabler. Had this happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the ability for information workers, like the businesses that we're in, would've been much more difficult. So acknowledging that there's still a lot of people hurting, a lot, hospitality industry, restaurant industry, sports places that aggregate people, concerts. We're fortunate we're in the information industry. And I'd just love to get your perspective, Jason, on cloud as an enabling platform and really an enabling way of thinking about things that have made this transition a little bit less painful than it otherwise would've been. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Jeff, and I think on one hand it's been pretty amazing to see how much our industry in technology and IT has been able to kind of adapt to COVID, adapt to working at home, adapt to these kinds of changing models. But what's been really interesting is as someone who spends all their time thinking about cloud every day, it's been really incredible to see how much it's accelerated people's adoption of cloud. Like, obviously everyone was leveraging cloud. They had plans to move more and more workloads to cloud. But I think over the last six months we've really seen a massive acceleration, and I also think kind of a mindset shift that maybe before there was some hesitation and conversation about what things move to cloud and what things don't, and that seems to have kind of gone away, and everyone's like, this is the model that not only will carry us through moments like this, but we have newfound confidence that it's the right model for us to move the majority of our businesses to. >> Right. >> So really massive acceleration. >> Massive acceleration. And Briana, get your take, 'cause you're a product manager, so you're in the weeds on the speeds and feeds and the features and functions. Cloud as a concept sounds kind of simple, but the execution is not so simple. And we've seen kind of this morphing from moving your test dev maybe to a public cloud, IBM has a cloud, to there's some stuff that just can't go on the cloud or shouldn't go to the cloud or I'm not sure if it should go in the cloud. So now we're hearing talk of hybrid cloud and multicloud, and we're hearing pieces of public cloud in my own data center and pieces of my own data center in a public cloud. It's a pretty complicated space. I wonder if you can kind of share your perspective as this thing morphs from kind of a simple concept and a beautiful little icon to a much more complex execution in the real world. >> Well, great question and insights. And I think, building off of what Jason said, I think the most important shift I've seen is really a mind shift, a mindset shift. And there's so much more empathy that I'm seeing across the board, whether it's children running in the background or cats and pets, there's a lot more tolerance for work-life balance and a lot more empathy for how people are getting through this really challenging pandemic. And what I think is interesting is that kind of carries over into the technology. And so now where some of our clients were solving problems like keeping their workforce safe by using video analytics to see if someone's using or wearing maybe a hard hat in a construction zone. Now that use case has sort of shifted, and now it's is someone wearing a mask? Do they have a temperature? How do we make sure that the office areas are sanitized and clean so that when people go back to work, they'll be working in a safe environment? So I think that the mindset shift is really driving a lot of these technology innovations. And then of course you need cloud to make those real. So I think that's the kind of aha moment I've seen is that people are leading with empathy and that's driving kind of the next wave of innovation that I'm seeing. >> I have to say I've been doing these many, many years, and Briana, I don't think anyone has brought up empathy at the at the head end of the open. And I love that 'cause I think that's a way to think about it, right? 'Cause these are people trying to execute business activities, and it's not easy. And that's a really great take. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about one of the things we talked about the cloud, but really it's about enabling applications, right? And really, the application now has become this first class citizen where it's, this is the app I want. Cloud enables me to use whatever infrastructure I need versus this is the infrastructure I have. Hm, what can I put on this app? So I'd love to get your take. As you said, you think about cloud all the time, but really, cloud is an app enabler. And how has, as that capability has been gifted to people, how has that made the the cloud execution a lot more complex? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think you're hitting on a really key transformation that's happened in cloud over the last few years, which is that it's gone from infrastructure kind of cost optimization to an application delivery accelerator. And what I think that's caused is everyone's starting to kind of move their thinking up the stack in cloud, and you see the rise of technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift as a platform that enables application developers to build applications and deliver them more quickly. I think the acceleration that we've been talking about here has cemented that. At the end of the day, we're all trying to figure out in our businesses how to adapt to change. We have some new changes this year that maybe we didn't predict we would have last year. We're trying to figure out how to adapt to those to deliver new capabilities, to maybe build a digital experience for something that we didn't have a digital experience for before, 'cause now nobody is face to face. And that requires cloud to be much more application-centric. It requires cloud, you alluded to this kind of evolution. I think it's starting to drive cloud into more places. Cloud isn't about just getting into some big cloud data center somewhere. Cloud is about a style of working and a set of technologies that I want to be able to consume wherever I need them. So that kind of application-centric capability and the rise of cloud-native technologies I think go hand in hand. >> Right, so it got to us from a simple dev swiping a credit card to do a little project on Amazon to now enterprising having very complex ecosystems, right? Very complex situation because they've got lots of different clouds and lots of different apps running on lots of different clouds, and the application and the control of those is now much more complicated than probably when you just had it all in your own data center or if you're some cloud data organization and you grew up on the public cloud and you really are kind of a single app that happens to be a big one in hyperscale. So I'm curious, Briana, you guys have a ton of customers. What are they telling you about what they're doing with hybrid cloud, managing hybrid cloud, trying to get back to some of the simplicity and kind of the simplistic vision and execution when what's happening is probably increasing complexity as different apps are running on different clouds, different places. >> Yeah, great question. You know, I think that what we're hearing from our clients is really a couple of things. One is that they have to find ways to unburden their teams. They only have limited resources and the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible. So they need to be able to innovate faster, but they have to unburden the team. So the rise of "as a service" I think is really coming into its own because teams don't have time to manage things like Kubernetes. They have to go higher in the stack and really start to build and innovate for their own business differentiation. But another I think really important thing that we're hearing from our clients is that we have to meet them where they are in their journey. So what you said was great. A lot of our clients are using five to nine different clouds today, and that's extraordinarily fragmented, and being able to manage and have one way to see what workload is running where and what is running on that workload is really important. And having kind of one single pane of glass where they can manage everything is one of the single most important features that I hear that is needed. And I think the other thing that I hear a lot from clients is they need flexibility. They need flexibility for, you know, where they are in their journey. Some folks, they need to be able to deploy to existing infrastructure that they have in their data center, and others need to be able to deploy to another public cloud. And having the flexibility to run anywhere is one of the more common themes that I'm seeing. >> Right, so, and you guys built something to help with that, right? It's the IBM cloud satellite. So you just basically outlined the customer challenge, so what did you have to do to enable them to have a single pane of glass, to have more control across these disparate projects running in disparate clouds. >> Well, so one of the things that we found is our clients really, all of the agility that they need to adopt cloud data best practices, really comes from the public cloud. The public cloud services, DevOps, all the tools that allow you to really run and move faster and innovate faster, but they needed that ability to consume those public cloud services anywhere. So at the edge, on another public cloud, or in their existing infrastructure. And of course there's tons of infrastructure options. We have infrastructure for our clients that they can use. We have turnkey appliances. But really having that public cloud, cloud-native agility, but really bringing that anywhere that our clients want to run it is the key to satellite. >> Right, right. So it's not kind of what would be typically thought of as a hybrid cloud solution per se, but it's really almost kind of a level up, if I'm hearing you correctly, in controlling all the different kind of instances or instantiations of your cloud execution. That'd be accurate, Jason? >> Yeah, well, or maybe another way to think about it is it's a way of consuming hybrid, right? It's a way of consuming these hybrid cloud capabilities. Hybrid starts with a common platform, and this idea that we are using things like OpenShift as that common technology platform that enables customers to build applications once and run them anywhere. What satellite brings to the table is it takes that base technology platform and it delivers it as a cloud service, and a cloud service that's flexible enough to be anywhere. And so you kind of combine the best of both. You combine a common technology approach and you combine the as a service API-based consumption model of public cloud to get a hybrid strategy that's super flexible, right? And now really lets customers focus on the work that they're doing going faster. And at IBM, we've been pretty clear that we think the future of hybrid cloud computing is rooted in technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift, that that's the platform of the future. The acquisition of Red Hat was motivated by that strategy. Our public cloud for the last three-plus years has been built internally on top of the same technologies. And so what we've done with satellite from a technology perspective is we've taken the things that we do in our cloud and we've used the power of of Kubernetes and OpenShift to deliver those anywhere, right? And to give customers that same experience on their infrastructure or on some other public cloud. >> Right. I love it because it's kind of cloud on cloud, if you will, but it really supports this notion of the customer experience, and even more importantly in some ways, the developer experience to make sure that your developers inside the house are feeling good, have a great productive environment so they can do a better job with what they're working on. And that that sounds like something they would really, really enjoy and be native to the way they're used to working already. >> It's interesting too, one of the kind of interesting, I don't know, adoption trends we're starting to see with approaches like satellite is if you think about cloud, I'll oversimplify, but you could say there's kind of two big transformations. One is move my workload to a public cloud, and the other is change how my team works, right? Adopt cloud-native, agile best practices. And often to get to the culture change of the team, you had to start with moving the app, but that's hard, especially for the kind of 80% of workloads that we're seeing move to cloud now where they're complex. They have lots of ties into data that you have in your data center. So it's hard to move them sometimes. So with approaches like satellite, you can kind of flip the order. You can bring the cloud in house, if you will. You can start to adopt self-service and API-based consumption and DevOps and change how your teams work and make them more efficient without moving the applications. And then later, if it makes sense to move them, you can, right? And I think that's really powerful. >> Right, right. Briana, I want to go back to you on kind of the nuts and bolts. 'Cause I don't know if you've read "Innovator's Dilemma" by Christian Clayton. You should if you haven't. But one of the things is how do you prioritize what you're building? How do you prioritize your feature stack? Because you have to, right? You have to put one in front of the other, and it's going to drive your design decisions and what you ultimately ship. So as you were thinking about satellite, what were kind of your top-level design priorities that you're really building this towards that you wanted to make sure you really nailed? >> Oh, what a great question. I love that question. I'm so passionate about product and design and I think we take it very seriously at IBM, and it's, we have an amazing design department, if you will, at IBM. And one of the things we do is just relentlessly interview our clients, and we really try to understand what their main issues are. And one of the first use cases that we we looked at was actually in the financial industry, which was, in the financial services industry, the differentiation is really all about the technology itself, and so they're constantly having to innovate at a faster pace so they can bring new features and functions to their clients but they have this dilemma where they have to, in some cases, in many cases, keep the data on-prem in a specific location. And that starts to get really interesting, because sometimes the regulations, it could be country, it could be a compliance thing, but for whatever reason, there is a specific requirement, and sometimes that comes with a fine if that data doesn't reside in that location. So having the ability to move at an incredibly fast pace and keep innovating, but keep that data on-prem and offload the management of Kubernetes and the services that allow them to move fast. That was one of the first use cases that we tackled. And I think that's a pretty important one, because if you can get that right, that starts to permeate all other industries, because you want to, you have to be secure. You have to make sure that the data resides and is on-prem and in a specific location and that it's auditable. So I think that was one of our first use cases, and that has served us really well. We also, one of the things that we do inside of IBM is that we co-develop using our own internal workloads. And so we use the data and AI team within IBM will GA with us when we GA IBM Cloud Satellite, and so their workloads are running on top of satellite. And I think that's a great way to come to market because when you're delivering an MVP, but if you can deliver an MVP that's already running a really complex AI workload, that's a pretty impressive MVP, if you ask me. So we try to do that whenever we release new products, and I think that has served us very well because it really forces us to solve the really hard problems first. We don't have a choice. We have to be able to make some pretty strategic choices upfront to be able to deliver something like that. >> That's great. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about a little bit beyond the cloud, but things that are really interesting and happening, right? You already talked about this big enabler with containers and Kubernetes, but this next thing that's coming, right, is just edge, which is an extension of the cloud, an outpost to the cloud, but this whole concept of getting outside of the data center but actually now starting to bring the compute to the devices that generate the data as well as need that. How do you see that kind of impacting your cloud thoughts? I love that you're thinking cloud all the time. And the other piece, keying off of what Briana just said, is applied AI, right? I mean, I think we all would agree that AI and machine learning as kind of a standard, generic thing is okay, but really the application of the AI and the machine learning for specific use cases is where we're seeing huge, huge benefit. And I would imagine there's many, many kind of areas within cloud execution that AI and machine learning can start to add even more and more and more efficiencies and automation. >> Sure, sure. So maybe a couple comments. I mean, I think the edge thing is so interesting because if you really kind of step back and think about what we were talking about with cloud, what is a cloud is becoming much more diverse. Started as it's these three regions and it's becoming everybody's data centers plus on-prem, and then it's becoming edge, large edge locations, and then it's becoming devices. So clouds are becoming pervasive as a concept across all IT consumption models. And there's core technologies, even, like containers that we think apply at all those levels. They apply in the core cloud, in the data center, at the edge, in a device. And so things like satellite certainly give us a mechanism to push that boundary, to push closer to the end user. And there's a ton of scenarios motivating that. 5G telecommunications and high-speed networking for mobile devices is necessitating pushing closer to where the data's getting generated. IoT, same thing. If you think about the IoT edge case, that's massive data generation. You don't necessarily want to backhaul that all the way back to a central cloud. You want to be able to do AI and training and inferencing on that data close to where it lives. And so you need this whole idea of cloud to kind of expand, and if it doesn't, then what happens is all of these different use cases become like different technology stacks or different operational models and you get tons of complexity. So it's this really interesting intersection, and I think we're getting much more complex in how we deploy, but we're trying to put common ideas over the top of it to simplify, and I think that's pretty interesting. On the AI question, you're right, there's tons of places where AI, applied AI will come into the picture. At IBM, we're doing a ton of work on AI for IT operations and how do we apply AI modeling to monitoring, to resiliency, even to workload placement. I mean, just think about the world we just described. As a customer, maybe I have IBM cloud and I have 20 satellite locations in all our fun places in the world, and now I have to make decisions about what runs where and where should I deploy my workloads and what's the most efficient way to place workloads to get availability or better performance, and AI plays a role there. So I see a really bright future as we build out this infrastructure to then use AI as a mechanism to further simplify the customer's consumption of cloud. >> Yeah, that's great. So I want to give you both the last word before we sign off, and that was a good summary, Jason. Cloud's been around for a while and it gets tossed around, and again, now we have hybrid and multi and all these different flavors. You guys are in the weeds and you're seeing down the road a little bit. What is it about cloud that most people probably aren't talking about when you kind of look in your crystal ball, obviously don't share any secrets that you can't share, that gets you excited and makes you think, wow, we're still really, hard to believe, but really in the early days of what this really, the kind of opportunities that this opens up. And I'll go with you first, Briana. >> Well, that's a great question. I think we're already starting to see that with the example of all of the work that we're seeing in the COVID space. It just feels like whatever challenge that might lie ahead in our future, we have an ability to quickly iterate and change and adapt. It's so interesting to see how fast we can roll out new technologies and new ideas. Things that would take years to put together you can kind of put together in a week or so with a quick POC. And that's really an exciting kind of place to be that you can adapt and change so quickly. So I think that's one. And I do think your point about edge is really an important one. There's more and more opportunities to distribute workloads closer to, compute goes closer to where the users are, so therefore you're reducing latency, so you're getting instant feedback. And I think that's really going to be interesting. And then I think the third element, again, is like security and compliance. How do you know exactly that your data stays exactly where you want it to, and you can have proof and you can audit that data. I think that's really where the future's headed. >> Yeah, that's great. And Jason, to you, what's getting you up in the morning today? >> Oh, you don't want to know what gets me up today. But if we talk about what's coming, so for me, my whole career, I've really been thinking about applications. And I think one of the kind of macro trends that everyone doesn't always see that's going on in cloud is we're switching from an IT infrastructure-centric view of computing to an application-centric view. And all of these things we've been talking about are kind of steps along that journey. We're getting to a point where I can build applications, I can build them in a consistent way, I can deploy them anywhere in the world on this incredibly diverse infrastructure. As a developer, I have simple, immediate access to world-class capabilities, to specialized hardware. We are really in the midst of a transformation on how we build computing technology and really a democratization of that technology that 10 or 15 years ago you wouldn't have had the, most people would not have had the funds to stand up the technology they needed to build these things. And that's what really gets me excited, because I think about, well, then what's all the innovation that's going to come from that? As more and more developers have access to this powerful infrastructure in these diverse ways, what are they going to create? And that's what's, I think, going on under the covers. I think we're in the middle of a generational transformation of technology that will result in things we can't predict today because we'll open up so many people's ability to leverage that platform. >> What a great thought to close on, Jason, 'cause I think we hear that consistently all the time. What's the key to innovation? Give more people the access to the tools, give more people access to the data and more people the power to do something with it and create. And we hear all the time about the disadvantaged classes of people that just didn't get the opportunity, and if all those people had the same school, the same education, and now the same basically infinite compute power at their disposal, what are they going to invent? And I think it's an exciting future, and I think that's a great place to close. So we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you both for checking in. Briana, great to meet you, and Jason, always good to see you, as well. >> Yeah, nice to meet you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thank you. >> All right, thanks a lot and have a great day. >> Thank you. >> All right, that was Briana and Jason. