>>Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage, VMware Explorer, 2022 formerly world. I've been saying now I gotta get that out. Dave, I've been sayingm world. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall to wall coverage, again, back to back interviews all day two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. Got one more interview after this really getting the analyst's perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing, and reporting on the cube. Again, two sets blue and green. We call them here on the show floor on Moscone west with the sessions upstairs, two floors of, of amazing content sessions, keynote across ed Moscone, north and south SBI here, cloud strategists with the cube. And of course, what event wouldn't be complete without SBE weighing in on the analysis. And, and, and I'm, you know, all kidding aside. I mean that because we've had great interactions around, you know, digging in you, you're like a roving analyst out there. And what's great about what you do is you're social. You're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that cuz that's what we do, but you're out, we're on the set you're out on the floor and you know your stuff and, and you know, clouds. So how you, this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to >>See you. I'm good guys. Thank you. Thank you for having >>Me. So I mean, Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event and even before, during our super cloud event, we're reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember, Dave OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud. And that was a great ambition. And the cloud AATI at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision, all the infrastructure was code. Everything was lined up. Everything was religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay. 20 2009, 2010, where was Amazon? Then they just went off like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. Yeah. OpenStax then settled in, did some great things, but also spawns Kubernetes. Okay. So, you know, we've lived through thiss we've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines present at creation for cloud computing. >>Yeah. I was at Rackspace when the open stack was open sourced. I was there in, in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually like we left a toddler on the freeway. No, the toddler >>Got behind the wheel. Can't see over the dashboard. >>So we have learned over the years in last two decades, like we have seen the open source rise of open source and we have learned quite a few lessons. And one lesson we learned from there was like, don't let a project go out in the open, tell it mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA, NASA and Rackspace gave the, the code from two companies to the open source community and then likes of IBM and HPE. No. Now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of developers on that. And then lot of us sort of second tier startup. >>But, but, but I remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them it wasn't like they infiltrated like a, the vendors always tried to worry about vendors coming in open source, but at that time was pretty people accepted them. And then it got off the rails. Then you remember the great API debate. You >>Called it a hail Mary to against AWS, which is, is what it was, what it was. >>It's true. Yeah. Ended up being right. But the, the battle started happening when you started seeing the network perimeters being discussed, you starting to see some of the, in the trenches really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And, and again, totally premature it continue. And, and what does that mean today? So, okay. Is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? >>No >>For, and is it just vaporware? >>No, they're not too early, actually on, on, on, on that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company, like in the ops area, you know, we have been using, we VMware stuff since 2000 early 2000. I, I was at commerce one when we started using it and yeah, it was for lab manager, you know, like, you know, put the labs >>Out desktop competition. >>Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. So it, it matured pretty fast, but now it it's like for all these years they focused on the op site more. Right. And then the challenge now in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped, to be honest with you, they have try and find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a, that's a struggle for, for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tap Tansu application platform services. They, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ups to the, to the right, from that point to the right on the left side. They're lot more tooling to helpers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think, I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ups to the right and then focus there. And then how in the multi-cloud cross cloud. >>Cause my sense is, they're saying, Hey, look, we're not gonna own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying do develop in whatever world you want to develop in will embrace it. And then the ops guys, we, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency and you're our peeps. You tend then take it, you know, to, to the market. Is that not? I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I >>Mean, look at if you're VMware Dave and start, you know, this where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud. And they had to reboot that with jazzy and, and, and Raghu to do the databases deal. It's essentially VMware hosted on AWS and clients love it cuz it's clarity. Okay. It's not vCloud air. So, so if you're them right now, you seeing yourself, wow. We could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hitting in the scene, whoever can make this, the interoperability concept of inter clouding and connect clouds so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, you know, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay. And again, in concept, that sounds simple, but if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction layer. So do you own it or do you seed the base and let it become a defacto organization? Like a super layer, super pass layer and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So, so they could be the middleware for at all. >>Aren't they? The infrastructure super cloud. I mean, that's what they're trying to be. >>Yeah. I think they're trying, trying to do that. It's it's I, I, I have said that many times VMware is bridged to the cloud, right? >>The sorry. Say bridge to >>The cloud. Yeah. Right. For, for enterprises, they have virtualized environments, mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is I wanna mention touch on that is the number of certified professionals on VMware stack. There it's a huge number it's in tens of thousands. Right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They wanna leverage that. It's like, it's a Sunco if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, to during the press release yesterday, like are there new certifications coming into the, into the limelight? I, I think the VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen. I guess they should introduce a, a cross cloud certification for their stack because they want to be cross cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one sort of single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose. I, I, I call it when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. >>Well, they're not, they have the enterprise they're super cloud enabler, Dave for the, for the enterprise, cuz they're not hyperscaler. Okay. They have all the enterprise customers who come here, we see them, we speak to them. We know them will mingle, but >>They have really good relationships with all the >>Hyperscale. And so those, those guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operation though. So, so if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might wanna raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide that. Yes, totally. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack middleware it's middle tissue. So you got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. >>Maybe, maybe my, my it's >>Not a stack >>Industry. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational, but so let's assume for a second. You're not gonna have everybody doing their own clouds, like Goldman Sachs and, and capital one, even though we're seeing some evidence of that, even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and, and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem and it's just call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid. They should dominate that. I mean, who is who, if it's not it's VMware and it's what red hat who else? >>I think red hat wants it too. >>Yeah. Well, red hat and red, hat's doing it with IBM consulting and they gotta be, they have great advantage there for all the banks. Awesome. But what, what about the other 500,000 customers that are >>Out there? If VMware could do what they did with the hypervisor, with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together. That's a, that's a holy grail move right >>There. But what about this PA layer? This Tansu and area which somebody on Twitter, there was a little SNAR come that's V realized just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's, it's from talking to Raghu unless he's just totally BSing us, which I don't think he is. That's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's this, their super PAs layer and, and, and it's purpose built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What, what do you make of that? >>I think Tansu is a great effort. They have put in lot of other older products under that one umbrella Tansu is not a product actually confuses the heck out of the market. That it's not a product. It's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with the newer sort of, >>So really is some yeah. >>Two >>Umbrella on there. So it's what it's pivotal. It's vRealize it's >>Yeah. We realize pivotal and, and, and older stack, actually they have some open source components in there. So, >>So they claim that this ragus claim, it's this new architecture, this new federated architecture graph database, low latency, real time ingestion. Well, >>AJ, AJ that's AJ's department, >>It sounded good. I mean, this is that >>Actually I think the newer, newer stuff, what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So, >>And it won't be, it won't be hardened for, but, but >>It won't be hardened for, but, >>But those, but they have a track record delivering. I mean, they gotta say that about yeah. >>They're engineering focus company. They have engineering culture. They're their software engineers are top. Not top not, >>Yes. >>What? >>Yeah. It's all relatives. If they, if the VMware stays the way they are. Well, >>Yeah, >>We'll get to that a second. What >>Do you mean? What are you talking >>About? They don't get gutted >>The elephant in the room if they don't get gutted and then, then we'll see it happens there. But right now I love, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials, not without their own issues to work on. I mean, everyone needs to work on stuff, but you know, world class, they're very proud of their innovation, but I wanna ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in, are they like enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? >>Yeah. It at the individual product level, like the people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering, but when it comes to the telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booth there, like it's hard to find anybody who can tell what, what are all the services under tens and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide or they can't. They, I mean, most of the people who are there, they can are walking through the economic side of things, like how it will help you save money or, or how the TCR ROI will improve. They are very focused on because of the nature of the company, right. They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that that's the, that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers. On one side on the, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops related improvements. They didn't mention AI or, or data. >>Yeah. Data storage management. >>That that was weak. That's true. During the, the keynote as well. >>And they didn't mention security and their security story, strong >>Security. I think they mentioned it briefly very briefly, very briefly. But I think their SCO story is good actually, but no is they didn't mention it properly, I guess. >>Yeah. There wasn't prominent in the keynote. It was, you know, and again, I understand why data wasn't P I, they wanted to say about data, >>Didn't make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hawk and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nuts bolt of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, you know, I, I don't think that was as bad of a call as bearing the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was, was well done as targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom and Broadcom had this, the acquisition agreement that they're, they are doing, they agree >>Was well done. I mean, >>You know, if I VMware, I would've done the same thing, look at this is a bright future. We're given that we're look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. >>And I agree with you, but the, the, again, I don't, I don't see how you can't make security front and center. When it is the number one issue for CIOs, CSOs, CSOs boards or directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it. Yeah. Okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there. I get that. But >>Another thing is, I think just keynote is just one sort of thing. One moment in this whole sort of continuous period, right. They, I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events tapping into the practitioners on regional basis. They have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue. Maybe it is some weakness on the, no, >>I think they planning, I talked to, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is gonna be a road show. They're gonna go international with, it's gonna take a global, they're gonna have a lot of wood behind the arrow. They're gonna spend a lot of money on Explorer is what, they're, what we're seeing. And that's a good thing. You got a new brand, you gotta build it. >>You know, I would've done, I would've had, I would've had a shorter keynote on day one and doing, and then I would've done like a security day, day two. I would've dedicated the whole morning, day two keynote to security cuz their stories I think is that strong? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And I don't know the developers side of things. I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered. You know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on freaking monthly basis, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to sustain that they on the very left side and the, the, the >>It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in super cloud and ins Rayme mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like and you know, the old cliche meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is the right they're doing. And it's the right strategy meeting that develops where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service they like to try stuff. They like to, they don't like it. They'll throw it away. Look at the success that comes like data, dog companies like that have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to, to continue the wins versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling >>Totally self-serve infrastructure for the, in a way, you know, you said they missed cloud, which they did V cloud air. And then they thought of got it. Right. It kind of did the same thing with pivotal. Right. It was almost like they forced to take pivotal, you know, by pivotal, right. For 2 billion or whatever it was. All right. Do something with it. Okay. We're gonna try to do something with it and they try to go out and compete. And now they're saying, Hey, let's just open it up. Whatever they want to use, let 'em use it. So unlike and I said this yesterday, unlike snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform. Okay. I think VMware's taken a different approach saying use whatever you want to use. We're gonna help the ops guys. And that, to me, a new op >>Very sensitive, >>The new ops, the new ops guys. Yes. Yes. >>I think another challenge on the right right. Is on, on the op site is like, if, if you are cloud native, you are a new company. You just, when you're a startup, you are cloud native, right. Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, Hey, you know, come to us and use this. Right. It's very hard. It is. They're a good play for a while. At least they, they can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the, the skills gravity, I call it of the developers and operators actually that's their, they, they have a loyal community they have and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show. I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of the, their communities that they force. The communities actually can force the companies, not to do certain things certain way. And I've seen that happening. And >>Well, I think, I think they're gonna learn and they already walked back their messaging. Not that they said anything overtly, but you know, the Lori, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was, they never said that they wanted to replace VM world. Although the name change implies that. And what they re amplified after the fact is that this is gonna be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuanced, they're splitting hairs, but that's, to me walking back the, you know, the, the loyalty and, and look at let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything of change. People are gonna be bitching and moaning. Yeah. >>But I mean, knew, worked, explore, >>Work. It wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad look. It wasn't disastrous call. Okay. Not at all. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did, did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the position they, and a lot of people >>Showed >>Up. Yeah. It worked >>A busy busier than all time >>It worked. And I think they, they threaded the needle, given everything they had going on. I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at, at VMware pulling off now, did they make profit? I don't know. It doesn't matter, you know, again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone west, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave's sessions, you know, lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem. The people giving the talks, you know, the people in the V brown bag, you know, got the, the V tug. They had their meeting, you know, this week here, >>Actually the, the, the red hat, the, the integration with the red hat is another highlight of, of, they announced that, that you can run that style >>OpenShift >>And red hats, not here, >>Red hat now here, but yeah, but, but, but >>It was more developers, more, you know, >>About time. I would say, why, why did it take so long? That should >>Have happened. All right. Final question. So what's the bottom line. Give us the summary. What's your take, what's your analysis of VMware explore the event, what they did, what it means, what it's gonna mean when the event's over, what's gonna happen. >>I think VMware with the VMware Explorer have bought the time with the messaging. You know, they have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it, it, it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner and build more hooks into other sort of platforms. Right? So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system people. Don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of the actually four or four or more public clouds, Alibaba cloud was, they were saying that they're the only VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of the Alibaba. And they, they can go to other ones as well. So I think, especially when they're sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that'll be even better. I think they, >>And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the, all the parties were hopping. I mean, there was, there's >>A lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they gonna try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middleware. Are they gonna be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness or are they gonna take the, the strategy of open collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative totally hit Culbert. I wanna do out in the open. We're not just not, we're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're gonna be this, you know? >>Yeah. The one, the last thing, actually, the, the one last little idea I'm putting out out there since I went to the Dell world, was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operation economics of operations side of things that when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means a productivity practitioner, growth. Everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side economics of operations. And, and that will go a long way. Actually. I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's >>Just, well, I think Dave, we always we've had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formally world now floor, where there were moments of that's pat Gelsinger, spinal speech. Yeah. And I remember he was under a siege of being fired. Yeah. There was a point in time where it was touch and go, and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware Dave, where we're gonna see what Broadcom does, because I think what hop 10 and Broadcom saw this week was an EBI, a number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and net present value of future state that you could, you gotta roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth all this new stuff worth? Is that gonna contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is gonna be a very interesting test because VMware did it, an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You >>Think about how resilient this company has been. I mean, em, you know, EMC picked them up for a song. It was 640 million or whatever it was, you know, about the public. And then you, another epic moment you'll recall. This was when Joe Tuchi was like the mafia Don up on stage. And Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci. And then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing, I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay. Now Broadcom's gonna buy you. And, >>And if Michael Dell keeps all in stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it off. >>Well, and that's probably, you know, that's a good question is, is it's gonna, it probably a very tax efficient transaction. If he takes all stock and then he can, you know, own against it. I mean, that's, that's, >>That's what a history we're gonna leave it there. Start be great to have you Dave great analysis. Okay. We'll be back with more coverage here. Day two, winding down after the short break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for Several decades but We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. A year ago, I'm looking for Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those end expectations is really at the heart of The modernization and part of that's Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that Can be positive if done right. We do see that as A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)

(soothing music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for... Several decades but... We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where... Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with... Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a... If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. I'm looking for... Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those annex and expectations is really at the heart of... The modernization and part of that's... Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that... Can be positive if done right. We do see that as... A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant... They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were... In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of... "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly... We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is... A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the... What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see... That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a... Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of... Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to... Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of... You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to... Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had... 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people... Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could... We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is... Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be... Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really... That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to... Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is... Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back to session, too. Thoughts about everywhere. Unlock new revenue streams with embedded search and I Today we're joined by our senior director of Global Oh am Rick Dimel, along with speakers from our thoughts about customer Hayes to discuss how thought spot is open for everyone by unlocking unprecedented value through data search in A I, you'll see how thoughts about compound analytics in your applications and hear how industry leaders are creating new revenue streams with embedded search and a I. You'll also learn how to increase app stickiness on how to create an autonomous this experience for your end users. I'm delighted to introduce our senior director of Global OPM from Phillips Spot, Rick DeMARE on then British Ramesh, chief technology officer, and Leon Roof, director of product management, both from Hayes over to you. Rick, >>Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hi, everybody. We're here to talk to you about Fox Spot everywhere are branded version of our embedded analytics application. It really our analytics application is all about user experience. And in today's world, user experience could mean a lot of things in ux design methodologies. We want to talk about the things that make our product different from an embedded perspective. If you take a look at what product managers and product design people and engineers are doing in this space, they're looking at a couple of key themes when they design applications for us to consume. One of the key things in the marketplace today is about product led growth, where the product is actually the best marketing tool for the business, not even the sales portion or the marketing department. The product, by the word of mouth, is expanding and getting more people onto the system. Why is that important? It's important because within the first few days of any application, regardless of what it is being used binding users, 70% of those users will lose. Interest will stop coming back. Why do they stop coming back? Because there's no ah ha moment through them. To get engaged within the technology, today's technologies need to create a direct relationship with the user. There can't be a gatekeeper between the user and the products, such as marketing or sales or information. In our case. Week to to make this work, we have toe leverage learning models in leverage learning as it's called Thio. Get the user is engaged, and what that means is we have to give them capabilities they already know how to use and understand. There are too many applications on the marketplace today for for users to figure out. So if we can leverage the best of what other APS have, we can increase the usage of our systems. Because in today's world, what we don't want to do from a product perspective is lead the user to a dead end or from a product methodology. Our perspective. It's called an empty state, and in our world we do that all the time. In the embedded market place. If you look at at the embedded marketplace, it's all visualizations and dashboards, or what I call check engine lights in your application's Well, guess what happens when you hit a check engine life. You've got to call the dealer to get more information about what just took place. The same thing happens in the analytic space where we provide visualizations to users. They get an indicator, but they have to go through your gatekeepers to get access to the real value of that data. What am I looking at? Why is it important