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS re:invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of AWS re:invent 2020. It's virtual this year, just like everything is virtual this year. But it's still the biggest event in cloud, and we're excited to be back. I'd like to welcome in our next guest, he is Erez Yarkoni, head of cloud and telco technologies for checkpoint software technologies. There it is great to see you. >> Nice to see you, Jeff. Thank you for hosting me this morning. >> Absolutely, so let's jump into it. You've been in the cloud space. For a while I saw a great interview with you, I think like four or five years ago, when I was doing some research, and you're talking about, all the great innovation that's coming from cloud. That was years and years ago. Now, suddenly, we had COVID arrived. And I'm sure you've seen all the social media means who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we don't know what the answer is. So first off, I'd just love to get your perspective, you've been in this a long time now that we're here in 2020, both in terms of the development of the cloud and the adoption of the cloud, as well as this accelerant that came into our lives in March. >> Hey Jeff, You know I have been lucky that I got to participate in this kind of innovation cycle of IT and technology. Earlier, I was a CIO for an organization, large organization, and we were adopting cloud. At the same time, as an organization, we were selling technologies and networks to our customers, and they were asking to adopt cloud and so on. And these are probably some of the early interviews we looked at. So I got lucky that I had to look at my own organization and understand where cloud is beneficial. And obviously, now I work with cybersecurity and secure in the cloud. So it's all come together. I think that as as cloud technologies came in, it really came in to help many of us address the fundamental need to come to market with business capabilities and functionality faster. For those of us in technology, you know we were probably always the bottleneck of our business counterparts that said. Well, if you could only do this for me, I could grow the business, I could change your business, I can go to other places, I can incrementally bring more customers, revenues, and so on. The cloud platforms have done a tremendous job allowing developers and operators have technology to change the speed in which they service their businesses. But with speed comes security. And I think the cloud platforms disneynow. Specifically, here platforms like AWS build security into into the cloud as well. But there's other needs in it and the pandemic or COVID. All it did is it shifted some of these motions into another gear and then it created some new business needs that can only be service that digital mean, you are now having a collaboration session over a digital channel where otherwise would be probably sitting in the same studio. So definitely collaboration has changed. Commerce have changed, especially for some organizations that never planned to do commerce over digital channels, small businesses and so on. Just think about the food delivery industry and how many new customers have now sole, restaurants that have now signed up for food delivery services that must have exploded. These continuous changes brought continuous needs to address security as well. AWS is allowing people to build some amazing applications. I watched the commercials when I watch football on Sunday. Right? So peloton and zoom in education and many other things. And yeah, so when people build those amazing applications, the next thing they need to do is make sure that the zoom session is secure. And nobody's crashing in if you have a bunch of kids doing zoom for school. >> Erez you talked on so many topics on that. So let's break a few of them down. First off, I just, you know thank goodness for cloud, right? >> Yeah >> If this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we would not have been able those of us in the IT industry to shift so easily to cloud based or excuse me to working from home or working from anywhere because of the cloud based applications huge enabler. But it's funny now once on what you just talked about, did you talk about cost savings? And I still find there's a lot of people that are looking at cloud as a way to save costs. You been in it for a while, and you know the truth is all about agility and speed of business, speed of adoption, speed of innovation. You said it in every single one of your answers. But it still seems to be a lag for a lot of people now with with COVID, and, you know securing people work from home, one of the big issues go back to security is increasing attack surface. And we know the increasing sophistication of the bad guys. Now, I'm hearing from some people that they're actually using old techniques that they used to use back in the day because they know people are at home, and maybe things are as locked down. You talk about security needs to bake be baked in all long the way we're using all these, more and more cloud based apps. How do people think about the security perspective? How do you bake it into everything that you do? And how do you respond to the increased attack surfaces that have now suddenly opened up to look like for probably a little while not just going back to the old way, anytime soon? >> Yeah, so you know, you you touched on that, you said that you hear about people using old secure the old attack methods or vectors or so on, coming back, because people are now at home and no longer behind a very secure environment in their office or in the data center, people had to maybe move things that they never thought they would call center operations. That was by definition, you showed up to the call center for certain organizations and moved it out. And they may have not been ready to move those applications so on, so they had to address the security of it. I think that's exactly it, which is now some of the reaction we had to have for just staying in business. We used kind of very older, or, we increased what we know about security about remote access by increasing VPN capacity for the organization or, or those type of methodologies. Now people are looking at what happened to our topology to our architecture, where are people and machines coming in to execute their work over the network? Where are the applications residing? What have we moved to the cloud because we had to know flex for capacity and speed and maybe localize and move it into regions and so on. I don't think it was about cost saving, as you think it was about business agility, especially in this phase. I actually think that at the end of the day, the big benefit from cloud is business agility. Cost has to come with it, we cannot sacrifice costs and everything we do. And we look at overall how we use cloud technologies and other technologies and make sure that the cost fits into what our business demands from a cost structure but it is about business agility. Now, it's also about security agility. So people are building, you know methods and capabilities to match the business agility with security and security was, at least for me, for instance, as as a CIO, security was a bottleneck. So when business demanded the Agile development, you know iterations, sprints, deliver functionality in weeks, and, you know keep pouring it into the environment. One of the inhibitors was security, right, we weren't ready for it, we weren't ready to release it. So we had to find a way to adopt it. And then came in companies like AWS, saying, we built some of that security built into the platform. And companies like checkpoint saying we have cloud security that moves at cloud speed and allows you to integrate into your CICD, environmental or, or processes and allows you to match the speed of the business with the speed of security. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, again, I agree with you, 100%, it's all about agility, and speed of business. And being able to move faster just always surprises me how people how many people are still kind of stuck on the cost saving piece. And then the other thing, of course, which you're super aware of, if you've ever been to one of kind of the technical keynotes at AWS re:invent the amount of investment that they can make an infrastructure including security, in just, just completely over overshadows anything in an individual company can invest just in terms of the resources and then somebody like you guys can leverage on top of not only using the the massive Amazon, kind of core investments in security at the infrastructure layer, but then all the stuff that you guys can do in terms of securing the enterprise and helping make sure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time, but not a lot more than that. I wonder if you can talk about a new kind of zero trust in some of the evolution within security in terms of the posturing, and how you kind of make assumptions, as we said, it's no longer like a wall anymore, it's no longer talking about having these physical borders, or even logical borders, but it's really about access and breaking down access even to the person in the application and the data etc. >> Yeah, I think you asked specifically about zero trust, and I think that we want to move, maybe want to keep that the the theme here around the application security, I'll get to zero trust at the end. You know, so one of the things that that definitely is thematic, or what we see happening is, in the evolution in the maturity curve of adopting the cloud, the initial adoption was, maybe some lift shift from organizations and the IaaS layer was a big player. But the PaaS layers of the cloud are where all the interesting things happen, where all the exciting services, all the innovation coming from organizations like AWS, all the enablers for a business agility, and capabilities are coming from there. And when you start developing your applications for that PaaS layer, we start leveraging the services, the type of security changes, so you're no longer looking at network security, or maybe northeast, east west, north south, east west type of security on your network, you're now looking at security API's and securing the backplane of the cloud, from those services that they give you, you know you get to encrypt your buckets, you got to make sure your security groups are correct, you want to make sure your serverless functions are not executing anything malicious in them or, or talking to IP addresses, they shouldn't be. Same with your container, you want to make sure that your container code is scanned properly, you didn't download anything in there that's malicious. And obviously, have runtime security, both to make sure you're compliant from a posture perspective, you make compliance may require you to be PCI compliant one of those. So the elevation in which you execute to security changed from the from the stack from a kind of a traditional stack, requires different capabilities and between what AWS has built into the platform and what checkpoint puts together in cloud guard. This is big, the big target, then we get into, okay, so how do you access all these great things that we just built? Right? So we built these, this great application? It's sitting on AWS, it's using some of the great services there. How do you how do you get to it? Who gets to it? How do you get to it? This is where some of these, sassy and zero trusts come in. Because what happened is, you used to come into a lot of enterprise applications from the data center, then we moved some web apps, and you came over the web into the application. So we have some web firewalls and security for that. Now you're getting into every application from the edge of the network, because we are all at home, or we are we used to be traveling but a lot more of us are now at home coming over the edge of the network, we're adding IoT devices coming on via generic and so on, there's a lot more volume coming at you. And you get to find different ways than just VPN authentication of the traffic into so we are coming into the age of having to identify who's coming at the application at the capability at any given time. And that's where you come into the framework of zero trust, I, every time you come in, I'm going to authenticate that is you. And there's different methodologies in there. For instance, one of the things that we just added to our portfolio is the ability to put an agent, let's say in your around your AWS application, and allow remote access with no VPN to your enterprise app aah to an acquisition company we call odo without having to put a VPN so the administrator defines what applications are connected to the connector. They define who's the users that are allowed and authenticate them based on the authentication framework, let's say Octo, something like that, and allows them to come in and that that those are the type of capabilities you need in these new frameworks. So, how do you get to these great applications we're building? >> Right, right. And you touched on something really interesting, right, which is, which is the complexity is only going up? As you mentioned edge you mentioned a little bit of IoT, right, so as 5G comes on board, as IoT gets increasing amounts of traction. All these applications are API based there's all types of information flying back and forth, so I wonder if you can share kind of your guys thoughts on, applied machine learning and artificial intelligence to help, you know kind of get through all the all the signal or excuse me all the noise, find the signal, and really, you know bring more automation to help the security experts in the security systems be more effective at their jobs. >> Yeah, so I think a lot of what we talked about, until now was protecting establishing a new perimeter, there's not really a perimeter, right because we talked about the perimeter has grown and it's fuzzy and it's at scale that really doesn't allow you to say I have it for an undersea up to authentic everybody. But like you said, with that speed, and scale, came a lot of data, you got a lot of logs running in there, you're like got a lot of events, you got a lot of things that you can look into. And by looking into them, you can start with machine learning and those type of AI methodologies start looking both to identify things before they happen, or inform organizations and inform about things that are already happened and they're in and potentially remediate them. At checkpoint, for instance, we have something called the threat, the threat cloud, we collect these events from every gateway, every appliance, every virtual appliance, every type of security agent that we have around the world, into the flex cloud that processes and I'm going to throw a number there, that's the closer about 80 billion a day transactions. >> 80 billion with B >> Yeah, and that allows us to, to process to apply machine learning and AI algorithms to find threat, and then inform all these great checkpoint security agents out there of new threats and prevent those threats from ever happening in the in the environment. Right? If you're operating on a on an AWS environment, there's a lot of blood flows happening in your environment, there's a lot of things to collect and look at, right. So in cloud guard, we offer something called logic log.ic, which allows you to harvest those logs, we enrich them and then we allow threat hunting inside those environment, right. So those types of capabilities are definitely kind of the future of advanced security, right. So beyond just establishing, it's like, you establish your security around what you do. And then you have your intelligence unit starting to identify what signals are out there allowing you to both prevent security breaches or any type of threats, but also remediate anything, any, you find the traces of things that happened and remediate them. >> Right, right. Well, there is that's, that's a great illustration of, kind of baking security into the multiple steps of the process and all the steps of the process. That's not just a bolt on anymore. It's got to be, part of everything you do and baked into everything you do. I still, I still wonder how certain companies that that are run by having people click on links that they're not familiar with still happen today. But I guess, I guess they still do. So as I give you the final word, again, you've been in this space for a long time, as we kind of turned to turn the page on 2020. What are some of your priorities we are you excited about for 2021? >> I think the most exciting things for us in cloud security in 2021 is we're releasing more capabilities into into the environment, we're in the maturity curve, of protecting, your network in the cloud, and then protecting your posture in the cloud. We're moving very strongly into predicting your runtime and applications in the cloud, your API's, and working with organizations through that maturity curve and getting them up to all the way up to threat hunting capabilities. And I think that'll be exciting because I hear from customers that they need to move quickly through that maturity curve of cloud security as they have accelerated and continue there to accelerate their move to the cloud. >> Well, that's great. Well, I think, no shortage of job security in the cloud security space. So I'm sure it will be a busy year. Well, it was thanks for sharing your insight. Really appreciate the time and it was great catching up. >> Thank you, Jeff, for your time today. And it was great talking to you. >> Absolutely. All right. Well, he's Erez I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2020 Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's the Cube. With digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our commudity partners. >> Okay, Welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We are, coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with our continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 digital this year, like everything in 2020 but we're excited to welcome back to The Cube. He's been on a number of times, he's Russ Currie. The vice president enterprise strategy for Netscout systems. Russ great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. Thank you. >> Absolutely. So before we jump into there's so(laughs), so many things going on in 2020. What I do want to do is, is reflect back a little bit. You were first on The Cube at AWS reinvent 2017. So it's been about three years. And I remember, one of the lines you had said, I believe that was your guys' first, AWS show as well. So I wonder if you could reflect on kind of how the world has changed in terms of your business, and the importance of AWS and public cloud within the infrastructure systems of your clients. >> Yeah, well, it was interesting, right? We were just getting our feet wet at that point, and had just introduced some of our technology for use in AWS, and it was kind of a interesting little adventure. So we were looking at it and saying, okay where's this going to lead us? And ultimately now we're just really waist deep in it, and really having a great partnership with AWS, and delivering new technologies, new capabilities, and our customer base also is becoming so much more reliant on public cloud in particular AWS and the services that they can provide. So as we've gone and they've gone it's been a journey that we've taken together, and it's been quite, fruitful and exciting. >> Right, right. And it really reinforces this concept of I think you'd mentioned it before, a blended, you know kind of a blended infrastructure approach. So there's a lot of conversations about public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, et cetera, et cetera. But at the, at the end of the day from a customer perspective, as you've mentioned it's really kind of a blended network, right. And it's really application centric, and you put the applications where those applications need to be to be the most appropriate, and that might even change over time from, from test dev to really roll out to, to scale. So you're seeing that consistency. Consistency, >> Absolutely. Yeah. The, the blended environment that in it it's so incredibly complex of our customers. As they take a look at the way that the world has changed, right? When we take a look at what has happened with people working remotely, working from home and having to come into access services in such a, a completely blended and hybrid environment as you say, not only the move to the cloud, but the move to Colo, and bringing all of this together for interconnect, it's definitely a complex environment that they have to have their fingers on the pulse of. Right? >> Yep, yep. And then of course there was this little thing that happened this year with COVID. And really right in March, April timeframe light switch moment, everybody worked from home, whether you're ready or not. And that was a very different kind of situation. Cause we had to get people secure and safe, and get them up and operating. So I'm sure you(laugh) saw a lot of interesting stuff at your business there, but I'm even more interested in how that's evolved over time. Here we are at the end of 2020, there's going to be you know, some version of this for the foreseeable future. And a lot of companies are saying that, you know there'll be a lot of, kind of work from anywhere pieces that continue forward. So again, with your customers and looking kind of the change between what happened in the spring, and now what's happening as they really of kind of put in the systems that'll enable them to continue to support, you know people working from anywhere, not even really working from home, but working from anywhere. >> Right. Exactly. I mean, as our customers had to bring up more connectivity, new connectivity, and start to add licenses for virtual desktop or for their VPN connectivity ultimately how they got it done, most of our customers said, you know we're running hot, but stable. And I think that that was, that was great for most folks. But now they're leaning into it and saying, okay how do we continue to make this happen? And how do we provide the visibility that we need to ensure that the services that we're delivering are, making it possible for their users to be productive and successful. A user doesn't want to feel that they're not contributing as much as someone else that may be able to make it into the office. And, it's a, it's a challenging time, but with that being said, technology has really stepped up, and in particular, the way that they're able to stand up services in the cloud, and the automation, and potential cost savings that they get from standing up in the cloud has really been a bood for most of our users. And some of the users, you know, the high end enterprise that we're a little bit slow to adopt, now are just turning it on as fast as they possibly can. >> Yeah, it's pretty wild. And then, we had another representative from Netscout on earlier this year. One of the, the kind of recurring themes that we've seen is you know, changes in the threat landscape. So clearly the increased attack surfaces as more and more people are working from home. They're not working from the secure environment at the office. But you guys notice some interesting things about what's happening, and we've, we've seen a little bit too in terms of kind of, ransomware and the increase in ransomware as a particular type of attack that, that seems to be growing in popularity. And these, these people are a little bit more thorough in the badness that they caused before they, they throw in the ransom request, and that they're looking for a little bit more fundamental disruption to enable them to basically extract that ransom is which they hope to do. >> Yeah. I mean the amount of DDoS attacks that we've seen has just grown incredibly over the past several months. And these extortion attacks they come in and they often hit the customer quickly and hard, and then say, turn it back for a bit and say, pay us, or we're going to shut you down. And they're really coming in more towards the back office aspects of things. So, going in and attacking that part of the business is kind of a new environment for a lot of folks. But one of the other interesting(laughs) challenges here with us is that, oftentimes those extortion notes don't make it through to the people that really need to act on them because they get caught in spam filters or they like so they're finding these DDoS attacks, and don't necessarily understand that they're under an extortion attack. So it's a real challenge for folks. And we've seen a good uptake with our on-prem capabilities to provide that kind of protection, right at the top of the security stack with our Arbor edge defense products. So it's been something that we're trying to get out there and help our customers as much as we can. And even that new, folks. >> Yeah. It's a, it's an interesting environment. And we found out from somebody too that sometimes if you actually pay the bad guys you can be breaking other rules for doing business with countries >> Yeah. >> Or people that we're not supposed to be doing business with. Like, that's the last thing you need to think about when you're trying to get all your data, and your company back online. >> Right, yeah, I mean, are you trying to make sure that you're keeping yourself stood up right? And, it's tough and you know kind of the rule one is never pay the extortion right? But you kind of got to take a look at it and say, hey, you know, what do I do? >> Right, right. So, you guys been around for a while. I wonder if we could dive in a little bit, we're at reinvent. Some of the things you guys are doing specifically on the product side to, basically increase your, your AWS capabilities. >> Sure. Thanks, yeah. We've been working really closely with AWS as they start to roll out new technologies. Last year, we were fundamental in the VPC ingress routing announcement that they have. We've been working with them with their traffic mirroring capabilities. So technology-wise, we keep in close touch with them in terms of everything that they are delivering. But also on the business side of it, we have our networking competency and just last week got our migration competency. So what we're really doing is, trying to both work the technical and the business relationship, as much as we can to try and expand our overall capabilities of book print with AWS. And, having that visibility and being able to kind of provide that same level of control and capability that you had, on-prem in your enterprise network as you move into the public cloud is a great benefit to a lot of our customers. They really have the ability now, to deliver services the way they have been delivering it for years and years. >> Now, what do you mean specifically, when you say migration competency or networking competency? >> So, they have these different competency programs for their technology partners. And the networking competency is, that you've demonstrated capabilities in your ability to provide network monitoring, or network management capabilities, or network connectivity. In the applica--, migration side you've really provided the ability to show that you have the tools, and solution set to drive, and help people become successful migrations into AWS. As you can imagine right now, a lot of folks are just lifting and shifting, putting stuff into AWS as quickly as they can to try and take advantage of the automation and the operational efficiencies that you get when you move into public cloud settings. As you make those migrations, you want to ensure that you're not either leaving something behind, that needed to move with it, or building a dependency onto something that's in the background that's going to have an adverse effect on, user experience. And ultimately, it really all comes down to the user experience that are, delivering to your customers and or your user base. Right? >> Right. Right. So what are the things you talked about in a prior interview was kind of the shifting dynamic in terms of network traffic. As there's more and more, you know kind of SAS based applications, and there's more kind of an application centric, and in this kind of API interface between all the applications that, you know the North-south is still significant, but the growth in the East-west traffic, meaning, you know kind of inside, if you will. And that some of the unique challenges that come from that from kind of a network monitoring. I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on that, as to, and are you continuing to see this increase in East West relative to North-south, and what kind of special opportunities and challenges that that presents? >> Yeah, absolu--. There is an absolute growth in terms of the East-west connectivity and, traffic that exists out there. In particular, when we take a look at the way that people are implementing software defined networks, NSX, for example NSXT has now provided the ability to blend your environment whether you're going to any cloud, any vendor as you move between these environments having that ability to deliver network services under the same framework is really beneficial to our customer base. And we've also been partnering very closely with VM-ware, and a lot of our customers are implementing VMware cloud on AWS. So, they have that ability to stand up services in a consistent manner whether it be in their legacy environments, or into the public cloud environments, and have that same ability to provide visibility down into the East-west traffic so that you can see that. So when you're part of the NSX framework, what you're able to do is really leverage the service framework that they have the service and search it, and be part of the clusters and host groups that are exchanging traffic East-west. And our ability to see into that really exposes chall--, not, exposes challenges but exposes potential issues that(laughs) our customers might be having in delivering high quality services. So that visibility is really what we've been keying on. >> Right. I'm just curious to get your take, you know as people kind of, as you said, make this move to public cloud, and, you know, you talked about wholesale migrations, and wholesale lifts and shifts. You know, there, there's kind of a couple trains of thought. One is, you know, using cloud for just pure economics, and trying to save money, and the flexibility. The second one is, is to is to add this automation as things grow in this, these great opportunities to automate, and try to reduce air. But the third one, right, the big one is to drive innovation, and to unlock innovation enable better innovation, and speed of delivery, and, you know, moving at the speed of business, pick your favorite buzzword. I'm curious whether your customers, as you have you seen them all jumping in? How much of it is still, you know, to save money or to, or to, you know, kind of use the basic, you know cost saving economics versus people really embracing the opportunity to use this as a method to drive innovation, and change within their own business? >> So I, I think the realities of 2020 have been forcing people to look at primarily from operational and cost efficiency perspectives, however with an eye towards innovation, and as they start to get themselves into a, zone where they're comfortable, they look to see how they can leverage the cloud to provide new services, and new ways in which they provide their services, and avail themselves of, the underlying technologies that are there to build something that's new and exciting in their overall portfolio. So, I think that 2021 is probably going to be a little bit more of where can I innovate as opposed to, how do I get there? (Jeff laughs) >> It's probably an unfair question here at 2020 cause priorities certainly got turned upside down in the middle of the year. So maybe, maybe innovation got pushed down a little bit from, you know, let's get people up, let's get people safe, and let's make sure they can access all the systems and all this crazy stuff that we've got available to them from wherever they are. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Not just within the, within the home office. >> I was listening to a, panel from federal government a couple of weeks ago, and it was really the way the they've adopted kind of commercial cha-- commercial capabilities to meet some of these challenges things that they wouldn't normally look at. But now it's a set of innovation that they're looking at, to try and make sure that they can avail themselves of the services that are out there and available in the public cloud. >> Yeah. Well, that's great, Russ. It's great to catch up. I'm sure you must be as amazed as anybody as the rapid acceleration of this, you know since the short time you went to your first re-invent and, >> Yeah. >> And clearly AWS and Amazon generally is an execution we're seeing. So, I think they'll keep doing it. So I think you're, you're probably sitting in a good spot. >> I think so. (Jeff laughs) Thank you. (Russ laughs) >> All right. Thank you Russ for, for stopping by and sharing your insight. Look forward to catching up next time. >> Thanks a lot, Jeff. Really appreciate it. >> Alrighty. He's Russ, I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube's, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, the virtual event. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with thecube coming to you from our palo alto studios with our ongoing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2020 virtual it's virtual like everything else that we're doing in 2020 we're really excited by our next guest we're going to dive into a company that you probably know a little bit on the surface but probably don't know a lot of the stuff that's going on behind the surface so we're really excited to have our next guest he is jai chakrabarti he is the director of engineering for core infrastructure at spotify jai great to see you great to be here with you today so as a as a long-standing uh spotify fan and and customer and premium customer and family playing customer just so there's no question i'm a big fan the infrastructure to deliver what i want to hear basically any sound any song from the entire world it seems like i don't know what the actual uh percentage of every published song you guys have you know kind of at my fingertips searchable available now to listen to is an amazing accomplishment i can't imagine how big and significant and complicated the infrastructure you guys must be managing and and not only that but kind of the meteoric growth over the last several years so first off just talk a little bit about spotify scale how you guys think about it is there some things that you can share to help people really understand you know some of the some of the big iron that's behind giving me the songs i want to hear absolutely and thank you for the opportunity to let me talk about this so it's a as you say it's a pretty mammoth project to be able to deliver just about any song that's in the world or now any podcast that you might want to listen to to hundreds of millions of fans and also enable creators to be able to share their content with the consumers who are interested in consuming that content so some of the metrics that go behind us are we have thousands of microservices running in production we were one of the early adopters of microservices at scale and continued to build on that foundation with early entrants to dockerize services and now of course largely on kubernetes we also have thousands of data pipelines hundreds of uh websites as well as micro app features and we're doing about 20 000 deployments a day to give you kind of a scale of how fast things are changing and for us speed is a great virtue as we're testing out features doing ab tests and trying to roll out the next best thing for the audio network it's amazing and i'm and i'm curious in terms of execution on the business side i mean clearly you're in many many countries you know you're global are all the licensing agreements for the music different by country are you just like super micromanaging um you know kind of the the revenue streams and the licensing by geo or is is that just as complex as it feels like it might be or is there some some simplicity or some scale that you can bring to uh to bring a little bit of of clarification there yeah so that is an area of complexity as well um so you know licensing across the broad set of content that we have as well as the number of publishers and creators that we have to make sure that everything is well accounted for is also kind of a source of complexity in our organizational makeup and then and then the the piece that i don't think a lot of people know is you guys are huge consumers and contributors back to open source and clearly we're here at q con cloud native con you've talked already about kubernetes and containers but i wonder before we get into some of the specifics if you can talk about philosophically the role of open source and why you know you guys are such a big open source company versus kind of back in the old days when you would have a lot of proprietary technology that you would try to develop and keep in-house as part of the as part of the secret sauce yeah thank you for that question so philosophically we are big proponents of open source we believe in giving back to the community we believe that when we as a community come together to solve these problems at scale the end result is much better than if we were to try it alone if any one company were to try it alone so some of the projects that we've contributed or invested a lot of time in are envoy for example which we use to power our perimeter at spotify or kubernetes which we use for deployment purposes as many companies do but there are also a number of other open source projects that we're committing to so for example with cloud bigtable we have produced an auto scaler that's now fairly widely used to be able to manage costs better with cloud bigtable we've also invested in a open source time series database called heroic to manage millions of data points for a metrics platform and scales so those are just a few examples but philosophically we believe this isn't something that we want to do alone and we want to leverage and do this together with the community right another one that you didn't mention there but you've talked about i want to dig into is backstage and as you mentioned you have a lot of developer teams working on a lot of projects like i saw a statistic maybe in github of the number of of github projects you guys are working on it's a it's a lot so what is backstage all about give us the story there yeah so at spotify we have almost somewhere around 500 engineering teams and so you can think about backstage as kind of like a central nervous system to be able to help engineers interface across the wide landscape that is spotify's engineering ecosystems so if you're an engineer you can go into backstage and you can manage your services your data pipelines your micro features you can see what other teams are doing what the organizational structure is you can get recommendations and insights on your tech health so you can see where you might need to invest more time and get some recommendations on how to get back to the blessed stock so it's really a one-stop developer portal that engineers spend the bulk of their time in today we open sourced it uh earlier this year and we've been absolutely thrilled with the response we've gotten thus far a number of companies have already started using it and contributing back so we've seen you know a lot of contributions coming back to backstage which is of course one of the ideas to be able to get some of the great ideas uh on backstage so we're really excited about that and specifically within backstage something that my team has just released into the open is a product called cost insights so one of the problems that we were dealing with at spotify is how do we sustainably look at cloud costs but do it in a way that isn't like a compliance exercise isn't a focus on traditional top top down cost controls but really taps into developers innate desire to work on optimization because all of us who come from an engineering background know that optimization is fun at the same time premature optimization is the root of all evil as the saying goes and so what we've done within our cost insights product and backstage is really try to find a good balance between engineering love for optimization and letting people know what are the areas where cloud spend really matters so if making an investment here isn't going to move the needle for us we let people know that this isn't worth your time to worry about so let me unpack you touch on a couple things first off you talked about it gives you an assessment of your engineering health so does that mean that it's kind of uh compliance within a standard is that looking for i guess not quite red flags yet but yellow flags of things that that are known potential issues down the road is it you know tapping into maybe higher cost services or microservices versus less that maybe there's a less expensive way so so how do you define health and how do you you know keep track of people getting away from health and then you know steering them back to being more healthy yeah that's a great question so we have this concept at spotify called golden state which is a reflection of how far away are you from all of the blessed frameworks libraries that we recommend to engineers and the way we think about golden state is there ought to be clear value adds to going to a new service a new library version and so the way we try to express it is unless of course there's a kind of a direct security concern and there aren't really too many ways to get around that but we really tried to preserve engineering autonomy and say if you go to this new framework for example you're going to save this much time on average so the recommendations that you'll find there are going to be highly specific so for example if you adopt uh you know an auto scaler for bigtable you're going to save this much time and spend this much less that's in general how we phrase these things okay and then on the cost insights i mean clearly when a dev is working on a new feature or new uh you know experimenting maybe with a bunch of new features and you're you're setting up multiple a b testing this and that are they are they not really working worrying about cost at the front end of that or is really kind of the cost optimization and you mentioned you know don't optimize too early does that come kind of after the fact and after you've you know moved some new things into production they have potential and now we do maybe a second order kind of analysis of the appropriateness of that feature because i imagine if they're just if you're just trying to come up with new features and exploring and trying new things not really worrying about the you're not worrying about the cloud bill right you're just trying to get some feature functionality and make sure you don't have too many bugs and make sure you're going to get some good client value and some new customer experience yeah yeah no and and we agree with that perspective so we think about the world in terms of startup scale-ups and mature businesses at spotify so there are a lot of teams who are experimenting with new ideas that fall into the startup category and by and large they are not going to be worrying about costs that being said we as infrastructure teams have the notice on us to think about how do we provide shared services and frameworks that abstract away a lot of these questions around how do you properly manage your costs right so that that is on us as infrastructure teams but really our perspective is for startups to move as quickly as they can and really if that's an idea that's viable and you get to what we call the scale-up stage or you get to the mature business stage where it really is a core part of our business then that's where you know you might start to get some nudges or recommendations and cost insights so interesting so i'd love to you know your background you came from financial services and trading where clearly speed matters accuracy matters you know that that's i mean basically financial services is is a software game at this stage of the game and it's a speed game and i saw another interesting uh video getting ready for this i think it was with gustav soderstrom talking about the competitive advantage of the early days really being speed and speed to return a result and speed to start that stream and it just struck me very much like you know the early days of google which was that was their whole speed thing and they even told you how fast you got a return on your search when you're thinking about optimizing now with the huge suite of features and functionalities that you have how do you think about speed is it still speed number one how is kind of the priority changed and what are some of the design priorities that when things go from experiment to start to be into the scale realm and hopefully be successful in production that that need to be thought about and potentially rank ordered um in in the proper way yeah yeah that's it's a great question and so you know i'll just refer to daniel x quote around this which is we aim to fail faster than anyone else and so for us as a company and with our growth trajectory and investing in the areas that we are looking to invest into it's still absolutely critical that we move fast that we get the ideas of the startup phase out to be vetted and validated if we can go to the next phase to the scale-up phase so i see that just as important today if not more than when i first joined spotify uh you know over four years ago at this point and regarding financial services um there are certainly you know touch points in terms of the amount of data that we're processing and the scale of technology that it requires to process that kind of data but one of the things that i really love about spotify of course is that we get to move fast which is sometimes of course going to be a lot more difficult when you're talking about the financial service arena and various uh compliance bodies that are overseeing any changes that you might make yeah you guys are you guys were running a little bit ahead of the regs i think which is pretty typical uh in the music business napster was running a little bit ahead of the regs and you know then we saw the evolution with the itunes and then you know you guys really really nailing the streaming service really for the first time and and opening up this new con consumption bottle and i wonder if you could talk about you know kind of keeping the customer experience first and making sure that that's a positive thing i can't help but think of of the netflix experience where they spend so much time on people's interaction with the application to to get them to try new things a recommendation engine such an important piece of the of the puzzle and i think what you guys have really nailed is the discovery piece because it's one thing to be able to quickly access a favorite song and be able to listen to it but everyone loves discovery right and discovery is kind of an interesting and interesting process and you guys have taken a really scientific approach in terms of cataloging music and and different attributes of music and then using those to help drive the recommendation engine i wonder if you can share you know kind of your thoughts in terms of being you know kind of ultimately driven by the customer experience and their interaction with the application and these things called you know music or podcast which is such a such a a a very personal thing to interact with yeah so from the perspective of core infrastructure you know it's spotify our goal is to really enable the scale in which we are processing the amount of audio content that goes through our system and so podcast of course is a new category that wasn't there when i originally joined spotify but it's really to provide a platform so these experiments can be done seamlessly so we can have different ways of looking at discovery looking at user segmentation and being able to come up with new ways that are going to be compelling to our customers so that's very exciting and fulfilling for us to be able to provide that platform by which our sister teams can iterate very quickly knowing that they have the guard rails uh which you know in our on-premise days at times was a struggle and where we're in a very different place now yeah so last question before i let you go we're at cubecon cloudnativecon um and and it's just an interesting thing that i always think about when you're managing engineering teams that are heavily open source participants and you know it's such a big piece now of of a lot of engineers motivation to be active participants in open source and to and to show their work to others outside the company but at the same time they have to get company work done so i just wonder if you could share your perspective of how do you manage open source contributions how do you keep them you know working on company projects but also make sure you allocate time and priorities to open source contributions because that is a really important piece of the motivation for a lot of engineers it's not just working for the company and getting paid at the india at the end of every two weeks yeah it's a key motivation as you say and it's key to our recruiting strategy and also how we think about retaining engineers and spotify so there are different mechanisms that we use and there's a lot of focus that's modified on coming up with development plans for engineers that actually make sense um so you know i would say that all the way from the oft quoted 20 time is something that you might hear at spotify where you have engineers who are working on open source 20 of the time or you might see a variety of customized customized options depending on who the engineer is where they want to grow and really i think the key here is providing the right support structures so even if you have the time are you getting the mentorship are you getting the right kind of support system so you know how to connect with the community and so you have other like-minded people who are bouncing ideas and you don't feel like you're doing it yourself so that's something that i feel really excited about that we've grown those support structures over the last few years eyes have also been very intentional about giving engineers time to work on open source and you give them as much as 20 i'd never heard that before yeah in some cases some i mean if that is what where an engineer really wants to focus and grow there are a number of folks at spotify who are spending up to 20 of their time on open source wow that's amazing that that is a uh that's a it's just it's such a great commitment for the company to the engineer if that's their priority and then everyone's going to benefit from it both the engineer the company as well as the community so really a forward-looking you know point of view to take that long-term view versus the you know maybe we should only give them 10 we're losing 10 of their time working on a project so that is super super progressive and i'm sure you must be seeing great roi on it or you wouldn't continue to be such huge proponents of open source and such huge contributors back so that's that's a great story yeah terrific i mean you know we we want those contributions to be in line with where we're growing as a company and we see a lot of opportunities uh where that is happening so like envoy or kubernetes um just to name a couple of examples where folks have devoted time in those areas well thanks for uh thanks for sharing some of the the story behind the scenes you know again household name what what a tremendous success story and and and uh you know i'm a movie customer so i'm definitely a customer though no no doubt about it so uh thank you for your contributions congrats to the team and uh and really loved the story of how you guys are contributing back and and doing a lot more than just making great music available to us all and a great channel for uh for creators to get their stuff out there so thanks again thanks so much for your time i really appreciate it all right he's jai i'm jeff you're watching the cube's continuing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2020 thanks for watching we'll see you next [Music] time you