the best user experiences out on the marketplace today? They are autonomous. If we wanna leverage the true value of digital transformation, we have to allow our developers to develop, not have them, the gatekeepers to the rial, content to users want. And in today's world, with data growing at much larger and faster levels than we've ever seen. And with that shelf life or value of that data being much shorter and that data itself being much more fragmented, there's no developer or analysts that can create enough visualizations or dashboards in the world to keep the consumption or desire for these users to get access to information up to speed. Clients today require the ability to sift through this information on their own to customize their own content. And if we don't support this methodology, our users are gonna end up feeling powerless and frustrated and coming back to us. The gatekeepers of that information for more information. Loyalty, conversely, can be created when we give the users the ability toe access this information on their own. That is what product like growth is all about in thought spot, as you know we're all about search. It's simple. It's guided as we type. It gives a super fast responses, but it's also smart on the back end handling complexities, and it's really safe from a governance and as well as who gets access to what perspective it's unknown learned environment. Equally important in that learned environment is this expectation that it's not just search on music. It's actually gonna recommend content to me on the fly instantly as I try content I might not even thought of before. Just the way Spotify recommends music to us or Netflix recommends a movie. This is a expected learned behavior, and we don't want to support that so that they can get benefit and get to the ah ha moments much quicker. In the end, which consumption layer do you want to use, the one that leads you to the Dead End Street or the one that gets you to the ah ha moment quickly and easily and does it in an autonomous fashion. Needless to say, the benefits of autonomous user access are well documented today. Natural language search is the wave of the future. It is today. By 2004 75% of organizations are going to be using it. The dashboard is dead. It's no longer going to be utilized through search today, I if we can improve customer satisfaction and customer productivity, we're going to increase pretensions of our retention of our applications. And if we do that just a little bit, it's gonna have a tremendous impact to our bottom line. The way we deploy hotspots. As you know, from today's conversations in the cloud, it could be a manage class, not offering or could be software that runs in your own VPC. We've talked about that at length at this conference. We've also talked about the transformation of application delivery from a Cloud Analytics perspective at length here it beyond. But we apply those same principles to your product development. The benefits are astronomical because not only do you get architectural flexibility to scale up and scale down and right size, but your engineers will increase their productivity because their offerings, because their time and effort is not going to be spent on delivering analytics but delivering their offerings. The speed of innovation isn't gonna be released twice a year or four times a year. It's gonna It can happen on a weekly basis, so your time to market in your margins should increase significantly. At this point, I want a hand. The microphone over to Revert. Tesche was going to tell you a little bit about what they're doing. It hes for cash. >>Thanks, Rick. I just want to introduce myself to the audience. My name is Rotational. Mention the CTO Europe ace. I'm joined my today by my colleague Gillian Ruffles or doctor of product management will be demoing what we have built with thoughts about, >>um but >>just to my introduction, I'm going to talk about five key things. Talk about what we do. What hes, uh we have Really, um what we went through the select that spot with other competitors What we have built with that spot very quickly and last but not least, some lessons learned during the implementation. So just to start with what we do, uh, we're age. We are health care compliance and revenue integrity platform were a saas platform voter on AWS were very short of l A. That's it. Use it on these around 1 50 customers across the U. S. On these include large academic Medical Insight on. We have been in the compliant space for the last 30 plus years, and we were traditionally consulting company. But very recently we have people did more towards software platform model, uh, in terms off why we chose that spot. There were three business problems that I faced when I took this job last year. At age number one is, uh, should be really rapidly deliver new functionality, nor platform, and he agile because some of our product development cycles are in weeks and not months. Hey had a lot of data, which we collected traditionally from the SAS platform, and all should be really create inside stretch experience for our customers. And then the third Big one is what we saw Waas large for customers but really demanding self service capabilities. But they were really not going for the static dash boats and and curated content, but instead they wanted to really use the cell service capabilities. Thio mind the data and get some interesting answers during their questions. So they elevated around three products around these problems statements, and there were 14 reasons why we just start spot number one wars off course. The performance and speed to insights. Uh, we had around 800 to a billion robot of data and we wanted to really kind of mind the data and set up the data in seconds on not minutes and hours. We had a lot of out of the box capabilities with that spot, be it natural language search, predictive algorithms. And also the interactive visualization, which, which was which, Which gave us the agility Thio deliver these products very quickly. And then, uh, the end user experience. We just wanted to make sure that I would users can use this interface s so that they can very quickly, um, do some discovery of data and get some insights very quickly. On last but not least, talksport add a lot of robust AP ice around the platform which helped us embed tot spot into are offering. But those are the four key reasons which we went for thoughts part which we thought was, uh, missing in in the other products we evaluated performance and search, uh, the interactive visualization, the end user experience, and last but not least flexible AP ice, which we could customize into our platform in terms of what we built. We were trying to solve to $50 billion problem in health care, which is around denials. Um so every year, around 2, 50 to $300 billion are denied by players thes air claims which are submitted by providers. And we built offering, which we called it US revenue optimizer. But in plain English, what revenue optimizer does is it gives the capability tow our customers to mind that denials data s so that they can really understand why the claims were being denied. And under what category? Recent reasons. We're all the providers and quarters who are responsible for these claims, Um, that were dryland denials, how they could really do some, uh, prediction off. It is trending based on their historical denial reasons. And then last but not least, we also build some functionality in the platform where we could close the loop between insights, action and outcome that Leon will be showing where we could detect some compliance and revenue risks in the platform. On more importantly, we could, uh, take those risks, put it in a I would say, shopping card and and push it to the stakeholders to take corrective action so the revenue optimizer is something which we built in three months from concept to lunch and and that that pretty much prove the value proposition of thoughts. But while we could kind of take it the market within a short period of time Next leopard >>in terms >>off lessons learned during the implementation thes air, some of the things that came to my mind asses, we're going through this journey. The first one is, uh, focus on the use case formulation, outcomes and wishful story boarding. And that is something that hot spot that's really balance. Now you can you can focus on your business problem formulation and not really focus on your custom dash boarding and technology track, etcetera. So I think it really helped our team to focus on the versus problem, to focus on the outcomes from the problem and more importantly, really spend some time on visualizing What story are we say? Are we trying to say to our customers through revenue optimizer The second lesson learned first When we started this implementation, we did not dualistic data volume and capacity planning exercise and we learned it our way. When we are we loaded a lot of our data sets into that spot. And then Aziz were doing performance optimization. XYZ. We figured out that we had to go back and shot the infrastructure because the data volumes are growing exponentially and we did not account for it. So the biggest lesson learned This is part of your architectural er planning, exercise, always future proof your infrastructure and make sure that you work very closely with the transport engineering team. Um, to make sure that the platform can scale. Uh, the last two points are passport as a robust set of AP Ice and we were able to plug into those AP ice to seamlessly ended the top spot software into a platform. And last but not least, one thing I would like to closest as we start these projects, it's very common that the solution design we run into a lot of surprises. The one thing I should say is, along those 12 weeks, we very closely work with the thoughts, part architecture and accounting, and they were a great partner to work with us to really understand our business problem, and they were along the way to kind of government suggested, recommends and workarounds and more importantly, also, helpers put some other features and functionality which you requested in their engineering roadmap. So it's been a very successful partnership. Um, So I think the biggest take of it is please make sure that you set up your project and operating model value ember thoughts what resources and your team to make sure that they can help you as you. It's some obstacles in the projects so that you can meet your time ones. Uh, those are the key lessons learned from the implementation. And with that, I would pass this to my colleague Leon Rough was going to show you a demo off what we go. >>Thanks for Tesh. So when we were looking Thio provide this to our customer base, we knew that not everyone needed do you access or have available to them the same types of information or at the same particular level of information. And we do have different roles within RMD auto Enterprise platform. So we did, uh, minimize some roles to certain information. We drew upon a persona centric approach because we knew that those different personas had different goals and different reasons for wanting to drive into these insights, and those different personas were on three different levels. So we're looking at the executive level, which is more on the C suite. Chief Compliance Officer. We have a denial trending analyses pin board, which is more for the upper, uh, managers and also exact relatives if they're interested. And then really, um, the targeted denial analysis is more for the day to day analysts, um, the usage so that they could go in and they can really see where the trends are going and how they need to take action and launch into the auditing workflow so within the executive or review, Um, and not to mention that we were integrating and implementing this when everyone was we were focused on co vid. So as you can imagine, just without covert in the picture, our customers are concentrated on denials, and that's why they utilize our platform so they could minimize those risks and then throw in the covert factor. Um, you know, those denial dollars increase substantially over the course of spring and the summer, and we wanted to be able to give them ah, good view of the denials in aggregate as well as's we focus some curated pin boards specific to those areas that were accounting for those high developed denials. So on the Executive Overview Board, we created some banner tiles. The banner tiles are pretty much a blast of information for executives thes air, particular areas where there concentrating and their look looking at those numbers consistently so it provides them away to take a good look at that and have that quick snapshot. Um, more importantly, we did offer as I mentioned some curated pin boards so that it would give customers this turnkey access. They wouldn't necessarily have to wonder, You know, what should I be doing now on Day one, but the day one that we're providing to them these curated insights leads the curiosity and increases that curiosity so that they can go in and start creating their own. But the base curated set is a good overview of their denial dollars and those risks, and we used, um, a subject matter expert within our organization who worked in the field. So it's important to know you know what you're targeting and why you're targeting it and what's important to these personas. Um, not everyone is necessarily interests in all the same information, and you want to really hit on those critical key point to draw them and, um, and allowed them that quick access and answer those questions they may have. So in this particular example, the curated insight that we created was a monthly denial amount by functional area. And as I was mentioning being uber focused on co vid, you know, a lot of scrutiny goes back to those organizations, especially those coding and H i M departments, um, to ensure that their coding correctly, making sure that players aren't sitting on, um, those payments or denying those payments. So if I were in executive and I came in here and this was interesting to me and I want to drill down a little bit, I might say, You know, let me focus more on the functional area than I know probably is our main concern. And that's coating and h i M. And because of it hit in about the early winter. I know that those claims came in and they weren't getting paid until springtime. So that's where I start to see a spike. And what's nice is that the executive can drill down, they may have a hunch, or they can utilize any of the data attributes we made available to them from the Remittance file. So all of these data, um, attributes are related to what's being sent on the 8 35 fear familiar with the anti 8 35 file. So in particular, if I was curious and had a suspicion that these were co vid related or just want to concentrate in that area, um, we have particular flag set up. So the confirmed and suspected cases are pulling in certain diagnosis and procedure codes. And I might say 1.27 million is pretty high. Um, toe look at for that particular month, and then they have the ability to drill down even further. Maybe they want to look at a facility level or where that where that's coming from. Furthermore, on the executive level, we did take advantage of Let me stop here where, um also provided some lagged a so leg. This is important to organizations in this area because they wanna know how long does it take before they re submit a claim that was originally denied before they get paid industry benchmark is about 10 days of 10 days is a fairly good, good, um, basis to look at. And then, obviously anything over that they're going to take a little bit more scrutiny on and want to drill in and understand why that is. And again, they have that capabilities in order to drill down and really get it. Those answers that they're looking for, we also for this particular pin board. And these users thought it would be helpful to utilize the time Siri's forecasting that's made available. So again, thes executives need thio need to keep track and forecast where they're trends were going or what those numbers may look like in the future. And we thought by providing the prediction pins and we have a few prediction pins, um would give them that capability to take a look at that and be able to drill down and use that within, um, certain reporting and such for their organization. Another person, a level that I will go to is, um, Mawr on the analyst side, where those folks are utilizing, um, are auditing workflow and being in our platform, creating audits, completing audits, we have it segregated by two different areas. And this is by claim types so professional or institutional, I'm going to jump in here. And then I am going to go to present mode. So in this particular, um, in this particular view or insight, we're providing that analysts view with something that's really key and critical in their organization is denials related Thio HCC s andi. That's a condition category that kind of forecast, the risk of treatment. And, you know, if that particular patient is probably going to be seen again and have more conditions and higher costs, higher health care spending. So in this example, we're looking at the top 15 attending providers that had those HCC denials. And this is, um, critical because at this point, it really peaks in analyst curiosity. Especially, You know, they'll see providers here and then see the top 15 on the top is generating Ah, hide denial rate. Hi, denial. The dollars for those HCC's and that's a that's a real risk to the organization, because if that behavior continues, um, then those those dollars won't go down. That number won't go down so that analysts then can go in and they can drill down um, I'm going to drill down on diagnosis and then look at the diagnosis name because I have a suspicion, but I'm not exactly sure. And what's great is that they can easily do this. Change the view. Um, you know, it's showing a lot of diagnoses, but what's important is the first one is sepsis and substance is a big one. Substances something that those organizations see a lot of. And if they hover, they can see that 49.57 million, um, is attributed to that. So they may want to look further into that. They'd probably be interested in closing that loop and creating an audit. And so what allowed us to be able to do that for them is we're launching directly into our auditing workflow. So they noticed something in the carried insight. It sparked some investigation, and then they don't have to leave that insight to be able to jump into the auditing workflow and complete that. Answer that question. Okay, so now they're at the point where we've pulled back all the cases that attributed to that dollar amount that we saw on the Insight and the users launching into their auditing workflow. They have the ability Thio select be selective about what cases they wanna pull into the audit or if they were looking, um, as we saw with sepsis, they could pull in their 1600 rose, but they could take a sampling size, which is primarily what they would do. They went audit all 1600 cases, and then from this point in they're into, they're auditing workflow and they'd continue down the path. Looking at those cases they just pulled in and being able Thio finalized the audit and determine, you know, if further, um, education with that provider is needed. So that concludes the demo of how we integrated thought spot into our platform. >>Thank you, LeAnn. And thank you. Re test for taking the time to walk us through. Not only your company, but how Thought spot is helping you Power analytics for your clients. At this point, we want to open this up for a little Q and A, but we want to leave you with the fact that thought spot everywhere. Specifically, it cannot only do this for Hayes, but could do it for any company anywhere they need. Analytical applications providing these applications for their customers, their partners, providers or anybody within their network for more about this, you can see that the website attached below >>Thanks, Rick and thanks for tests and Leon that I find it just fascinating hearing what our customers are doing with our technology. And I certainly have learned 100% more about sepsis than I ever knew before this session. So thank you so much for sharing that it's really is great to see how you're taking our software and putting it into your application. So that's it for this session. But do stay tuned for the next session, which is all about getting the most out of your data and amplifying your insights. With the help of A, I will be joined by two thought spot leaders who will share their first hand experiences. So take a quick breather and come right back

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

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

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Dell Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> The one Welcome to the Special Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante breaking down day one of three days of wall the wall Coverage - 2 Cube sets. Uh, big news today and dropping here. Dell Technology World's series of announcements Cloud ability, unified work spaces and then multi cloud with, uh, watershed announced with Microsoft support for VMware with Azure are guests here theCUBE alumni that Seo, senior leader of'Em Where Sanjay *** and such a great to see you, >> John and Dave always a pleasure to be on your show. >> So before we get into the hard core news around Microsoft because you and Satya have a relationship, you also know Andy Jassy very well. You've been following the Clouds game in a big way, but also as a senior leader in the industry and leading BM where, um, the evolution of the end user computing kind of genre,  that whole area is just completely transformed with mobility and cloud kind of coming together with data and all this new kinds of applications. The modern applications are different. It's changing the game on how end users, employees, normal people use computing because some announcement here on their What's your take on the ever changing role of cloud and user software? >> Yeah, John, I think that our vision , as  you know, it was the first job I came to do at VMware almost six years ago, to run and use a computing. And the vision we had at that time was that you should be able to work at the speed of life, right? You and I happen to be on a plane at the same time  yesterday coming here, we should be able to pick our amps up on our devices. You often have Internet now even up at thirty thousand feet. In the consumer world, you don't lug around your CDs, your music, your movies come to you. So the vision of any app on any device was what we articulated with the digital workspace We. had Apple and Google very well figured out. IOS later on Mac,  Android,  later on chrome . The Microsoft relationship in end use the computing was contentious because we overlapped. They had a product, PMS and in tune. But we always dreamed of a day. I tweeted out this morning that for five and a half years I competed with these guys. It was always my dream to partner with the With Microsoft. Um, you know, a wonderful person, whom I respect there, Brad Anderson. He's a friend, but we were like LeBron and Steph Curry. We were competing against each other. Today everything changed. We are now partners. Uh, Brad and I we're friends, we'll still be friends were actually partners  now why? Because we want to bring the best of the digital workspace solution VMware brings workspace one to the best of what Microsoft brings in Microsoft 365 , active directory, E3 capabilities around E. M. S and into it and combined those together to help customers get the best for any device. Apple, Google and Microsoft that's a game changer. >> Tell about the impact of the real issue of Microsoft on this one point, because is there overlap is their gaps, as Joe Tucci used to say, You can't have any. There's no there's no overlap if you have overlapped. That's not a >> better to have overlapped and seems right. A gaps. >> So where's the gaps? Where this words the overlapping cloud. Next, in the end user world, >> there is a little bit of overlap. But the much bigger picture is the complementarity. We are, for example, not trying to be a directory in the Cloud That's azure active directory, which is the sequel to Active Directory. So if we have an identity access solution that connect to active directory, we're gonna compliment that we've done that already. With Octo. Why not do that? Also inactive Directory Boom that's clear. Ignored. You overlap. Look at the much bigger picture. There's a little bit of overlap between in tune and air Watch capabilities, but that's not the big picture. The big picture is combining workspace one with E. M s. to allow Office 365 customers to get conditional access. That's a game, so I think in any partnership you have to look past, I call it sort of these Berlin Wall moments. If the U. S and Soviet Union will fighting over like East Germany, vs West Germany, you wouldn't have had that Berlin wall moment. You have to look past the overlaps. Look at the much bigger picture and I find the way by which the customer wins. When the customer wins, both sides are happy. >> Tearing down the access wall, letting you get seamless. Access the data. All right, Cloud computing housely Multi cloud announcement was azure something to tell on stage, which was a surprise no one knew was coming. No one was briefed on this. It was kind of the hush hush, the big news Michael Delll, Pat Girl singer and it's nothing to tell up there. Um, Safia did a great job and really shows the commitment of Microsoft with the M wear and Dell Technologies. What is this announcement? First, give us your take an analysis of what they announced. And what does it mean? Impact the customers? >> Yeah, listen, you know, for us, it's a further That's what, like the chess pieces lining up of'Em wars vision that we laid up many years for a hybrid cloud world where it's not all public cloud, it isn't all on premise. It's a mixture. We coined that Tom hybrid loud, and we're beginning to see that realize So we had four thousand cloud providers starting to build a stack on VM, where we announced IBM Cloud and eight of us. And they're very special relationships. But customers, some customers of azure, some of the retailers, for example, like Wal Mart was quoted in the press, released Kroger's and some others so they would ask us, Listen, we're gonna have a way by which we can host BMO Workloads in there. So, through a partnership now with Virtue Stream that's owned by Dell on DH er, we will be able to allow we, um, where were close to run in Virtue Stream. Microsoft will sell that solution as what's called Azure V M, where solutions and customers now get the benefit of GMO workloads being able to migrate there if they want to. Or my great back on the on premise. We want to be the best cloud infrastructure for that multi cloud world. >> So you've got IBM eight of us Google last month, you know, knock down now Azure Ali Baba and trying you. Last November, you announced Ali Baba, but not a solution. Right >> now, it's a very similar solutions of easy solution. There's similar what's announced with IBM and Nash >> So is it like your kids where you loved them all equally or what? You just mentioned it that Microsoft will sell the VM wear on Azure. You actually sell the eight of us, >> so there is a distinction. So let me make that clear because everything on the surface might look similar. We have built a solution that is first and preferred for us. Called were MacLeod on a W s. It's a V m er manage solution where the Cloud Foundation stack compute storage networking runs on a ws bare metal, and V. Ember manages that our reps sell that often lead with that. And that's a solution that's, you know, we announced you were three years ago. It's a very special relationship. We have now customer attraction. We announce some big deals in queue, for that's going great, and we want it even grow faster and listen. Eight of us is number one in the market, but there are the customers who have azure and for customers, one azure very similar. You should think of this A similar to the IBM ah cloud relationship where the V C P. V Partners host VM where, and they sell a solution and we get a subscription revenue result out of that, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. Our reps will get compensated when they sell at a particular customer, but it's not a solution that's managed by BM. Where >> am I correct? You've announced that I think a twenty million dollars deal last quarter via MacLeod and A W. And that's that's an entire deal. Or is that the video >> was Oh, that was an entirely with a customer who was making a big shift to the cloud. When I talked to that customer about the types of workloads, they said that they're going to move hundreds off their APs okay on premise onto via MacLeod. And it appears, so that's, you know, that's the type of cloud transformation were doing. And now with this announcement, there will be other customers. We gave an example of few that Well, then you're seeing certain verticals that are picking as yours. We want those two also be happy. Our goal is to be the undisputed cloud infrastructure for any cloud, any