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020, the digital version. It would have been the North American version but obviously everything is digital. So we're excited, we've been coming back here for years and we've got a founder of CNCF and also a practitioner, really great opportunity to get some insight from someone who's out in the field and putting this stuff into work. So we're joined in this next segment by Ken Owens. He is the Vice President of Software Development Engineering for MasterCard, and he's a founding member of the CNCF, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Ken, great to see you. >> Yeah, great. Thank you for having me, I have, I've enjoyed theCUBE over the years and I'm glad to be a part of it again. >> Yeah, so we're, we're psyched to have you on, and I think it's the first time I've got to talk to you. I think you might've been on in LA a couple of years ago, or I was kind of drifting around that show. I don't think I was a it was on the set that day, but before we jump into kind of what's going on now, you were a founding member of CNCF. So let's take a step back and kind of share your perspective as to kind of where we are now from where this all began and kind of this whole movement around Cloud Native. Certainly it's a good place to be. >> Yeah, yeah definitely. It's been a great ride. In our industry, we go through these sort of timeframes every decade or so, where something big kind of comes along and you get involved in and you participate in it. And it gets to be a lot of fun and it either dies or it evolves into something else, right? And with CloudNativeCon Cloud Native itself, this concept of just how difficult it was to really move with the type of agility and the type of speed that developers in the enterprise really need to move at. It was just, it was hard to get there with just traditional infrastructure, traditional ways of doing configurations of doing management of infrastructure and it really needed something different and something to kind of help, it was called orchestration of course but at the time we didn't know it was called orchestration right. We knew we needed things like service mesh, but they weren't called service meshes then. There were more like control planes. And how do you, how do you custom create all of these different pieces? And the great thing about the CNCF is that we, when we started it, we had very simple foundational principles we wanted to follow right. One was, we wanted to have end users involved. A lot of foundations as become very vendor-driven and very vendor-centric. And you kind of lose your, your core base of the practitioners as you call us right? The guys who actually need to solve problems they're trying to make a living solving problems for the industry, not just for selling products, right? And so it was important that we get those end users involved and that, and that's probably the biggest changes. It's a great technology body. We had great technologists, great engineers and the foundation but we also have a huge over 150 end users that have engaged and been very involved and contributing to the end users things of the community, contributing to the foundation now. And it's been awesome to see that come to fruition over the last three years. >> Yeah, it certainly part of the magic of open source, that's been so, so transformative. And we've seen that obviously with servers and Linux and what what that did, but we've been talking a lot lately too about kind of the anniversary of the of the Agile Manifesto and kind of the Agile Movement and really changing the prioritization around change and really making change a first class citizen as opposed to kind of a nightmare I don't want to deal with and really building systems and ways of doing things that adopt that. I want to just to pull up the Cloud Native definition 'cause I think it's interesting. We talk about Cloud Native a lot and you guys actually wrote some words down and I think it's worth reading them that Cloud Native Technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in dynamic environments. Dynamic environments is such a key piece to this puzzle because it used to be, this is your infrastructure person, you've got to build something that fits into this. Now with an app-centric world has completely flipped over and the application developer doesn't have to worry about the environment anymore, right? It's spin it up and make it available to me when I need it. A really different way of thinking about things than kind of this static world. >> Definitely and then that was the big missing piece for all those years was how do you get to this dynamic environment, right, that embraces change and embraces risk to some extent. Not risk like you heard in the past with risk avoidance is so important to have, right. It's really more, how do you embrace risk and fail earlier in the process, learn earlier in the process so that when you get to production you're not failing, you're not having to worry about failure because you cut as much as you could in the earlier phases of your development life cycle. And that's been set, like you said that dynamic piece has just been such the difference. I think in why it's been taken off. >> Yeah. >> And industry this last five years now that we've been around. >> Yeah, for sure. So then the next one well, I'm just going to go through them 'cause there's three main tenants of this thing. These techniques and techniques enabled loosely coupled systems that allow engineers to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimum toil. I mean, those are, those are really hard challenges in a classic waterfall way with PRDs and MRDs and everything locked down in a big, giant Gantt chart that fills half of the half the office to actually be able to have loosely coupled systems. Again a really interesting concept versus hardwired, connected systems. Now you're talking about APIs and systems all connecting. Really different way to think about development and how do you build applications. >> Yeah and the interesting thing there is the very first definition we came up with five plus years ago was containers, containerized workloads, right? And being technologist, everyone focused on those words containers and containerized and then everything had to be a container, right? And to your point, that isn't what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to create services that are just big enough to support whatever is needed for that service to support and be able to scale those up and down independently of other dependent systems that may have different requirements associated with what they have to do, right. And it was more about that keeping those highly efficient type of patterns in mind of spinning up and spinning down things that don't have impact or cause impact to other larger components around them was really the key not containers or containerized. >> Right. >> Obviously that's one of the patterns you could follow to create those types of services and those patterns, but there is nothing that guarantees it has to be a container that can do that. Lots of BMS today and lots of Bare Metal Servers can have a similar function. They're just not going to be as dynamic as you may want them to be in other environments. >> Right and then the third tenant, three of three is fostering sustainable ecosystem of open source vendor neutral projects, democratizing state-of-the-art patterns to make these innovations accessible for everyone. So just the whole idea of democratization of technology, democratization of data, democratization of tools, to do something with the data to find the insight democratization of the authority to execute on those decisions once you get going on that, I mean the open source and kind of this democratization to enable a broad distribution of power to more than just mahogany row, huge fundamental shift in the way people think about things. And really even still today, as everyone's trying to move their organizations to be more data-centric in the way they operate, it is really all about the democratization and getting that information and the tools and the ability to do something with it to as broad a group of people as you can. And that's even before we talk about open source development and the power of again, as you said, bringing in this really active community who want to contribute. It's a really interesting way that open source works. It's such a fun thing to watch, and I'm not a developer from the outside, but to see people get excited about helping other people. I think that's probably the secret to the whole thing that really taps into. >> Yeah, it is. And open source, there were discussions about open source for 20 plus years trying to get more into open source contributing to open source in an enterprise mindset, right? And it could never really take off 'cause it's not really the foundation or the platforms or the capabilities needed to do that. And now to your point, open source was really the underlying engine that is making all of this possible. Without open source and some of those early days of trying to get more open source and understanding of open source in the enterprise, I think we'd still be trying to get adoption but open source had just gotten to that point where everyone wanted to do more with open source. The CNCF comes along and said, here's the set of democratized, we're not going to have kingmakers in this organization. We're going to have a lot of open solutions, a lot of good options for companies to look at, and we're not going to lock you in to anything. 'Cause that's another piece of that open source model, right. Open source still can lock you in, right. But if you have open choices within open source, there's less, lock-in potential and locking isn't really a horrible thing. It's just one of those tenants you don't want to be tied too tightly to any one solution or one hope, open source even program because that could 'cause issues of that minimal toil we talked about, right. If you have a lot of dependencies and a lot of, I always joked about OpenStack but if I have to email two guys, if I find an issue in OpenStack about security that's not really a great security model that I can tell my customers I have your security covered, right? So, you want to get away from emails and having to ask for help, if you see a big security issue you want to just address it right then and fix it fast. >> Right, right. So much to unpack there. And for those that don't follow you, you've done a ton of presentations. You've got a ton of great content out of the internet with deep technical dives, into some of this stuff and the operational challenges in your philosophies but good keeping it kind of high level here. 'Cause one of the themes that comes up over and over in some of the other stuff I saw from you is really about asking the right questions. And we hear this time and time again, that the way to get the right answer first you got to frame the question right. And you talk quite extensively about asking the why and asking the how. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit as to why those two questions are so important and how do you ask them in a way that doesn't piss everybody off or scare them away when you're at a big company like MasterCard that has a lot of personal information, you're in the finance industry, you got ton of regulation but still you're asking how and you're asking why. >> Yeah, definitely. And those, those are two questions that I keep coming back to in the industry because they are, they're not asked enough in my opinion. I think they, for the reasons you brought up those there's too much pushback or there's, you don't want to be viewed as someone who's being difficult, right? And there maybe other reasons why you don't want to ask that but I like to ask the why first because it, you kind of have to understand what's the problem you're trying to solve. And it kind of goes back to my engineering background, I think right. I love to solve problems and one of my early days and you might have heard this on one of my, my interviews, right. But in my early days, I was trying to fix a problem that I was on an advanced engineering team. And I was tier four support in a large Telco. And for months we had this issue with one of our large oil based companies and no one could solve it. And I was on call the night that they called in. And I asked the guy a simple question, tell me which lights you see on this DHUC issue? Which is a piece of equipment that sits between a ATM network and a regular Sonnet network. So we're watching, I'm asking them as kind of find out where in this path, there's a problem. And the guy tells me where there's no lights on. And I'm like well, plug in the power and let me know when it boots up and then let's try another test. And that was the problem. So my, the cleaning crew would come through and unplugged it. And so I learned early on in my crew that if you don't ask those simple questions, you just assume that everything's working almost nine times out of 10, it's the simple, easy solution to a problem. You're just too busy thinking of all the complex things that could go wrong and trying to solve all the hard problems first. And so I really try to help people think about, ask the why questions, ask, why is this important? Why do we need to do this now? Why, what would happen if we don't do this? If we did it this other way, what's the downside of doing it this other way? Really think through your options, 'cause it may take you 20, 30 minutes to kind of do a good analysis of a problem, but then your solution you're not going to spend weeks trying to troubleshoot when it doesn't work because you put the time upfront to think about it. So that's sort of the main reason why I like to ask the why and the how, because it forces you to think outside of your normal, my job is to take this cog and put it over here and fix this, right. And you don't want to be in that, that mode when you're solving complex problems because you overlook or you miss the simple things. >> Right. So you don't like the 'cause we've always done it that way? (both laughing) >> I do not. And I hear that a lot everywhere I've been in the industry and anywhere, any company you have those, this is the way we've always done it. >> Yeah, yeah. Just like the way we've always traveled, right. And the way we've always been educated and the way we've always consumed entertainment. It's like really? I wanted to (indistinct) >> I have learned though that there's a good, I like to understand the reason behind why we've always done it that way. So I do always ask that question. >> Right. >> I don't turn around on someone and get mad at them and you say, Oh, we can't we have to do it differently. I don't have the mindset of let's throw that out the window because I realized that over time something happened. It's like when I had younger kids, I always laugh because they put these warnings on those whatever they call them at the kids stand up in them. >> Right, the little, the little (indistinct) >> Don't put them on top of the stairs right. These stupid little statements are written on there. And I always thought I was dumb. And if somebody told me, well that's because somebody put their kid near the pool and they drown. >> Right, right. >> You have to kind of point out the obvious to people and so, >> Yeah. >> I don't think it's that dangerous of a situation and in the work environment, but hopefully we're not making the same mistakes that have been prevented by not allowing just the, not because we've done it this way before modeled it to go forward. >> Right, right now we have a rule around here too. There's a reason we have every rules is because somebody blew it at some point in time. That's why we have the rule that I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about automation, right? 'Cause automation is such a big and important piece of this whole story especially as these systems scale, scale, scale. And we know that people are prone to errors. I mean, I had seen that story about the cleaner accidentally unplugging things. We all know that people fat fingers, copy and paste is not used as universally as it should be. But I wonder if you could share, how important automation is. And I know you've talked a lot about how people should think about automate automation and prioritizing automation and helping use automation to both make people more productive but also to prioritize what the people should be working on as well as lowering the error rate on stuff that they probably shouldn't be doing anyway. >> Exactly, yeah automation to me is, as you've heard me say before is it's something that is probably almost as big of a key tenet as open source should be, right? It's one of those foundational things that it really helps you to get rid of some of that churn and some of the toil that you run into in a production environment where you're trying to always figure out what went wrong and why did this system not work on this point in time and this day and this deployment, and it's almost to your point always a fat finger, someone deleted an IP address from the IPAM system. There's all kinds of errors that you can people can tell you about that have happened. But to the root of your question is automation needs to be thought about from three different primary areas in my view, in my experience. The first one is the infrastructure as code, software defined infrastructure, right. So the networking teams and the storage teams and the security teams are probably the furthest behind in adopting automation in in their jobs, right. And their jobs are probably the most critical pieces of the infrastructure, right? And so those are, those are pieces that I really highly encouraged them to think about how can they automate those areas. The second piece is I think is equally as important as the infrastructure piece is the application side. When I first joined multiple enterprises in the past, the test coverage is in the low 10's to 20%, right. And your test coverage is a direct correlation to how well your application is going to behave and production in terms of failures, right? So if you have low test coverage, you're going to have high failure rates. It's sort of over over all types of industries every study has shown that, right. So getting your test coverage up and testing the right things not just testing to have test coverage right. >> But actually. >> Right, right. >> Thinking through your user stories and acceptance criteria and having good test is really, really important. So you have those two bookends, right. And in between, I think it's important that you look at how you connect to these services, these distributed systems we talked about in the opening right. If you fully automate your infrastructure and fully automate your application development and delivery, that's great. But if in the middle you have this gooey middle that doesn't really connect well doesn't really have the automation in place to ensure that your certificates are there that your security is in place. That middle piece can become really a problem from a security and from a availability issue. And so those those are the two pieces that I say really focus on is that gooey middle and then that infrastructure piece is really the two keys. >> Right, right. You've got another group of words that you use a lot. I want you to give us a little bit more color behind it. And that's talking to people to tell them that they need to spend more time on investigation. They need to do more experimentation. And then and the one that really popped out to me was it was retro to retrospective to not necessarily a postmortem which I thought is interesting. You say retrospective versus the postmortem, because this is an ongoing process for continuous improvement. And then finally, what seems drop dead dumb obvious is to iterate and deliver. But I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on how important it is to experiment and to investigate and to have those retrospectives. >> Yeah definitely. And then it kind of goes back to that culture we want to create in a Cloud Native world, right. We want to be open to thinking about how we can solve problems better, how we can have each iteration we want, to look at, how do we have a less toil, have less issues. How do we improve the, I liked kind of delight in your experience, how do you make your developers and your customers specific, but specifically how do you make your customers so happy with your service? And when you think about those sort of areas, right. You want to spend some portion of your time dedicated to how do I look at and investigate better ways of doing things or more improvements around the way my customer experience is being delivered. Asking your customers questions, right. You'd be surprised how how many customers don't ever get asked for their opinion on how something works, right. And they want to be asked, they'd love to give you feedback. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go do it that next iteration, right? The old adage I like to use is if Henry Ford had listened to his customers he would have tried to breed a faster horse, right? And so you have to kind of think about what you want to try to deliver as a product and as an organization but at the same time, that input is important. And I think, I say carve it out, because if you don't, we're so busy today and there's so much going on in our lives. If you don't dedicate and carve out some of that time and protect that time, you will never get to that, right. It's always a, I'll get to that next year. Maybe our next iteration I'll try, right. And so it's important to really hold that time as sacred and spend time every week, every couple of weeks, whatever it works out in the schedule, but actually put that in your calendar and block out that time and use it to really look at what's possible, what's relevant, what kind of improvements you can have. I think those are really the key the key takeaways I can have from that piece of it. And then, the last one you asked about, which I think is so important, is the retrospective, right. Always trying to get better and better at what you do is, is an engineer's goal, right? We never liked to fail. We never liked to do something twice, right? We don't want to, we want to learn the first time we make a mistake and not make it over and over again. So that those retrospectives and improving on what you're doing iteratively. And to the point you brought up and I like to bring this up a lot, 'cause I've been part not at MasterCard, but at other companies parts of companies that would talk a great game come up with great stories, say here's our plan. And then when we get ready to go to deliver it, we go and we reinvestigate the plan and see if there's a better plan. And then we get to a point where we're ready to go execute. And then we go back and start all over again, right. And you've got to deliver iteratively, if you don't, you're the point I like to always make is you're never going to be ready, right. It's like, when are you ready to have kids? You never ready to have kids, right. You just have to go and you'll learn as you go. You know so. >> Right, right, I love that. Well again, Ken, you have so much great stuff out there for technical people that want to dive in deep? So I encourage them just to do a simple YouTube or excuse me, YouTube search or Google search but I want to give you the last word. One word, I'm going to check the transcript when this thing is over that you've used probably more than any other word while we've been talking for the last few minutes is toil. And I think it's really interesting that it brings up and really highlights your empathy towards what you're trying to help developers avoid and what you're trying to help teams avoid so that they can be more productive. You keep saying, avoid the toil, get out of the toil, get out of this kind of crap that inhibits people from getting their job done and being creative and being inventive and being innovative. Where does that come from? And I just love that you keep reinforce it and just kind of your final perspective as we wrap on 2020 and another year of CNCF and clearly containers and Kubernetes and Cloud Native is continues to be on fire and on a tear. I just wonder if you can share a little bit of your perspective as a founding member as we kind of come to the end of 2020. >> Yeah definitely. Thanks again for having me. It's been a great, great discussion. I am a developer by background, by trade today, I still develop. I still contribute to open source and I've had this mantra pretty much my entire career that you have to get into the weeds and understand what everyone's experiencing in order to figure out how to solve the problems, right. You can't be in an ivory tower and look down and say, Oh, there's a problem, I'm going to go fix that. It just doesn't work that way. And most problems you try to solve in that model will be problems that no other team has really experienced. And there not going to be help, they're not going to be thankful that you solved the problem they don't have, right? They want you to solve a problem that they have. And so I think that that's sort of a key for the reason why I spent so much time talking about that as I live it every day. I understand it. I talk with my development community and with a broader community of developers at MasterCard and understand the pains that they're going through and try to help them every day with coming up with ways to help make their lives a lot easier. So it's important to me and to to all organizations out there and in all of the, in the world. So, CNCF its been great. It's still growing. I'm always looking for end users. I'd love to talk to you. Well, you can reach out to, to the CNCF if you'd like to learn more, our website has information on how to get connected to the end user community. We community within the CNCF that is not, it's a private community. So you don't have to worry about your information being shared. If you don't want people to know you belong to the community, you don't have to list that information. If you want to list it, you're welcome to list it. There's no expectations on you to contribute to open source, but we do encourage you to contribute, and are here to support that end user community any way we can. So thanks again for having us and looking forward to, to a great show in North America. >> All right well, thank you, Ken, for sharing your information sharing the insight, sharing the knowledge really appreciate it and great to catch up. All right. He's Ken, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE with our ongoing coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 North America Digital. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with thecube coming to you from our palo alto studios for the continuing coverage of kubecon cloud native con 2020 north america there was the european version earlier in the summer it's all virtual uh so the good news is we don't have to get on planes and we can get guests from all over the world and we're excited to welcome back for his return to the cube ricardo rocha he is a staff member and computing engineer at cern ricardo great to see you hello thanks for having me absolutely and you're coming in from uh from geneva so you're you already had a good thursday i bet yeah we're just finishing right now yeah right so in in getting ready for this um interview i was looking at the interview that you did i think it was two cube cons ago uh in may of 2019 and it just strikes me a lot of people know what cern is but a lot of people don't know what's cern in so i wonder if you can just give you know kind of the 101 of what cern's mission is and what is some of the work that you guys do there yeah sure uh so cern is the european organization for uh nuclear research we are the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and our main mission is uh fundamental research so we try to answer big questions about why don't we see antimatter what is dark matter or dark energy other questions about the origin of the universe and to answer these questions we build very large machines particle accelerators where we try to recreate some of [Music] the moments just after the universe was created the big bang to try to understand better what was the state of the matter at that time the result of all of this is very often a lot of data that has to be analyzed and that's why we traditionally have had a huge requirements for computing resources during the the start of cern we always had this this large large requirements right and so you have this large particle accelerators as you said large machines the one that you've got now the the latest one how long has that one been operational yeah so it started uh like maybe around 10 years ago the first launch was a bit before that uh and it's uh it's a very large uh it's the largest one ever built so it's 27 kilometers in perimeter we inject protons into different uh directions and then we we make them collide where we build these huge detectors that can can see what's happening in these collisions uh the the main the main particle accelerator is this one we do have other experiments we have a nancy meta factory that is just uh down from my office and we have other types of experiments as well going right 27 kilometers that's a big that's a big number and then and then again just so people get some type of sense of scale so then you you you speed up the particles you smash them together you see what happens they collect all the data what types of data sets are generated off off just a one you know kind of event and i don't even know if that's a relative you know if that's a valid measure how do how do you measure kind of quantities of data around event just you know kind of for orders of magnitude right so uh the way it works is as you said we accelerate the particles to very close to the speed of light and we increase the energy by by having the beams well controlled and then at specific points we make them collide we have this gigantic detectors underground all of this is 100 meters in the ground and these detectors are pretty much a very large camera that would take something like 40 million pictures a second and the result of this is a huge amount of data each of these detectors can generate up to one petabyte of second this is not something we can record so what we do is we have hardware filters that will bring this down to something we can manage which is in the order of a few tens of gigabytes per second wow so you've been you've got a very serious computing challenge ahead of you because you're the one that's on the hook for for grabbing the data recording the data making the data available for for people to use um on their experiments um so we're here at kubecon cloud native con where did containers come into the story uh and and kubernetes specifically what was the real uh challenge that you're trying to overcome yeah so uh this is a a long story of uh using distributed computing at cern and other types of computing so as i mentioned we generate a lot of data we generate something like 7 but of 70 petabytes of data every year and we accumulated something over one half an exabyte of data by now so uh traditionally we've had to build this software ourselves um which was uh because there was not so many people around that would have this kind of needs but this revolution with containers and the clouds appearing kind of allowed us to to join other other communities and benefit also from their work and not have to do everything ourselves so this is the main probe for us to start doing this the other point is more containerization we traditionally are very we have a lot of needs to share information but also share resources between physicists and engineers so this idea of containerizing the work including all the code all the data and then sharing this with our colleagues is very appealing the fact that we can also take this unit of work and just deploy it in any infrastructure that has a standardized api like kubernetes and scale that monitoring the same way it's also very appealing so all of these things kind of connect with our way of working our natural way of working i would say right so you've talked about the this upgrade is coming um to the particle accelerator in a couple four or five years whatever that timeline is relatively soon um this as you've said before is a huge step function in the data that's that that's going to come off these experiments i mean how are you keeping up on the compute side with the fundamental shift in on kind of the physics side and the data that's going to be generated to make sure that you can keep up and i think you said it in a prior interview somewhere along the way that you know you don't want to be the bottleneck when there's all this great work being done but if it's not captured and made available for people to do stuff with the data then you know it's not uh it's not the greatest experiment so how are you keeping up and and what's the relative scale to have what you got to do on the compute side to keep up with the the guys on the physics side yeah so the the the idea well we what we will have to deal with is an increase of 10 times of more data than we have today we already have a lot and very soon we'll have a lot more but this is not i would say this is not the first time this kind of uh step happens uh in our computing we always kind of found a new technology or a new way to do things that would improve in in this case uh what we do is we do what we always do which is we try to look for all sorts of new technologies or all sorts of new resources that we could make use of in this case a lot is involving improving our own software to replace what we currently use with hardware triggers to replace that with software-based using accelerators gpus and other types of accelerators this will play a big role and also making our software more efficient in this way the second thing that we are doing is trying to make our infrastructure more agile and this is where cloud native kubernetes plays a huge role so that we can benefit from external resources uh we we can always think of like expanding our in on-premises resources but it's also very good to be able to just go and fish around if there's something available externally kubernetes plays a very big role in that respect as well yeah i'd love to dig into that a little deeper because the cloud native foundation is a super active foundation obviously a ton of activity around kubernetes so what does that mean to you as an infrastructure provider you know to your own company being on the hook to have now you know kind of an open source community that's supporting you indirectly via ongoing developments and ongoing projects and having as you said kind of this broader group of brain power to pull from to help you move your own infrastructure along yeah i think this this is great we've had really good experiences in the past we've been uh heavy users of uh linux from from from for a very long time we've used openstack for our private cloud and we've been heavily involved in that community as well we not only uh contribute as end users but we also uh offer some some manpower for development and helping with the community and we are doing the same with kubernetes uh and this is uh this is really we we end up getting a lot more than we we are putting in the community we are quite involved but uh it's so large and and and with such big players that have very similar needs to ours that uh we end up having a lot a lot more back than we are putting in we try to help as much as possible but uh yeah we have limited resources as well now open source is an amazing it's just an amazing innovation uh machine and and obviously it's proved as its value over a lot of things from linux to kubernetes being one of the most recent i want to shift gears a little bit right and ask you just your your take on public cloud right one of the huge benefits of public cloud is is the flexibility to add capacity shrink capacity as you need it and you talked again in a prior thing i was looking at you know that you definitely have spikes uh in demand spikes whether there's a high frequency of experiments i don't know how frequently you run those things versus maybe a conference or something where you said people you know want to get access to the data run experiments prior to your conference do you where does public cloud play in your thoughts and maybe you're there today maybe you're not how do you think about you know kind of public cloud generically but more specifically you know that ability to add a little bit more flex in your compute horsepower or are you just going up into the right up into the right and not really flexing down very much yeah so this is this is something we've been working on for a few years now uh we it's uh it's uh it's i would say it's an ongoing work it's a situation that will will not uh be very clear for the for the next few years but again what what we try to do is just to explore as much as possible all kinds of resources that can help us what we did in the kubecon last year was this demonstration that we can actually scale we can scale out and burst for for this uh spiky workloads we have we can burst to the to the public cloud quite easily using this kind of cloud native technologies that we have today and this is extremely important because it kind of changes our mindset instead of having to to think only on investing on premises we can think that maybe we can cover for the majority of use cases but then explore and burst to the public cloud this has to be easy in terms of infrastructure and that we are at that point right now with kubernetes we also have kind of workload that is maybe easier to do these things than than a traditional i.t where services are very interconnected in our case we are more thinking of batch workloads where we can just submit jobs uh and then fetch the data back right this also has a few challenges but but it's i would say it's it's easier than the traditional ite service deployments the other aspect where the public cloud is also very interesting is uh for resources that we don't have in large quantities so we have a very large farm for with cpus we have some gpus and it's very good to be able to explore this new accelerator technologies and maybe expand our available pool of accelerators by going to the public cloud maybe to use them but also to validate to see which ones are best for our use cases and explore that option as well it's not only general capacity it's really like dedicated um hardware that we might not even have ever like we think of tpus or ipu's it's something that is very interesting that we can scale and just go go use them in the public cloud yeah that's a really interesting point because because the cloud providers are big enough now right that they're building all kind of specialized specialized server specialized uh cpu specialized gpus dpus is a new one i've heard a data processing unit as you said there's fpgas and all kinds of accelerators so it is a really rich environment for as you said to do your experiments and find what the optimal solution is for whatever that particular workload is but ricardo i want to shift gears a little bit as we come to the end of 2020 thankfully for a whole bunch of reasons as you look forward to 2021 i mean clearly anticipating and starting to plan to get ready for your upgrade as a priority i'm just curious what are your other priorities and how does you know kind of the compute infrastructure in terms of an investment within cern you know kind of rank with the investment around the physical things that you're building the big machines because without the compute those other things really don't provide much data and i know those are we always talked about how expensive the particle accelerators is it's an interesting number and it's big but you guys are a big piece of that as well so what are your priorities looking forward to 2021 yeah from from the compute side i think we are keeping the the priorities in similar to what we've been doing the last few years which is to make sure that we improve all our automation to improve efficiency as well to prepare for these upgrades we have but also there's a lot of activity in this new uh area with machine learning popping up we have a ton of services appearing where people want to to start doing machine learning in many many use cases in some cases they want to do the filtering in the detectors in other cases they want to generate simulation data a lot faster using machine learning as well so i think this will be something that will be a huge topic for next year even for the next couple of years which is to see how we can offer our users and physicists the best service so that they don't have to care about the infrastructure they don't have to know about the details of how they scale their their model training their serving of their models all of this i think this will be a very big topic um it's something that it's becoming really a big part of of the world computing for high energy physics and for cern as well that's great we see that a lot you know just applied machine learning to very specific problems you talked about you still can't even record all that information that comes off those things you have to do some compression technology and other things so real opportunities barely scratched on the surface of machine learning and ai but i'm sure you're going to be using it a ton well ricardo give you give you the last word um we're in at cncf's uh kubecon cloud native con you know what do you get out of these types of shows and why is this such again kind of why is it such an important piece of your way you get your job done yeah honestly uh with all this uh situation right now i kind of really miss this kind of conferences in person uh it's really a huge opportunity to connect with uh with the other end users but also with with the community and to talk to the developers discuss things over uh coffee beer this is something that is really something that is really useful to to have this kind of meetings every year uh i think what what uh i always try to say is uh this this wall infrastructure is is truly making a big impact in the way we do things so we can only thank the community uh it's it allows us to to kind of shift to focusing on a higher level to focus more on our use cases instead of having to focus so much on the infrastructure we kind of start giving it as a given that the infrastructure scales and we can just use it and focus on optimizing our own software so this is a huge contribution we can only thank the cncf projects and everyone involved great well thank you for that uh that summary and that that's a terrific summary so ricardo thank you so much for all your hard work answering really big helping answer really big questions and uh and for joining us today and sharing your insight thank you very much all right he's ricardo i'm jeff you're watching the cube from our palo alto studios for continuing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon 2020. thanks for watching see you next time [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a cube conversation, you know we're like six, seven, eight months into this COVID thing. We're going to be dealing with it for a while. And one of the themes we've heard about over and over as kind of a result of COVID is an increased in the attack surfaces. More people are working from home or work from anywhere. And security has only been increasing in importance. And we're excited to have somebody from the alumni group who's been on before she is Sandra Wheatley the SVP marketing threat intelligence and influencer communications at Fortinet. Sandra great to see you. >> Thank you Jeff, I'm happy to be here. >> Yeah, I think actually I misspoke. We've had a ton of great Fortinet people on we've talked to John and Ken and Phil and Tony, but actually I'm not sure that we've had you on before, so great to have you. >> No, this is my first time. >> Awesome, so let's jump into it but we're going to take a slightly different tack today and we're not going to talk about the technology as much as this other pesky little problem, which is people. And, you know we know there's a huge skills gap in tech in general right. There's tons and tons of open recs. If you go into all the big sites and then security it's even a more specific and a more acute problem. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about kind of your perspective on this problem, being a senior executive you know, at a security company, people is a big issue. How do you guys kind of look at the problem? How should people think about it and what are we going to do about it? >> Well, Jeff, you were completely right. The Cyber security skills gap. It's one of the biggest challenges that's facing organizations today. I mean if you look at the larger landscape, cyber crime is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world, in fact by 2021, it'll cost the world about 6 trillion in total. And so tackling this issue continues to be a big problem. And it's exasperated by this the skills gap we recently did a study of Fortinet and 73% of respondents acknowledged that at least one intrusion could be attributed to the lack of skilled professionals. So it's a huge problem. We know that it would take about 4 million professionals to close that gap. And in particular with COVID, it's become even more increased. We've seen a big uptick in attacks from cyber criminals, really targeting remote workers. It's a way into the enterprise network. We've seen a resurgence of ransomware and phishing targeting that workforce. And so as this threat landscape continues to increase it's definitely a problem that cybersecurity organizations public and private partnerships really need to tackle. >> It's interesting because we talk a lot about automation and we talk about the scale of the attacks and the scale of data and you know, everything is just going so up until the right that without automation, you know you have no hope and you need some help to basically separate signal from noise. That said you still need people. And really that automation is going to hopefully get the high visibility the high priority issues to the right people. But ultimately that's an enabler for a person, not a replacement for person, for people. And it doesn't take away this tremendous need for more security professionals. And the other thing that we hear Sandra over and over right, is that security is no longer a bolt on it's no longer, you know, you just build the wall around the outside of everything, right? It's got to be baked in throughout the entire process of the product development and deployment. So the importance and kind of the reach and the breadth of security people in the influence of the building new products and shipping new products has never been greater and yet we've got this huge shortage. >> Exactly and I think you touched on it. You know, what we're hearing from our customers is that they're really using this period during COVID to really take a long-term look at their cybersecurity investments and strategy. And so you're right increasingly organizations are taking more of a platform approach to security, where they have more automation integration and AI that's one help. The other area is organizations need to be making their employees more cyber aware because it impacts everyone even employees working at home organizations. We just released InfoSec training and we offered it we made it available for free, and it really enables organizations to help educate their employees about the risk of cybersecurity and helping them to understand not to hit on the phishing email because, you know, 68% of intrusions happened as a result of careless mistakes by employees. That's a big issue, but also really making sure that we bring more professionals into the industry. I like to say, there's no job security like cybersecurity. So at the beginning of COVID, we made all of our training free and to the public in general. And I believe we had 500,000 registrations in the first six months. So that really underscores the demand for cybersecurity skills. And then organizations can also really be tapping into underrepresented of demographics, like veterans like women who make up only 14% of the workforce overall. So there was a lots of things we can be doing and working together on this problem. >> Yeah, you touched on a whole bunch of things there. So let's unpack a couple of them specifically. One of the cool things about security is that you guys do work together and that there is a big benefit from working together. So it's a great place for kind of coopetition, especially as new threats come in and you guys can share that information. So there is an interesting kind of an ecosystem that there's, you know shared basically resources against the bad guys. But you guys did a really interesting thing with Salesforce, with the world economic forum specifically to go after this problem. So where did that come from, Why Salesforce? Why world economic forum and why take you know, kind of, I guess, out of the industry approach to really addressing getting more people as cybersecurity professionals? >> Well, for dinette as a founding member of the C foresee cybersecurity forum, it was created by the world economic forum about two years ago. And right from the beginning one of the initiatives that we began working on was to reduce the skills gap. And so we started working with the world economic forum Salesforce, which is another founding member and others to tackle this problem. And so we're provide all of our training we provide our training and curriculum on the salesforce Trailhead platform. We've also entered into another partnership with IBM, where we're providing our training on there as cyber skills platform. We're working with local universities like Berkeley and others to make sure that we're getting more of the curriculum into their certifications and degree programs. Interestingly enough, one of the issues with this challenges is that there's not a lot of universities offering degrees in cybersecurity, which is really surprising. And so we're seeing a lot more uptick and interest around awareness around this area. And so it's very encouraging to see the results of some of these partnerships. >> I don't, I mean, you I'm going to tease you kind of buried the lead but so people understand what you just said. You guys basically opened up your training catalog for free, during COVID as a reaction to help basically get more people trained. Am I getting that right? >> That's completely right. We saw that this is something that can really help our customers during this time. It's something we're committed to closing and we felt this was a really impactful way to help with that issue. >> That's amazing. And I saw you in an interview with Rob Rashad I believe is his name from your team. I wonder if you can, again, share with us some of the details in terms of the numbers of people that have gone through this program. Cause he mentioned them, somebody didn't write them down this is pretty significant numbers that you guys are running through this free program. >> Yeah, so we just passed a great big milestone of 500,000 certifications. Half of those have just been this year and that program's been in place for many, many years. So there's no doubt that this is something that's in huge demand. And so we continue to offer those trainings. This was one of the reasons why we just rolled out the InfoSec training for our customers and others to educate their employees. I mean, that's one point I think we had someone registering every seven minutes. And so the response to that was excellent. And that training program has eight different modules and the curriculum in that program actually provides credits for ISC, which is a a big certification in cybersecurity and CIISSP. So, you know, it's just an invaluable training program. >> That's wild, and again, it's free all the way, not just to register for, you know, the one-on-ones, but all the way through the certification process at the end. >> Well at the end, if you want to get the actual certification that's something that you can do separately after you do the training. Although we're working with some nonprofits to help pay for those certifications so that there's no financial burden to people. >> Wow, that's tremendous. And then the other piece that you mentioned but I just want to highlight it is the opportunity to go after underrepresented groups. And you specifically mentioned that you have a program for veterans and again, it seems so logical but some people just don't get it right. Then you've got a skills shortage and you've got a talent shortage. Why not tap into those markets and of those pools of people that are under utilized because, Oh, by the way, they probably have a bunch of good qualified people in there that you can leverage. >> That's exactly right, like vets if you look at take veterans for an example, they already have a lot of the skills that really work well for cybersecurity like situational awareness. They work very well under pressure. And so we started our veterans program about two years ago. And in addition to our training we offer mentoring curriculum, resume building, interviews skills building and now at this point, trained about a thousand veterans many have had jobs on one thing that we do that's different to other programs is that we bridge those candidates to our partners and customers who are looking for talent and really closed that whole loop. So it's not just about the training, but it's also finding them as well at the end of the training once it's been completed. >> Right, that's great. I also want to touch on another thing that you do beyond just training and this comes from you published a blog on July eighth of this year talking about overcoming the cybersecurity gap skills gap. But you talked about other things beyond just the people. And I want to highlight really some attitudinal things that you suggest for people to get over this world view, cyber security as an enabler, right? Not an obstacle recognize cybersecurity is a team effort. It's not just some superstar, get the C-suite involved collaborate on cybersecurity awareness and you know, thinking about these this issue at a little broader and a more kind of macro company-wide scale versus it's just the security people's job over in the security people's corner. And that's really the best way to take care of it. >> Absolutely, and that goes back to my earlier point. I mean the insider threat continues to be the biggest vector for attacks. A lot of times it's, you know, employees hitting on a phishing email I'm sure you've seen the increase in those. And so it's really, you're right. It's more, the responsibility just doesn't lie with the folks who lead the cybersecurity organization. We all have a responsibility to be much more educated and aware. And so I think you know, the board has to get them more involved. Executive management needs to make sure that they're providing the right training and education to their employees, that they're providing mentoring that the really encouraging more employees to move into cybersecurity and become certified. So there's lots of things that organizations need to be doing that include education training. And then also making sure that you're making the right technology investments so that you have an infrastructure in place that's agile and can be flexible enough to meet the increasing demands of the threat landscape. >> Right, I just wonder if you can share some insight on the conversation that happened before you guys opened this up to be free. 'Cause it's clearly, it's a move to do the right thing. It's a move to you know, to respond to the community that's suffering and it's something that you guys could do you had at your disposal, but I'm sure there was some naysayers in there they're saying "No, we can't give this away. This is super valuable stuff." How, you know how did you kind of make that decision to move forward? And I'm curious how it's kind of played out over time now that you've basically, as you said increased your exposure and people that are trained and you know, I'm sure a lot of positive, you know kind of second order benefits that you really didn't plan on when you were just trying to make a decision to help the community. >> Well, this was a decision that came from the top. Our CEO has always been committed to training. I mean, this is why we even started the program which our NSE program is one of the most robust in the industry. And so it's something that the founders have always been committed to. It's something that we've invested in. So there really wasn't any obstacles to doing this. This was something that everyone jumped on board with. The other thing is we really wanted to help our customers during this time. And we felt that this was one really meaningful way. We could help them by providing this training for free. And making sure that they have the talent that they need to really address all of the, you know, the expanding attack surface. But we were surprised by the demand and the response that was outstanding, right from the get-go. And so while we, you know, we've talked about this being offered to the end of the year we haven't really made any plans to change that. And so that it may continue beyond the end of the year because the demand is so great and the results have been so positive. >> Right. And I'm just curious, do you have in the training and I didn't go through exhaustively through the whole list of all the courses, but beyond just the professionals do you have all the basic training just for employees? I just don't click on the link. You know, it's so funny. I was at, I think it was RSA. One of the keynotes was a, a Cisco executive and she said you know, we tell people not to click links but that's what we do all day long. We click links, that's what we do, it's part of our job. And, you know, it's such a a weird behavior to tell people not to do. And I'm still confused how SurveyMonkey gets people to click on SurveyMonkey links but that's a different conversation for another day but I mean, are you offering the whole suite? And I just love to get your perspective as a security executive, when you talk to clients how to think about things beyond just the obvious you know, don't click on phishing emails and, you know, tighten up everything, but you know, more kind of high level how to think about security in this increasingly complex and dangerous world, if you will. >> Yeah, well, the training program has eight modules. It goes from the most basic training to the most advanced training. So our NSE one and two are really more about educating people about the threat landscape the threats out there, what it looks like the most basic emphasis security awareness around what you should do and what you should be looking out for. And all of our employees afforded that take that training. We take up to NSE 4, that's, something that's mandated. And so at the very basic level all organizations should be leveraging those modules for their employees and for individuals who are just interested at large. And then it really advances very quickly after that. And it's the most advanced, you know, it covers, you know cloud, the whole attack surface, AI, threat intelligence. And actually, as I mentioned earlier, provides credits for some of that top cybersecurity certifications in the industry, especially at the level of CSO. So it's very broad, it's extremely robust. And addition to those modules we also have what we call fast track training and that's really utilized by our customers and partners. And that's more focused on specific technology areas. It's very condensed, it may be a day or two days. And the demand for that has been phenomenal. So that's been another program we added about two years ago. That's been very well received. >> Wow, well, good for you guys. Good for you guys for making a proactive move in a very positive way to help your customers and help the community at large. It's just great to see, these are just tough times. They're going to be tough times for a little while longer. So, you know, it's nice that you have resources available that you're able to make to make available to the larger community. And I'm sure it's nothing, but goodness will come from it. So good move by you guys. And I'm sure there's a lot of tangential benefits as well. >> Thank you Jeff. >> Well, thank you Sandra for sharing the story and great to meet you and expand our our community over on the fourth tenet side, we've had a lot of great guests over the year so it was great to great to have you on as well. >> Thank you very much. We really appreciate all the support. >> Absolutely, thank you. All right, so go out and get your free training. Go to fortinet.com and sign up and you too could be a security expert, or at least as far as you want to go all the way up to certification. I'm Jeff, she's Sandra you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with the cube coming to you from our palo alto studios with a cube conversation with a great influencer we haven't had him on for a while last had him on uh in may i think of 2019 mid 2019. we're excited to welcome back to the program he's kevin l jackson he is the ceo of gc globalnet kevin great to see you today hey how you doing jeff thanks for having me it's uh it's been a while but i really enjoyed it yeah i really enjoy being on thecube well thank you for uh for coming back so we've got you on to talk about citrix we had you last on we had you on a citrix synergy this year obviously covet hit all the all the events have gone virtual and digital and citrix made an interesting move they decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world and that's cloud so they had a citrix cloud summit they had a citrix workplace summit and now they just had their last one of the three which is the citrix security summit uh just wrapped up so before we jump into that i just want to get your take how are you doing how you getting through the kind of covid madness from you know the light switch moment that we experienced in march april 2. you know now we're like seven eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon well you know it's it was kind of different for me because um i've been working from home and remotely since i guess 2014 being a consultant and with all my different clients i was doing a lot more traveling um but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long it's sort of like uh old hat and i say welcome to my world but i find that you know society is really changing the things that you thought were necessary in business you know being physically at meetings and shaking hands that's all like you know although we don't do that anymore yeah i used to joke right when we started this year that we finally got to 2020 the year that we know everything right with the benefit of hindsight but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew in fact is not necessarily what we thought and um we got thrown into this we got thrown into this thing and you know thankfully for you and for me we're in you know we're in the tech space we can we can go to digital we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or you know so many businesses that are still suffering uh greatly but we were able to make the move in i.t and and citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work they've always been in remote work but this really changed the game a lot and i think as you said before we turned on the cameras accelerated you know this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on oh oh yeah absolutely and another one of the areas that was particularly um accelerated they sort of put the rockets on is security which i'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers i mean historically companies had most of their workforce in their own buildings on on their own property and there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely right but it's completely flipped now and it flipped within a period of a week or a week and a half and many of these companies were really scrambling to make you know their entire workforce be able to communicate collaborate and just get access to information uh remotely right right well david talked about it in the security keynote you know that you know as you said when this light switch moment hit in mid-march you had to get everybody uh secure and take care of your people and get them set up but you know he talked a little bit about you know maybe there were some shortcuts taken um and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration and again it's going to be going on for a while longer uh that there's really an opportunity to to make sure that you put all the proper uh systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people you're protecting the assets and you're protecting you know the jewels of the company which today are data right and data in all the systems that people are working with every single day yeah yeah absolutely they had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this uh accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud and it was just this this huge demand for remote work but it was also important to uh keep to think about the user experience the employee experience i mean they were learning new things learning new technologies trying to figure out how to how to do new things and that at the beginning of this uh trend this transition people were thinking that hey you know after a few months we'll be okay but now and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay so you have to understand that work is not a place and i think actually david said that right it's really you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model and you have to be able to measure the workers level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely so back to office is is not going to happen in reality so the employee experience through this digital environment this digital work space it's critical yeah i think one of the quotes he had whether i think was either this one or one of the prior ones is like back to work is not back to normal right we're not going to go back to the way that it was before but it's interesting you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation right how do we measure output versus you know just time punching the clock how do we give people that that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact in technology in their personal lives but there's an interesting you know kind of conflict and i think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use and yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack whether it's access to the systems whether it's the individual and and so there's always this built-in kind of tension between those two objectives well the tension is because of history security has always been sort of a a second thought an afterthought uh you know you said due to work oh security we'll catch up to it when we need to but now because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have the the need for security has is paramount so in order to attract that in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures uh this is when they when the data centers and we said well as long as it's in our data center we can control it but then we with this covet thing we'll just burst out of any data center we have to rely on cloud so this this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security right so you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach and it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data centric because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees right right and there's a very significant shift we hear all the time we've got rsa uh all the time to talk about security and that's this concept of zero trust and and the idea that rather than as you said kind of the old school you put a a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect right you kind of start from the perspective of i don't trust anybody i don't trust where they're coming from i don't trust their device i don't trust that they have access to those applications and i don't trust that they have access to that data and then you basically enable that on a kind of a need to know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least the least amount that they need to get their job done it's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security right and but it's a standardized approach i mean before present time you would customize security to the individual or 2d organization or component of the organization because you know you knew where they were and you would you would say well they won't accept this so we'll do that so everything was sort of piecemeal now that work is not a location you have to be much more standardized much more focused and being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and and secure browsers and some of the work that citrix has done with google has really been amazing they they looked at it from a different point of view they said okay