cloud, any AP any device. >> I want to get your thoughts. I was just in the analysts presentation with Dell technology CFO and looking at the numbers, the performance numbers on the revenue side Don Gabin gap our earnings as well as market share. Dell. That scales because Michael Delll, when we interviewed many years ago when it was all going down, hinted that look at this benefits that scale and not everyone's seeing the obvious that we now know what the Amazon scale winds so scale is a huge advantage. Um, bm Where has scale Amazon's got scale as your Microsoft have scales scales Now the new table stakes just as an industry executive and leader as you look at the mark landscape, it's a having have not world you'd have scale. You don't If you don't have scale, you're either ecosystem partner. You're in a white space. How do companies compete in this market? Sanjay, what's your thoughts on I thinkit's >> Jonah's? You said there is a benefit to scale Dell, now at about ninety billion in revenue, has gone public on their stock prices. Done where Dellvin, since the ideal thing, the leader >> and sir, is that point >> leader in storage leader inclined computing peces with Vienna and many other assets like pivotal leaders and others. So that scale VM, Where about a ten billion dollar company, fifth largest software company doing verywell leader in the softer to find infrastructure leader, then use a computing leader and softer, defined networking. I think you need the combination of scale and speed, uh, just scale on its own. You could become a dinosaur, right? And what's the fear that every big company should have that you become ossified? And I think what we've been able to show the world is that V M wear and L can move with scale and speed. It's like having the combination of an elephant and a cheetah and won and that to me special. And for companies like us that do have scaled, we've to constantly ask ourselves, How do we disrupt ourselves? How do we move faster? How do we partner together? How do we look past these blind spots? How do we pardon with big companies, small companies and the winner is the customer. That's the way we think. And we could keep doing that, you'll say so. For example, five, six years ago, nobody thought of VMware--this is going before Dell or EMC--in the world of networking, quietly with ten thousand customers, a two million dollar run rate, NSX has become the undisputed leader and software-defined networking. So now we've got a combination of server, storage and a networking story and Dell VMware, where that's very strong And that's because we moved with speed and with scale. >> So of course, that came to an acquisition with Nice Sarah. Give us updates on the recent acquisitions. Hep C e o of Vela Cloud. What's happening there? >> Yeah, we've done three. That, I think very exciting to kind of walk through them in chronological order about eighteen months ago was Velo Cloud. We're really excited about that. It's sort of like the name, velocity and cloud fast. Simple Cloud based. It is the best solution. Ston. How do we come to deciding that we went to talk to our partners like t other service providers? They were telling us this is the best solution in town. It connects to the data center story to the cloud story and allows our virtual cloud network to be the best softer. To find out what you can, you have your existing Mpls you might have your land infrastructure but there's nobody who does softer to find when, like Philip, they're excited about that cloud health. We're very excited about that because that brings a multi cloud management like, sort of think of it like an e r P system on top of a w eso azure to allow you to manage your costs and resource What ASAP do it allows you to manage? Resource is for materials world manufacturing world. In this world, you've got resources that are sitting on a ws or azure. Uh, cloud held does it better than anybody else. Hefty. Oh, now takes a Cuban eighty story that we'd already begun with pivotal and with Google is you remember at at PM world two years ago. And that's that because the founders of Cuban eighties left Google and started FTO. So we're bringing that DNA we've become now one of the top two three contributors to communities, and we want to continue to become the de facto platform for containers. If you go to some of the airports in San Francisco, New York, I think Keilani and Heathrow to you'LL see these ads that are called container where okay, where do you think the Ware comes from Vienna, where, OK, and our goal is to make containers as container where you know, come to you from the company that made vmc possible of'Em where So if we popularized PM's, why not also popularised the best enterprise contain a platform? That's what helped you will help us do >> talk about Coburn at ease for a minute because you have an interesting bridge between end user computing and their cloud. The service is micro. Services that are coming on are going to be powering all these APS with either data and or these dynamic services. Cooper, Nettie sees me the heart of that. We've been covering it like a blanket. Um, I'm gonna get your take on how important that is. Because back Nelson, you're setting the keynote at the Emerald last year. Who burn it eases the dial tone. Is Cooper Netease at odds with having a virtual machine or they complimentary? How does that evolving? Is it a hedge? What's the thoughts there? >> Yeah, First off, Listen, I think the world has begun to realize it is a world of containers and V ems. If you looked at the company that's done the most with containers. Google. They run their containers in V EMS in their cloud platform, so it's not one or the other. It's vote. There may be a world where some parts of containers run a bare metal, but the bulk of containers today run and Beyonce And then I would say, Secondly, you know, five. Six years ago, people all thought that Doctor was going to obliterate VM where, But what happened was doctors become a very good container format, but the orchestration layer from that has not become daugher. In fact, Cuban Eddie's is kind of taking a little of the head and steam off Dr Swarm and Dr Enterprise, and it is Cooper Navy took the steam completely away. So Senses Way waited for the right time to embrace containers because the obvious choice initially would have been some part of the doctor stack. We waited as Borg became communities. You know, the story of how that came on Google. We've embraced that big time, and we've stated a very important ball hefty on All these moves are all part of our goal to become the undisputed enterprise container platform, and we think in a multi cloud world that's ours to lose. Who else can do multi cloud better than VM? Where may be the only company that could have done that was Red Hat. Not so much now, inside IBM, I think we have the best chance of doing that relative. Anybody else >> Sanjay was talking about on our intro this morning? Keynote analysis. Talking about the stock price of Dell Technologies, comparing the stock price of'Em where clearly the analysis shows that the end was a big part of the Dell technologies value. How would you summarize what v m where is today? Because on the Kino there was a Bank of America customers. She said she was the CTO ran, she says, Never mind. How we got here is how we go floors the end wars in a similar situation where you've got so much success, you always fighting for that edge. But as you go forward as a company, there's all these new opportunities you outlined some of them. What should people know about the VM? We're going forward. What is the vision in your words? What if what is VM where >> I think packed myself and all of the key people among the twenty five thousand employees of'Em are trying to create the best infrastructure company of all time for twenty one years. Young. OK, and I think we have an opportunity to create an incredible brand. We just have to his use point on the begins show create platforms. The V's fear was a platform. Innocent is a platform workspace. One is a platform V san, and the hyper convert stack of weeks right becomes a platform that we keep doing. That Carbonetti stuff will become a platform. Then you get platforms upon platforms. One platforms you create that foundation. Stone now is released. ADelle. I think it's a better together message. You take VX rail. We should be together. The best option relative to smaller companies like Nutanix If you take, you know Veum Where together with workspace one and laptops now put Microsoft in the next. There's nobody else. They're small companies like Citrix Mobile. I'm trying to do it. We should be better than them in a multi cloud world. They maybe got the companies like Red Hat. We should have bet on them. That said, the end. Where needs toe also have a focus when customers don't have Dale infrastructure. Some people may have HP servers and emcee storage or Dell Silvers and netapp storage or neither. Dellery emcee in that case, usually via where, And that's the way we roll. We want to be relevant to a multi cloud, multi server, multi storage, any hardware, any cloud. Any AP any device >> I got. I gotta go back to the red hat. Calm in a couple of go. I could see you like this side of IBM, right? So So it looks like a two horse race here. I mean, you guys going hard after multi cloud coming at it from infrastructure, IBM coming at it with red hat from a pass layer. I mean, if I were IBM, I had learned from VM where leave it alone, Let it blossom. I mean, we have >> a very good partisan baby. Let me first say that IBM Global Services GTS is one about top sai partners. We do a ton of really good work with them. Uh, I'm software re partner number different areas. Yeah, we do compete with red hat with the part of their portfolios. Relate to contain us. Not with Lennox. Eighty percent plus of their businesses. Lennox, They've got parts of J Boss and Open Stack that I kind of, you know, not doing so well. But we do compete with open ship. That's okay, but we don't know when we can walk and chew gum so we can compete with Red Hat. And yet partner with IBM. That's okay. Way just need to be the best at doing containing platform is better than open shifter. Anybody, anything that red hat has were still partner with IBM. We have to be able to look at a world that's not black and white. And this partnership with Microsoft is a good example. >> It's not a zero sum game, and it's a huge market in its early days. Talk >> about what's up for you now. What's next? What's your main focus? What's your priorities? >> Listen, we're getting ready for VM World now. You know in August we want to continue to build momentum on make many of these solutions platforms. So I tell our sales reps, take the number of customers you have and add a zero behind that. OK, so if you've got ten thousand customers of NSX, how do we get one hundred thousand customers of insects. You have nineteen thousand customers of Visa, which, by the way, significantly head of Nutanix. How do we have make one hundred ninety thousand customers? And we have that base? Because we have V sphere and we have the Delll base. We have other partners. We have, I think, eighty thousand customers off and use of computing tens of millions of devices. How do we make sure that we are workspace? One is on billion. Device is very much possible. That's the vision. >> I think that I think what's resonating for me when I hear you guys, when you hear you talk when we have conversations also in Pat on stage talks about it, the simplification message is a good one and the consistency of operating across multiple environments because it sounds great that if you can achieve that, that's a good thing. How you guys get into how you making it simple to run I T. And consistent operating environment. It's all about keeping the customer in the middle of this. And when we listen to customs, all of these announcements the partnership's when there was eight of us, Microsoft, anything that we've done, it's about keeping the customer first, and the customer is basically guiding up out there. And often when I sit down with customers, I had the privilege of talking hundreds of thousands of them. Many of these CEOs the S and P five hundred I've known for years from S athe of'Em were they'LL Call me or text me. They want us to be a trusted advisor to help them understand where and how they should move in their digital transformation and compared their journey to somebody else's. So when we can bring the best off, for example, of developer and operations infrastructure together, what's called DEV Ops customers are wrestling threw that in there cloud journey when we can bring a multi device world with additional workspace. Customers are wrestling that without journey there, trying to figure out how much they keep on premise how much they move in the cloud. They're thinking about vertical specific applications. All of these places where if there's one lesson I've learned in my last ten twenty years of it has become a trusted advisor to your customers. Lean on them and they will lean on you on when you do that. I mean the beautiful world of technology is there's always stuff to innovate. >> Well, they have to lean on you because they can't mess around with all this infrastructure. They'LL never get their digital transformation game and act together, right? Actually, >>= it's great to see you. We'Ll see you at PM, >> Rollo. Well, well, come on, we gotta talk hoops. All right, All right, All right, big. You're a big warriors fan, right? We're Celtics fan. Would be our dream, for both of you are also Manny's themselves have a privileged to go up against the great Warriors. But what's your prediction this year? I mean, I don't know, and I >> really listen. I love the warriors. It's ah, so in some senses, a little bit of a tougher one. Now the DeMarcus cousins is out for, I don't know, maybe all the playoffs, but I love stuff. I love Katie. I love Clay, you know, and many of those guys is gonna be a couple of guys going free agents, so I want to do >> it again. Joy. Well, last because I don't see anybody stopping a Celtics may be a good final. That would be fun if they don't make it through the rafters, though. That's right. Well, I Leonard, it's tough to make it all right. That sounds great. >> Come on. Sanjay Putin, CEO of BM Wear Inside the Cube, Breaking down his commentary of you on the landscape of the industry and the big news with Microsoft there. Other partner's bringing you all the action here Day one of three days of coverage here in the Cubicle two sets a canon of cube coverage out there. We're back with more after this short break.

(theme music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi I'm Peter Burress and welcome to another Cube conversation from our studios in lovely Palo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenges that every business faces, especially the tech industry, is to reimagine the marketing concept. What will be the role of marketing in domain in an era in which customers have greater options, greater power to set prices, while at the same time better understanding of the role the data's going to play and how engagement happens. And to have that conversation we've got Joyce Kim who's the CEO of Arm with us today. Joyce, welcome to the cube. >> Thanks, great to be here Peter. >> So I kind of said in the preamble that one of the challenges the marketing faces in the concept is to establish how it imagines the role that it's going to play in overall customer engagement. What do you think the key challenges of marketing are? You know, marketing has evolved so much over the last even five, seven years. I mean, overall when you look at how we look at the entire customer journey and most marketers have really focused on sort of the prospect journey. Not really thought through. You're constantly marketing to your customers and engaging them in so many ways. So, from an overall industry we've sort of married technology, new ways of reaching and speaking to audiences both, you know at a professional level and a personal level. And then sort of dealt with the deluge of data that we've gotten as a marketing organization and what we do with it ultimately to, you know further the business objectives of the company as well as to meet the needs of the prospecting customers that we're talking to. So it's a fascinating time for a marketing organization. >> Well I want to build on something you said that during the customer journey, which the customer is focused on. The traditional role of marketing has been to just, at that initial inquiry, or do the product launch, or get the collateral out there. But the, as we move from a product orientation where the presumptions that the value is in the product being sold and it's caveated up to on a customer, to more of a services orientation which suggests that we have a continuing ongoing relationship with the customer, who's constantly evaluating the value that's being provided. That marketing has to participate and sustain a sense of engagement so that value is constantly being communicated and the source and and and being recognized. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely, I mean it's even beyond just once a product is launched. When you look at the entire value prop and the problem that, you know, product and engineering and some of these core sort of tenants of the business work on. Marketing is an incredible input to that. We can understand and help define the landscape and the specifics of roles and the pain points that, you know, from a pure feature function perspective that they would just never get. And I think today that your seeing marketers become much more of a partner to not just the sales organization to drive leads, which is obviously a critical part of what we do from a demand gen and lead generation. But really a true input to the direction of the product, to the go to market strategy. And even sort of looking at, you know, where do we go next? You have growth areas that you want to look into. And we can be a great vehicle to test out, you know, possible adjacencies or additional value layers that your going to add to your existing product, so absolutely. >> And one of the reasons why marketing can do that is because marketing historically has been one of the stewards of customer data. And because data is such a fungible asset within the business. If managed and handled right you get data in about how something is being used. Kind of what the market thinks about and that can be applied to products, can be applied to service, can be applied to sales, can be applied to partners, etc. So is that kind of the central reason why marketing's role in the business is starting to change is because data is informing all parts of the business data that has historically come in through marketing and been managed by marketing? >> Yeah, I mean data comes in though marketing, and a big chunk of it does but really, you know, so take a step back, today with the digital realms that we have, you have a lot more avenues in which to collect data and to understand the journey of the customers, or the prospects. The other part that I think is fascinating that we can do today is to inject that with product use data, or other third party data. And so there's sort of this constellation of information that comes together and uniquely marketing can put that together to really paint a picture of what's happening, what is causing something, what is correlating in different ways. So we become sort of a data clearing house for customers for sure. >> Well let's talk about that. So the data, you say, data clearing house for customers or a clearing house for customer data. But also a provider of value back to prospects and customers to sustain that journey. What then are the appropriate limits of data collection and data utilization? It's a topic that marketers kind of understand or recognize that it's an issue, but they don't get into it too much. >> Yeah. >> How does a marketers responsibility, vis a vis, privacy play out? >> Yeah, so ARM actually is a great example of that. Where, you know, we have been a steward of customer partner data. So our ecosystem, as we call it, of pretty much all of the semiconductor players on the planet. Our close relationships to understand the roadmaps, to really, you know, understand where the trends of devices is going. It's something we have had and we have worked with the ecosystem and the industry to lead forward but not abused it in any way and really been respectful of what the individual data provisions are. As a marketing organization, you know, even B to C or B to B, you really need to think about the trade offs that each particular customer or prospect is willing to give and the value that your going to provide. We could justify all day long that, you know, having more data will provide better advertising or better targeted something. That's not necessarily universal. And so for us as a marketing industry to really think about what are the boundaries and, you know, the lines that we need to draw for ourselves. So that we don't violate that customer trust or that we respectfully use the data that helps, you know, both side is one of biggest challenges that we have coming. And one of the areas that I think will drive it much more to the forefront is if you look at marketing technology and the data that we're creating. If you inject AI to that, and some of that's starting to be done where, you know, we've got it in shades, you know, predictive analytics and certain optimizations that we can do. Today the technology is going where that's going to be on steroids and so, you know, before you let a machine decide what the lines of privacy is, I personally think we need to have that conversation. >> Well, one of the things that suggests ultimately is you go back many years people talk all the time about what is an employee's responsibility? Is it to shareholders, other employees? Well, Increasingly we recognize that it's the customer. >> Yes >> And sales is historically the advocate for the deal and product and engineering is the advocate for the product. It seems as though marketing has become increasingly recognized as the advocate for the customer. What constitutes good behavior? What constitutes good engagement? What constitutes appropriate value exchange? But that suggests that there is a real cultural requirement. >> That's exactly right. >> So change is the culture that has to happen. Do you see marketing emerging as the advocate for the customer and having that notion being embedded increasingly in how marketing operates? >> I mean believe it or not I mean marketing has always done that to some degree. But yes, but now where it comes to not just what the customer needs are, you have to go through how do you. What are the boundaries that we as a company are willing to live with? Or go to in order to again best serve the customer. I mean I fundamentally believe in the mantra that if you treat your customers right or if you respect, you know, the market in which you're trying to win, that that serves your company best. So, you know, having a great product and having all the other things that are super important, no question. But we're the face of that company. We're the reflection of that to the external world. And so that is a responsibility that I think all marketers should take very seriously and respect. >> Yeah, but I think also that it's historically, especially in the tech industry, marketing has been something that we worry about at a certain time. >> At a later point. >> Where we pigeon hole to a certain step in the process. And your suggesting and I'm suggesting that marketing increasingly has to be that voice that cuts across not only the customer journey but also the technology journey, the product journey. The evolution of the company. Where you want to demonstrate internally as well as externally that you've got the customers interest at heart. Your not just trying to make money, your trying to serve your customer. >> Yeah, and it's a consistency. Right, so from general high level impressions to a customer prospect doing research to when they are ready to entertain speaking to different tools or vendors or solutions. I mean that whole thing, once you buy, after you buy, after you buy more. I mean this is literally the entire life cycle where the cultural aspects of who you are cannot be hidden. They will figure it out at some point during that engagement. And so we really have to drive not just the marketing programs to reflect that. But if I can't get the organization to really buy into it, you know, at the heart of it. We'll fall apart. So at ARM we've really done a lot of work to try and understand. You know, people at work will always hear me say, lets not market our internal org structure or internal, you know, something. What do the customers think? What do they care about? And if I can get everyone to ask that question. I think that's a huge win. >> Yeah, what's valuable to the customer? So that every touch is a source of value. So that's a conversation you have with your people. >> Yeah. >> How do you get the rest of the corporation to see marketing in the same way? To think the same way? So that ARM or any company can in fact become that strong partner, that thought leader, that advocate for customer outcomes. >> Yeah it's literally a multi touch effort. You can't just start at the top bottom, bottom up. It has to be across the board. But I do fundamentally think that if leadership isn't bought in on that, it will be a barrier. The strongest companies that truly believe, it's easy to say that we want to do what's right for the customer or to think about the market. That's sort of a, you know, table stakes if you will. But to live it, when you have to make some tough choices. That's where leadership can play a big role because whether your the call center person or the sales engineer or, you know, the product manager that's talking to a customer. If they fundamentally believe that the leadership driven by good data that they can have the right information to make the right decisions, married with a culture that supports the customer first mentality. I mean that is ultimately what I think comes, brings all of this together. >> Yeah, I think that's a great point and I've, you know we've had a number of CMO's on and the rubber meets the road when an individual proximate to the customer feels confident that they can take action on behalf of that customer based on the right data and not be countermanded by a political or some other agenda that exists somewhere else in the organization. That's really the test of a customer driven business. >> That's right. That's exactly right. And I think empowering them with the data and the knowledge as well as the support of the organization and leadership is what enables that person to give that kind of positive experience to the customer, ultimately. >> So Joyce, you've worked in a number of different companies, you've been around Silicon Valley for a while. Not too long. >> (laughing) >> Here at ARM, what is the one lesson that you want to leave other CMO's based on your experience at ARM. Which is a little bit out ahead of the curve in a lot of the fundamentals. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, I always believe in today you're in an environment and a technology landscape where you can take a lot of risks. You can test things out. It's just as important on how you react or how you shift based on that data than actually creating that initial program. And so I live by sort of, you know, the the. We won't progress if we don't innovate and kind of continue to try new things. We're very fortunate in a way, you know, time where we can do that and get almost instantaneous feedback. >> Immeadiate testing for the role of marketing. >> Exactly. But it's also sort of married with the other side which is know your boundaries. Know where you're willing to go as a company and what you believe is the right thing for your industry or your company or your customer. And if you put those two things together, that's what moves it forward in a positive way. >> Joyce Kim, CMO of ARM. Thanks again for being on the cube. >> Thanks Peter. >> And once again I'm Peter Burress. This has been another Cube Conversation. Until next time. Talk to you soon. (theme music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Run. Welcome back to the Cubes live coverage here in San Francisco. Mosconi North while you're here as part of our exclusive covers. The Cube for IBM think twenty nineteen, their annual conference of customers and employees coming together to set the agenda for the next year. For IBM and its ecosystem. I'm John for a student. Um, in day. Volonte and Lisa Martin co hosting all week This week. Four days of wall to wall coverage. Day two of our kind Really Day one of the show Kickoff. We're here ending out that day and just had the CEO's keynote, and we're going to a review and analysis. David's do. We had a lot of interviews. Coming up to this theme is pretty clear. It's a I cloud and everything else going underneath that classic development application. Developers, developers in general, making applications That's classic, but eyes the big story. And, like like Always Cloud and the promise of Where That's Going, which is hybrid and multi cloud Dave, You set on the keynote. Any surprises from Ginny Rometty? >> I wouldn't say there were any surprises. First of all, I like Jenny. I think she she's a great presenter. I'd like to hang out with their like we were kids. That was what I wanted to hang out with us. He's a time person. I think I would feel comfortable talking to, you know, sports or business. She looked good. She had a really nice, sharp white suit on. She's self deprecating. She was drinking Starbucks. You know, they're obviously a client of IBM. I got the best moment was when Jim White hearse came on stage. He said, It's great to be here So he was like, Yeah, given thirty four billion reasons why it's great to be here kind of thing, So that was pretty funny. And she had. She made the comment. We've been dating Red Hat for twenty years before we decided to get married. She was trying to make a case You normally in Jenny's presentation, she she makes a really solid, puts forth the solid premise and then sort of backs it up with her guests. Today, I thought her premise, which was we're entering Chapter two. It's all about scaling and embedding a I everywhere. It's about hybrid. It's about bringing mission critical APS, you know, move those forward. And she had a number of other lessons learned. I thought she laid it out, but I think it sort of missed the back end. I don't think they punctuated the tail end of Jenny's talk. The guests were great and they had guys on from Kaiser Permanente E. T. And they were very solid. Well, think they made the case as strong as the premises that she put forward. And you know, we could talk more about that. >> And Stewart see red hat on stage. We've been commenting. We've been analyzing the acquisition of Red Hat, big number, thirty four billion dollars critical point you guys talk about in your opening on day one, the leverage they need to get out of that. This is the Alamo for them with the cloud. In my opinion, IBM is a lot to bring to the bear in the cloud. They I anywhere telegraphs that they wanna have their stuff with containers and multiple clouds. They want to be positioned as a multi cloud company but still have their cloud, providing the power for the workload. That makes sense, right? Bm. This is their last stand. This is like, you know, the Alamo for them. They They need to make cloud work right now. Watson, move from a product or brand ballistically open step. Is it tied together? Stew your thoughts on open stack and how this fits into their narrative. >> So I think you mean open shift, right, John s o from red hat standpoint. Absolutely what they're doing. They are involved in open stack, but open stack. You got a small, >> but they're one of the few that are sanguine on Open, Zachary read. >> I mean, read had open shift. My bad >> way it absolutely. And it is complicated in the multi cloud world and lots of different pieces. We've had a number of conversations with the IBM people that have worked with side by side, red hat in the open source communities, IBM, no stranger to open source and a CZ we talked about in our open on yesterday. It's the developers is really what where IBM needs to go and where Red Hat has a bevy of them on DH John. What you said about Multi Cloud? Absolutely. It's if IBM thinks that buying Red hat will make them the Goebel Global player in Cloud. I think that's wrong, and I don't think that's what they're doing. When I wrote a block post when it came, and I said, Is this move going to radically change the cloud landscape? No. Can this acquisition radically change IBM and change the trajectory of where they fit into Multi cloud? Absolutely. So there's cultural differences. We had Ah, Stephanie sheriffs on who's a longtime IBM er who now runs the biggest business inside of Red Hat. And she talked about the passion of open source. This is not lip service. I've many friends that have worked for it. Had I've, you know, worked with them, partner with them and cover them for most of those twenty years on DH? Absolutely. You've got over ten thousand people that are passionate involved in communities on DH. When you talk about the developer world, you talk about the cloud native world. This is what you know. Really. Red Hat moment has been waiting. >> It was interesting. John and I would like one if you could comment on this is you hearing IBM? Jenny talked about Chapter two. She took a digital reinvention. Here's yet another company using the reinvent terminology. I think that's what sort of pointed she talked. About forty percent of the world is going to be private. Sixty percent is going to be public Cloud. The sort of that's the first time I've heard those that she said It's flipped if you're ah, regulated industry. But what do your thoughts on people essentially using and Amazons narrative on reinvention? >> Everyone's using Amazons narrative. Here's the bottom line. Amazon is winning impact large margins. I think the numbers airway skewed in the favor of the people trying to catch up. I think that's more of a game. If vacation by the analyst firms, Amazon is absolutely blowing away the competition when it comes to public loud. The only game at the table right now for the Oracle's, IBM, Sze and Microsoft and Google is the slow down the adoption of Amazon. And you see the cloud adoption of Amazon, whether it's in the government sector, which I think is more acute. And Mohr illustrative, the Jet I contract a ten billion dollar contract. That is a quote sole source deal. But it was bid as a multi source deal means anyone could bid on it. Well, guess what? That is a going to be an award and probably to Amazon as the sole winner because IBM doesn't have the certification. Nor does Microsoft notice Oracle. Nobody's got Amazons winning that, and that begs the argument. Can you use one cloud? And the answer is Yes, you can. If the APP worked, Load works best for it, and procurement does not decide output for the cloud. For example, if it's a Jet I contract, it's a military application. So, like a video game, would you want to play a video game and be lagging? Would you want our military to be lagging? Certainly, the D O d. Says no. So one cloud makes sense. If you're running office three sixty five, you want to use azure. So Microsoft has taken that, and their earnings have been phenomenal by specialising around their workloads. That makes sense for Azure, and they're catching up. IBM has an opportunity to do the same for their workload. The business workload. So aye, aye, anywhere is interesting to me. So I think this is a good bet. If they can pull it off, that's the strategy, and the world will go multi cloud, where certain clouds will be sold for the apple sole source for the workloads. That makes sense for those workload. So this is where the market's going, right? So this whole notion of there won't be multi class. It's going to be multi cloud and it's gonna winner, winner take most. And the game right now is to stop ama's. That is clearly the case, and you're seeing it in the bids you see in the customer base. And IBM is catching Oppa's fast as they can. They got the people and the technology. The question is, how much do they catch up and level up? Tamas on? >> Well, stew despite Jenny, you know, invoking the reinvent terminology, they're her. Kino was starkly different than what you would expect from an Amazon Kino. They may. She mentioned a couple of the announcements, Watson anywhere, which, by the way, is about time. It's about time that Watson ran on other people's clouds of it, which should have been a while ago and in hyper protect is the world's most secure cloud. But we don't have any really details on that. And then I'd be in business automation with Watson, and that was really it. I think it was by design not to give a big product pitch, you know, very non Steve jobs. Like very done, Andy Jazzy like which is all product product product. I mean, kind of surprising in a big show with all these customers. You think they'd be pitching, but I think their intent was to really be more content. Orient >> Well, So Dave, you know, goes back at the core. What is IBM's biggest business? IBM biggest businesses. So services. So I've done a number of interviews this week already talking about how IBM is helping with digital transformation, how they're helping people move to more agile and development for environments. You know, the multi cloud world. How do they know IBM has a long history with C. S, P s and M s peace? So they have large constituencies And sure, they have products. You know, great stuff talking about, You know, how do they have the best infrastructure to run your workloads and the strength that they haven't supercomputing in HPC. And how they can leverage that? Because IBM knows a thing or two about scale. But, you know, Dave, one of the questions I have for you is we've seen the big services organizations go through radical