where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from from anywhere but they all work through their browser so you know we could and i think this was something that the vice president at google said uh sunil potty i believe uh vice president of google cloud they said well we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience and he was talking about chrome so so citrix and and google have worked together to drive sort of an agent-less experience to order to enhance security so instead of making everything location specific or organizational specific they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model yeah it's interesting sunil's a really sharp guy we've had him on thecube a ton of times uh over the years but there's another really interesting take on security and i want to get your your feedback on it and that's kind of this coopetation right and silicon valley is very famous for you know coopetation you might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street at the same time you got an opportunity to partner you might share apis you know it's a really interesting thing and one of the the items that came out of the citrix show was this new thing called the workspace security alliance because what's interesting in security that even if we're competitors if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat where you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new you know kind of profile actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business as kind of you know us versus the bad guys even if we're you know competing for purchase orders we're competing you know kind of face-to-face so they announced this security alliance which is pretty interesting to basically bring in partners to support uh coopetition around the zero trust framework uh yeah absolutely this is happening across just about every industry though you're going away from uh point-to-point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem and in security just this week it's been highlighted by the uh the trick trick bot um activity this uh persistent uh malware that i guess this week is attacking um health care uh facilities the actual the u.s department of homeland security put out an alert now and this is a threat to the entire ecosystem so everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data and that improves that that is the way forward and that's really the only way to be successful so uh we have to go from this point-to-point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together and in this uh alliance the workspace security alliance is an indication that citrix gets it right everyone has workers everyone's workers are remote okay and everyone has to protect their own data so why don't we work together to do that yeah that's great that's interesting i had not heard of that alert but what we are hearing a lot of um in in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques uh that the bad guys are using to to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or have as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office and apparently you know ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransom where folks is very high and that they try to go after your backup and all in you know your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the uh for the want for the money so it's it's there's absolutely that's right yeah go ahead i'm sorry i was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities than now and at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel that data channel they didn't think they needed to right right one of the other interesting things that came up uh at the citrix event was the use of uh artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting you know kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual so what apps are they accessing what you know are they moving stuff around are they downloading stuff and to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies and behavior so even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're you know kind of out of band for a while then you know you can flag alerts to say hey what's going on is that this person did their job change you know why are they doing things that they don't normally do maybe there's a reason maybe there isn't a reason maybe it's not them so you know i think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're going to see the huge benefits come from this type of technology oh yeah absolutely i mean the citrix analytics for security is really a um security service right um that monitors the activities of of people on the internet and it this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight no one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet so bob working together leveraging this external service you can actually have automated remediation of your users you can put this specific user security risk score so um companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance right right and of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're seeing that we're just kind of on the cusp of right is 5g and iot so a lot more connected devices a lot more data a lot more data moving at machine speed which is really what 5g is all about it's not necessarily for having a better phone call right so we're just going to see you know kind of again this this growth in terms of attack surfaces this growth in terms of the quantity of data and the growth in terms of the the the rate of change that that data is coming in and and the scale and the speed with the old uh you know velocity and and variety and volume uh the old big data memes so again the other thing go ahead the other thing it's not just data when you have 5g the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network so it's a whole new paradigm yeah yeah so the uh once again to have you know kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust uh uh kind of baseline position right pretty damn important yeah absolutely with with edge computing the internet of things this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important and and uh another real important component of that is the um software-defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing right right yeah it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore i just want to you know again you've been doing this for a while get your feedback on on the fact that this is so much of a human problem and so much of a human opportunity versus just pure technology i think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology but i think you said before digital transformation is a cultural issue it's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and to change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring um as you said kobe kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge in a technology challenge yeah the technology in a relative sense of you is kind of easy right but it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right so you have to teach you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change they're uncomfortable in change so another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not faster than you think as well for sure you're right well that's great so kevin i'll give i give you the final word as as you think about how things have changed and again i think i think the significant thing is that we went from you know kind of this light switch moment where it was you know emergency and and quick get everything squared away but now we're in this we're in kind of this new normal it's going to be going for a while we'll get back to some some version of a hybrid uh solution at some point and you and i will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid if you will work environment and helping people you know be more productive with the tools they need it always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do so just kind of get your perspective as we you know kind of get to the end of 2020 we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today well to be honest we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility agility agility is the key to success this is like not locking into a single cloud you're going to have multiple clouds not locking into a single application you have multiple applications not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser you have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and uh teach their workers teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful that's a great that's a great way to leave it i saw beth comstack the former vice chair at ge give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was get comfortable with being uncomfortable and i think you nailed it right this is about agility it's about change it's we've seen it in devops where you embrace change you don't try to avoid it you know you take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't absolutely all right well kevin so great to catch up i'm i'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be uh shorter uh before the next time we get to see each other yes fine thank you very much i really enjoyed it absolutely all right he's kevin l jackson i'm jeff frick you're watching thecube from our palo alto studios keep conversation we'll see you next time you

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. I'm really excited to have our next guest on. You see them all over on social, a very active community member. And we have not heard from him for a little while, so I'm psyched to have him on. He's Bobby Allen. He is a tech and Cloud evangelist. Bobby, how you doing? >> I'm good, Jeff, how are you? >> Good, so, I'm just to have the obligatory check-in. So, you're getting through this madness of COVID, and family's good, everything's good? >> Yeah, everybody's good. I've got a teen and a twin. They haven't driven us crazy yet. So, so far, everybody's healthy and everybody's good. >> Good, good. So, let's jump into it, Bobby. You know, people talk about Cloud as being, there's a lot of great benefits to Cloud, you know, kind of, cost savings, and agility, and more importantly, really as a driver of innovation which I think most people are kind of late to the party there, they think really more on cost savings versus innovation, but now, it's been around, you know, AWS has been around kind of, broke open the door in terms of public Cloud, and then everything was a public Cloud and not because of public Cloud, and then we have hybrid Cloud and we have multicloud. And now, things are kind of, settling down. So, when you talk to people about Cloud, how should they think about the reality of it once they kind of, leave the trade show and they're getting back to their desk, and they actually have to start implementing some things? >> So, great question, Jeff, First of all, thank you for giving me that opportunity to answer that. This is how I think about Cloud. So, we often talk about Cloud in terms of gym memberships, right? Like going to the Cloud is like buying a gym membership. I actually argue that the Cloud is actually more like weights. If you apply weights to a good form you're going to get stronger, if you apply weights to a bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And what we found is that a lot of these companies, Jeff, are applying Cloud and automation to things that really didn't make a lot of sense. And so, they're wasting more money, they're getting more frustrated, and they're wondering why Cloud was not this magic bullet that just solved everything. It didn't fix world peace and global hunger, and now, they're worse off than they were before. There are a couple of reasons I can go into about that but hopefully, that answers the question at first. We're training the wrong way, Jeff. We're adding weight to things that don't make sense and we're hurting ourselves. >> So, it it just I picked the wrong application or are they operating it in a way as they operated it when it was on-prem? 'Cause the thing I always think of, which is interesting, right? Is everybody always talks about spinning up capacity, right? Spin up capacity. You're running a promotion on the Superbowl, and you're going to have a bunch of people hitting your coupon but they'd never talk about spinning it down. And I went to a really interesting presentation one time where a guy talked about their application. He's like, we like when you turn it off, when you turn off our application, we're not making any money, but it tells that you know, kind of how to operate this thing, which is turn it on, but don't forget to turn it off. And I think, you know, we had a situation on one of our little applications that we left open and let something run and ended up with a bill that we weren't necessarily anticipating, not because we did anything wrong, but we just didn't do the right thing, which was to turn off that particular service when we didn't need it. So, what's the wrong way, what's the wrong exercise? Why are people screwing this up? >> So, I think the problem, Jeff, is actually more upstream. So, my personal mantra for 2020 has been, tech is the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. And I think you nailed it, right? That Cloud is only about what you need to buy, not what you need to change, then you're going to be woefully disappointed with the results. And so, when I'm saying go upstream, what I'm finding is, missed expectations, Jeff, sink more projects than bad code broken APIs or large bills? The thing that we're missing is, we're thinking that technology replaces the need to have a conversation. So, for example, when we say we want to do something better in the Cloud, what does better actually mean? So, let's talk about food for a second. Hopefully, I don't make your people hungry 'cause it's around lunchtime. But if we think about Cloud application like a recipe, are we tryna make a mediocre recipe better or make a good recipe at scale, right? 'Cause if you take a nasty recipe and scale it out, you're just going to go broke faster. So, really the question is, which problem are we trying to solve? What is the issue that we're really wrestling with? And so, we need to have a better vocabulary, more descriptive conversations. And so, let me give you one that I often talk to customers about, right? We talk about technical debt a lot of times. And technical debt, Jeff, in my opinion, is being used as a misnomer. So, they're kind of, different sorts of debt that I see often in the C-suite. So, there's technical debt where I don't like what we're running, there's data debt where I don't know what we're running, and there's brain debt where I don't know what we want. And Jeff, I would argue that a lot of things that are masquerading as technical debt in the C-suite are really brain debt. I haven't figured out what we want to do, I haven't thought about what we're willing and able to change. And so, that's why the Cloud is a disappointment because we haven't figured out what we want for lunch. (laughs) >> So, it's a classic like people process technology program, you know, problem. And we hear about it all the time, right? And everyone loves to focus on the technology. I haven't heard it really explained that well, but that's what you're saying. It's like, we'll just jump to that part so we don't have to actually ask the hard questions, right? And the thing that makes me think of it when you talked about that is it's kind of like the whole data aggregation problem and all the big data adventures when half the time people don't know what data is where, so, even just going through the exercise of cataloging, finding, organizing, cleansing, all that kind of stuff before you really start to think about what can you do with the big data project? You got to get the baseline down before you can get into the fancy stuff. Sounds kind of like, what you're talking about. >> You nailed it, Jeff. And I'm actually going to piggyback on something you said. This is actually the problem that I think we're wrestling with in Cloud and in life. There it is, right? And we're got to put a fine point in it for the listeners. We are struggling, Jeff, with how to evaluate better versus different. And so, what Cloud has done more importantly, Cloud has shortened the amount of time that we're willing to spend on something before we just start over again. And so, the question that we wrestle with is, do I need to do the same thing a little bit differently? Do I need to tweak it or is there something better that's come along where I need to throw everything away, start all over again, and wipe the slate clean. And so, here's what ends up happening, right? The challenge that we have building on that is how we choose, Jeff, is more important than what we choose because a lot of us are making choices but we're not developing a framework to choose in a world where different things are pushed at us really every day and every night, right? Amazon and Azure are changing literally thousands of things every night. And if I feel like there's something new out there, I have to understand, is this noise, or is this something I pay attention to? Is this a size for a project or is this something that helps my value? If you don't have a way to choose, Jeff, every new option is going to just lead to more confusion and more decommitment. >> Right, well, I mean, you raised a really interesting point which is how do CIOs keep up with all this stuff? I mean, how do they possibly keep the lights on, you know, run digital transformation, kind of, keep up with the, Lord knows, how many changes like you said, get made at Amazon every single day I mean, the feature set when Andy stands on stage at re-invent and lists all the services. I think he's using like a two-and-a-half point font on a 200 foot video screen. I mean, there's so much there. So, how do you help people take a step back from, it's like driving, you know, a car with headlights through snow at night. You know, it's just like kuchu chu chu. How do you help people take a step back and be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more intentional, a little bit more circumspect to lay a good foundation which is going to be what the rest of the house is built on. If you don't have it, it's just going to crumble, if you have it, then at least you have a chance of success. How do you help guide them and get out of that snow storm? >> So, I'm going to give you a new acronym, Jeff, but I think it starts with humility. It starts with us admitting that we don't have this all figured out yet. I often tell a lot of customers, Cloud is that best a teenager that just learned how to drive. And Cloud similar to teenagers, the ability of what it can do is, kind of, in conflict with what it can comprehend in terms of unintended consequences. And so, if Cloud is changing all the time, let's not talk about, we crushed it, we nailed it, we knocked it out of the park. Let's raise our hand and say, you know what? I humbly need some help, because here's what we do, Jeff. In this industry, we throw around acronyms and terms all the time. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BDaaS, DBaaS, whatever. I'm going to introduce the term CaaS, but that's not containers as a service job. I think what we're getting is confusion as a service. (laughs) There's so many things that are changing that people are overwhelmed but because we want to act so much like we're crushing it on social media, we really need to say, I need help, I can't do this in a spreadsheet anymore. Please are there solutions out there that can help me automate some of this stuff so that I'm not a victim of my own ignorance. So, humility, right? Embrace other people that have solved some of this problem before, somebody has solved this problem. There are companies out there that are taking in the data, that are automating the decision-making, and that can help you, right? Bring people in, bringing outside help. >> Right, well, the other piece you just talked on is automation, and it goes back to your earlier comment about, you know, scale, bad things at scale are not good. So, if you don't get things dialed in now, and you start applying automation, and you start applying machine speed, you know, then things can get really squirrely really quick. So, that's even another kind of, you know, danger zone coming ahead, start to plan and make sure you've got your stuff organized or now you're going to automate it at machine speed, IOT, 5G, and really run things ragged super quickly. >> Jeff, I agree a hundred percent with that. I want to go back to something you talked about before. People process technology. I want to tweak that. I think we really need to evolve into people, process, product, or people, process, problem. It's got to go back to what am I creating or what am I solving this helping someone? And the technology is something that I will use or not if that helps me meet that outcome. But as technologists, Jeff, a lot of us are getting lazy. I want to play with Kubernetes. I want to play with containers. I want to play with serverless. I want to play with IOT. Who is that actually solving a problem for? Is what we've got to come back to because if I'm not doing that, the less you submit that I'm playing with this, but I'm not really making something better for a customer or adding more value to the business. >> So, again, what are your tips and tricks? 'Cause things are not going to get less complicated, right? As we've talked about Amazon's rolling out new services all the time. Google is really starting, you know, Google Cloud is really starting to rage. Obviously, Satya has done an amazing job with Microsoft, and then there's Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, and all these secondary Clouds, Equinix, and that acceleration is only going up. So, how do you, you know encourage people, coach people, tell people to make sure that they're taking a step back and being organized and thoughtful, and not just racing ahead at the next bright shiny object? >> So, great question again, Jeff. I think people have to have to be careful that just because you hear about something a lot doesn't mean it's proven to scale. Social media is dangerous in the sense that we think that we hear something a hundred times then a means that is polished. And I think that as enterprises and as businesses, you know, go with something that's proven, but dip a toe in the water, if you're not sure about it. So, maybe you are experimenting with some things in DevTests, but here's some practical tips that I'll give. Three things, right? I recommend that people typically start here with Cloud strategy, the three D's of data are what I recommend people begin with. Don't begin with the widgets, the shiny objects, begin with data storage, begin with data transport and begin with data organization. We know that data is the lifeblood of the enterprise, right? That's what all of us are focused on right now, right? Data is collected from watches, from websites, from things like self-driving cars, eventually. So, how is my data going to be stored? 'Cause that's the most important part of likely what we're doing as a corporation. How is it going to be transported? Am I okay with spending X amount of dollars on Egress? Do I have latency issues? And then when it comes to data organization, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, I would start with my philosophy, Jeff, on how I plan to leverage that information across any of the multi or hybrid providers that I plan to spin up, because if I start with the data that connects me better to the customer, how am I going to leverage this data then make something better for them? And then any venue honestly, Jeff, that I choose to execute in we'll have tools and utilities and packages that I can leverage to make something better for someone. >> The piece you didn't mention though, was the application. So, where's the application? Say you still start with the data foundationally, and then go to the application or? >> Yes. >> But most of the initiatives driven kind of, at the application level layer? >> They are, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So, practically speaking, let me go down a level to double-click on stuff. Well, people want to be Cloud native, right? 'Cause we don't want to run servers. We don't want to run boxes, we don't even really want to do VMS anymore. One thing that I recommend, that I believe is high reward and low risk is that people strongly consider adopting database as a service, and this is the reason why. It gives us a format to go to something that's Cloud native that doesn't have to be totally rewritten. So, the juice is worth the squeeze there because I'm reducing labor, I'm reducing maintenance, I'm reducing cycles, the DBaaS that people like that have to do, but I'm not paying to refactor an application. Where we struggle, Jeff, and maybe this is another topic, we really struggle with the value of applications, and because we don't know the value of an app, we're using the cost of an app as a proxy. And so, if you don't know the value of something, you're always going to be at risk of over or under improving it. This is why I like database as a service. I can be more nimble, I can reduce labor, and I'm not rewriting an application and spending more to rewrite it than the app is worth. If I totally refactor, or if I totally replatform, the cost may outstrip the value. DBaaS is almost always a slam dunk, 'cause I'm going to reduce manual things that my people are doing that freeze them up, to focus more on customers and evolve in the end. That's what I see pretty consistently in the enterprise. >> That is really scary. That statement that you said that people don't necessarily know the value of the app and using cost as a proxy is not good. You know, I had Butch Rizzo on recently, and he did a study on, you know, trying to figure out the value of data, versus the the value of an app. And he did some research of that UCSF, and what they did is they basically said the value of the data is dependent on the business process that you can improve, or the business project that you want to do. You make an estimate as to what the ROI in that process is, and then you basically see if it's worthwhile to do. And that case and point was, you know, running a promotion at Chipola 'cause bill loves Chipola, but he had a real concrete way that, you know, if we can increase sales at the target stores by, you know, 10%, or we can increase the average ticket by 20 cents or we can increase the average number of items ordered by 0.5 or whatever. So, you know, real far metrics that tie back to real numbers, that tie back to value that you can make an assessment of that project, and that project is enabled by data. So, I hope people are doing that far applications 'cause cost is not the way to figure out value >> The challenge that we have, Jeff, when we look at a lot of the things in the Cloud, there's a big difference between if I have "big C" customers, someone who's literally pulling out a wallet or a credit card to pay for my service or product versus "little C" customers like internally. If I'm paying for a streaming service, and the cost of the streaming service goes up the value of that's likely also going up because I'm serving more big C customers. If the cost of a password reset manager goes up and internal application that nobody was likely paying for, and that's really the dilemma that a lot of folks have in the enterprise, Jeff. Am I going to take something that has limited value like a password application, and put it in a place that can have unlimited spend. Now, if I'm a Netflix or Disney plus, if my spend is going up, my value is going up because I'm serving more big C people that are going to pull out their credit card and give me money. So, a lot of the struggle is when we drill down into this in the enterprise is the people that have the little C customers that don't have anybody paying them 'cause they're tryna understand this is like funny money in our houses job. My kids are teenagers. If I was to charge them, right? For room and board or for dinner, they don't have any money. So, the value of what they think about my cooking on the weekend, right? It's hard to put a value on that because they're not paying me, but if I had a food truck, it's easy to put a value on that, are people buying it or not? So, again, the challenges between internal or external customers and asked me to get any things I charged back and show back, we need a model to understand, is this something that you're tolerating or something that you're actually choosing and are you willing to spend money on it? >> Yeah, and it's a complicated issue, right? Because the other thing is you'd say, you take this conversation over to the security space, which I always find fascinating 'cause investigating security is kind of like investing in insurance and you can't use all your money to insure everything a hundred percent or else you just, why would you even do it? But you have to have some, and it's not a real clear ROI, but the potential downside is pretty huge. So, it's this kind of, balancing act, as you said, it's not really clean as to what the true value of that is unless you tie it back to some specific event, a breach, you know, some type of pins getting stolen, et cetera. So, these are not hard questions, but it's funny 'cause they're not technology questions, right? They're business value questions, and they're priority questions, and they're trade off questions. That's the other thing, right? You don't have infinite resources. So, even if you solve the model here you need to solve it within a portfolio of challenges, opportunities to then, as you said, you know, kind of rank order, where do you spend that next version of dollar? 'Cause it really can have a very a huge difference on the return. >> Okay, I think if I was going to give a, maybe a final piece of advice to the audience, Jeff, it would be to not confuse planning and analysis. That's something that I've talked about before. There's a big difference between those two things, and I often use the analogy of tax planning versus tax preparation. Jeff, when we collect our receipts, and our W-2s and 1099s, and go to our CPA at the beginning of the next year, we can't call that tax planning. That's tax preparation. It's already kind of done and dusted as long as you don't mess it up, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. And the enterprise is doing a lot of analysis and a lot of preparation, but really we need to do more planning. We need to look at the tools and the companies that are helping us simulate and plan for the future that's coming because then when we're talking about it, right? When you're sitting with your CPA and you're saying, what if I do this with my retirement or 401k, or real estate assets, when they can talk to you about what might happen, right? You're not in crisis, it's not a fire drill, it's not a dumpster fire, you can have a very easy conversation around the pros and cons of that. So, I think that's one thing we really have to embrace is press ahead, talk to those consultants and those solution providers, is this really planning or is this just analysis? Is this looking backwards or is it really looking forward and giving me some insight into the things that are coming so that I feel smarter going into the next season? >> And the opportunity to make a change before you hit December 31st. I mean, I think that's a really great analogy. Well, Bobby, a lot of great stuff squeezed in in a few short minutes, it's super fun to catch up, and I just love all your analogies and your stories because at the end of the day, it is about people, and it's about priorities, and it's about business, it's not about the technology. So, thank you so much for sharing your insight. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, absolutely, all right. He's Bobby Allen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today. And we've got one of the experts in the field, CUBE alumni and always a really fun guest to have on. Let's give a welcome to Tamara McCleary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thulium but you know her from social media and seeing her at all the conferences and speaking. And Tamara, it's great to see you again >> Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person, right? >> Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this, and clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? 'Cause I know you spend a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world, so your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to the, that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. >> You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me, it almost feels like not seven months. It feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February, and that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I had always been in three, four cities a week, every week, and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different, and it has shifted, and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work, and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely, and there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the centrical focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Workspace Summit was when CEO David Henshall talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are our most valuable, but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic, competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. Where do you want to go with it, Jeff? >> Well, I was going to say, and of course we can go forever, and we don't have forever, so at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is as we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic. And we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007, but we didn't have this forcing function, and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not. Work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight. And it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications, which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work, but now it's really driven to the forefront, because as you said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You could eat dinner with your family, maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities, whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening, but there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always on and this constant notifications, whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing, as you said, for both wellness and employee satisfaction, but also retention and getting new employees. It's really changed the priority of that whole set of, kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. >> Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives, and that is the constant interruption and distraction, and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted, but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications, it can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications, right? Some of your employees only need a few, and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction, making it easier for people, and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cybersecurity is not a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today, but I'm wild about it. But I think that all of these things, what I like about what Citrix is doing, and I enjoy the Summit, is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are, whether you're at home, you're in office, or in your car, work gets done. >> And not only work but I thought the theme that's interesting that came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's good work and high-value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said, is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which, again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more in one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness, and not just wellness in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two-hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And someone mentioned the people we talk about in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work, not only is it not fun, but super error prone. This is a really different to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high-value work done, prioritize good stuff, and not just deal with the incessant henpecking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. >> That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers, and over a nine-month period, they did this study, and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased. And every, 'cause at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's going to be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work. And that's not true. What ends up happening is that this study showed that productivity increased by 13%. And, I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance. And in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all the endless meetings, unless you have endless Zoom meetings, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work, which also increases focus. But I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important, because then if you look at other studies, there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8:32 a.m. or something like that and works until 5:38 p.m. And I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But this was interesting, I thought. Telephone calls were up by 230%, so the calls that employees were making, and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate, but in different ways. And I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that. I think it's a microapp that Citrix has on their Workspace, their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk. But I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty. I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning or usually around by five and go till late at night. But, and it's all in front of the computer screen. So maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. >> At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on, and Satya is a phenomenal executive, been super successful turning that big, very large boat, Microsoft, into really a cloud company and a SaaS company, and nothing but great success. Always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by you. One of them he said is we were dogmatic about work before, but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma. And what he really highlighted, A, obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place, this couldn't have happened. But more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency, and to really, again, kind of elevate those as the first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for. And really the highlight within this sudden shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities, you're going to be successful, and if you don't, you're in real trouble >> I'm glad you brought Satya up, because he also said something really cool that I think is true, and that is we are running right now, currently we are running a global scale experiment. Do you remember him saying that? >> Yeah. >> And it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their guinea pigs. But the other thing he was saying, too, is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and up-skill. And how long have we been talking about this, Jeff, with the future of work, that it will be a re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it, but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to up-skill and re-skill our workforces and also protect a workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of an engineer being able to communicate with a first-line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic, forcing our hand, really, to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to, for me, maybe the past two decades, is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about it anymore. We actually have to do it. And another thing that Satya said was that nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work. It's flexibility. And it's really... He also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. >> Jeff: Yes. >> I thought it was pretty wild. An EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study, all of us who are on video conferencing systems can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But, so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits, because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents, deliciously packed segments that were short. >> Jeff: Right. >> Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and partnerships and what was working, and I just thought that they did a really nice job, and it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20-minute window before attention wanes. >> Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Synergy before. >> Right. >> Now it's workspaces, it's cloud, and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud and a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And were some early applications that came out when this all went down that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole employee experience is, as you said, make 'em happy, make 'em feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. There's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people, which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So do you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep thinking output versus just checking another box and passing the paper down the line? >> You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's global human capital practice at Deloitte. I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home, and she mentioned she's a new mom, and so there was this warmth and connection there which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment, and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about rearchitecting the future of work, and she was talking about essentially, the premise was that human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real. And part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning. But also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life. And so this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be as we think about reinventing or re-imagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine, but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do, potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology. It's not being replaced by artificial intelligence, with machine learning algorithms. It's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. >> Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise. And the problem is with so many systems now, and I forget, you may know off the top of your head, the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> It's a lot. So, so there is a lot of noise, but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention, you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sort through the total flow, to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So Citrix has this approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or Zoom meeting, whatever, to have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers, and two laptops running just to get my day job done. >> You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. But, it's kind of, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think Citrix did a brilliant job in the Workspace Summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. One of 'em was City National Bank and Ariel Carrion? This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right, of City National Bank. And he's talking about that they had already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit, then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded 9600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that in a regular program, it would've taken, mind you, get this. It would've taken 14 years, 14 years to accomplish what they did in three months. >> That's a long time. >> I was blown away, right? Just to me, that speaks a lot, because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business, and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic? Small business. So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of companies. And the same story they had with eBay and David Lessor was talking, he's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how obviously eBay is a digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all had these shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business on eBay. And both eBay and City National Bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring, because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know. I think they said they had 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic, and a lot of those were in physical call centers. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching, saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. >> Yeah. >> And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. >> Right. >> You know, one of the other things that came up, before I let you go, that it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four Cs, connectivity, content, collaboration, and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just wanted to zero in on the culture piece, 'cause I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, and I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had the, we had a CMO on the other day, and she said internal comms, this is a big company, prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hands Zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, really, really increase the importance of culture, and then I think probably is going to show over time the people that have it right, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about, 'cause you're a big culture person and you know how important the people part of the whole thing is. >> Yeah, culture drives everything. You're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four Cs, I think, Meerah Rajavel. >> Yeah, yeah. >> She gave those four Cs. And you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture. And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay. And I don't care how much innovation you have. If the culture is sick, you just, you're going to lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift, because we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. Some of the things that we enjoyed about meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were going to foster culture digitally, how they were going to create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but cross over into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space, but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this. We're not in the same physical space. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I'm still going to feel like we met today. >> Jeff: Right. >> You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, right? And I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like employees, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in house, but you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK, and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker. I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up again? >> Jeff: Yeah, very good. >> And that was totally unplanned. But it is about output, and that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have, whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and Slacking with or using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication, and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. >> Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person, and there's reasons, and for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should. I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. >> Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us, and the things that fall away are those that were false, false perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more, even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. >> Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it. And great to see ya. >> Good to see you, too, thank you. >> All right, she's Tamara, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)