downsizing. You know, HP spun off their business. Del got rid of the Perot business. You know, IBM still is, you know, services. At its core, it is IBM built for the multi cloud cloud native. You know, Ai ai world, Or do they still need to go through some massive changes? >> Well, multi Cloud is complicated and complex. IBM does complicated services, you know, deal with complexity, but I still can't help but feel like, >> Well, I well, I thought, wouldn't comment on them. I think the services. If the Manual Services Professional Services dropped down, IBM has a great opportunity to move them to cloud based services, meaning I can write software. And this is where I think they have an advantage. They could really nail the business applications, which will become services, whether its domain expertise in a vertical. And I think this is their cloud opportunity. IBM could capture that they could take entirely new category of applications. Business applications and services, automate them with machine learning, automate them with cloud scale their cloud scale while making them portable on multiple clouds. So the notion of services will be the professional services classic your grandfather's services, too. Cloud based services at scale. >> Yeah, well, I think you're right. Look, that's one. IBM is biggest strengths, and Jenny did that acquisition. By the way. The PwC acquisition is one hundred thousand. People instantly brought IBM into that deep vertical industry expertise, and they're not going to give that up any time soon. And this so many opportunities to code. If I those services or that song you know, through software and make them repeatable services, I mean, they're at as a service. Business is one of the fastest growing parts of IBM, you know, revenue stream. So I don't see that going. Wait. All I do think there was a missed opportunity and maybe they can't talk about it for was some regulatory reason. They're just paranoid. But you had white hearse up on the stage. You just spent thirty four billion dollars. I would have liked to hurt Mohr about the rationale, even though we've heard it before. They did. You know, Jim and Jeannie did a tour there on all the big TV shows You're on Kramer. But I would have liked to heard sort of six months on what that rationale is and how they're going to help transform with this in this new chapter and what that role that red hat was going play, I thought it was a missed opportunity. >> Well, speculate on that. I think of things. Probably. They probably don't have their answer yet. IBM is very good on messaging. You know, they're pretty tight, but I think Arvin Krishna talked to assert this morning. On our first interview. He brought up the container ization and Coburn Eddie's trend. I think that's where red hat fits and melons and give them cloud Native developers in Enterprise Fortune one thousand. They also got the cloud native ecosystem behind that the C in C F etcetera. But Containers does for Legacy Container ization, and Cooper daddies really preserves legacy. It allows developers to essentially keep the old while bringing in the new and managing the life cycle of those applications, not a ribbon replace. This is an opportunity for IBM, and if I think the messaging folks and the product dies or probably figure out okay, how do we take the red hat and open shift and be cloud native and take all the goodness that comes in with cloud Native the new developers, the Devil Infrastructures code, make under the covers infrastructure programmable and is Rob Thomas pointed out, having horizontal data layer that enables new kinds of business services. So to me, container ization, it's kind of nerdy Cooper netease. But this is really a new linchpin to what could be a sea change for IBM in terms of revenue. Keeping the Legacy customs happy because then the pressure to move to Amazon goes away because I can say, Whoa, wait. If the question is, why adopt if customs have an answer for that that gives IBM time, This is what they want otherwise, cloud native worlds could move very, very fast. We've seen the velocity of the momentum, and I think that's a key move. >> I think your point about slowing down the Amazon momentum is a good one, and I want to talk about five things that Ginny said that lessons learned, she said. One. You can approach the world from outside in and focus on customer experience. Or you could do inside out, identify new ways to work and new work flows, you know, kind of driving change. The third lesson learned was You need a business platform fueled by data with invented A I. The fourth is you need an ai ai platform. And in the fifth is Rob Thomas is you can't have a eye without a word that you needed information, architecture, which, by the way, I believe it to be true. So those are business oriented discussions. It's not something that you necessarily here from Amazon there kind of chewy. There's the services component to all that. The big question I have is Well, Watson, be that ai ai platform. >> Yeah, I mean something, You know, I look at is why Doe I choose a platform and a partner. So we understand Amazon, you know, they want to be the leader and everything. They have a lot more services in anyone. But, you know, if I want data services, first cloud that comes to mind to me is Google. You know, Google has a real strength there, You know. Where does IBM have a leadership compared to Google business productivity? IBM has a lot of strength there, but Microsoft also has a place so you know, customers. If they're going to live, Multi cloud, they're going Teo in many ways go backto best of breed on DH. Therefore, where will IBM differentiate themselves from some of those? >> We have visibility down. It's clear now that the industry the fog is lifting, starting to see Cem clear lines of sight and a few major trends. And it's pretty clear on where the industry's going for the next ten years. Application developers at the top of the stack gonna build APS The infrastructures cloud cloud something multi cloud cloud, native infrastructures, code and data. And a I see that Amazon reinvent sage maker. You're seeing all the major innovations happening around APS using data power advice, cloud scale, that's it. Everything else to me is glue or some sort of fabric component. Or a piece of that distributed architecture and its cloud. Aye, aye, and an apple. >> A CZ. Dave is often said, it's the innovation sandwich of today. >> Yeah, well, so I guess the things I want to mention it because of me. There's been some high profile failed failures with Watson, But watching was trying to do some things that were not, you know, voice response to Alexa, you know, solve cancer, you know, world problems and so I think IBM is actually earned the right to be in the discussion, and the Red had acquisition gives IBM instant credibility in this game, especially in this a multi cloud game. >> Well, they got me. They have the right to be the zillions of customers. They have a lot of a lot of business model innovations with that that their customers are innovating on. And if they keep the cloud innovate, they gotta match the specs. Specs of the cloud. They gotta be there with Cloud. If they don't make the cloud work, they're going to be subservient to the other clouds. They have to make it in the top three. This is clear. Hey, I think I think we're working a lot of experience and data. I think Watson kind of finding his home is a brand's natural fit. Got a portfolio of data? I think IBM will do very well in the data front. It's the cloud game that they got a really sure up. They got to make sure that IBM cloud conserved. They're custom, >> but the good news is there is there. In the game we saw HPD tried to get into HPD, tried to get the cloud it failed. Cisco, for a while, was trying to get with Sawyer. AMC make of numerous attempts. VM were made, made numerous attempts. IBM spent two billion dollars in software. They they they've got a cloud. You know, they've transformed what was essentially a bare metal hosting platform, you know, into a cloud. They've jammed all there as a service products in there. They're SAS portfolio. So there, at least in the game and, you know, again, I've said often, I think they're very Oracle like it's not the biggest cloud. It's not going to scale to the Amazon levels, but they've got a cloud, and it's a key part of the strategy. >> Innovation Sandwich applications Cloud What data? In the middle of a I. That's the formula, David said on the Q beer. All right day to coverage for the Cuba. Four days were here in the lobby of Mosconi North, part of the new refurbished Mosconi Center in San Francisco. Howard Street's closed. It feels like Salesforce. Dreamforce event. Big event in San Francisco. I'm John First Amendment Dave along. They were here for four days Day, two of four days of coverage for IBM think back tomorrow. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018, brought to you by Redhat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman breaking down all the action, talking to all the top people, influencers, executives, start-ups, vendors, the foundation itself. We're here with two co-leads of Kubernetes at Google, legends in the Kubernetes industry. Tim Hockin and Brian Grant, both with Google, both co-leads at GKE. Thanks for joining us, legends in the industry. Kubernetes is still a short life, but still, being there from the beginning, you guys were instrumental at Google building out and contributing to this massive tsunami of 8000 people here. Who would have thought? >> It's amazing! >> It's a little overwhelming. >> It's almost like you guys are celebrity-status here inside this crowd. How's that feel? >> It's a little weird. I don't buy into the celebrity culture for technologists. I don't think it works well. >> We agree, but it's great to have you on. Let's get down to it. Kubernetes, certainly the rise of Kubernetes has grown. It's now pretty mainstream, people look at that as a key linchpin for the center of Cloud Native. And we see the growth of Cloud, you guys are living it with Google. What is the importance of Kubernetes? Why is it so important? Fundamentally at it's core, has a lot of impact, what's the fundamental reason why it's so successful? >> I think fundamentally Kubernetes provides a framework for driving migration towards Cloud Native patterns across your entire operational infrastructure. The basic design of Kubernetes is pretty simple and can be applied to automating pretty much anything. We're seeing that here, there are at least more than half a dozen talks about how people are using the Kubernetes to control plane to manage their applications or workflows or functions or things other than just core Kubernetes, containers, for example. Cloud Native is about... One of the things I'm involved with is I'm on the Technical Oversight Committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I drove the update of the Cloud Native definition. If you're trying to operate with high velocity, deploying many times a day, if you're trying to operate at scale, especially with containers and functions, scale is increasing and compounding as people break their applications into more and more micro services. Kubernetes really provides the framework for managing that scale and for integrating other infrastructure that needs to accommodate that scale and that pace of change. >> I think Kubernetes speaks to the pain points that users are really having today. Everybody's a software company now, right? And they have to deploy their software, they have to build their software, they have to run their software, and these things, they build up pain. When it was just a little thing, you didn't have to worry about scale, internet-scale and web-scale, you could tolerate it within your organization. But more and more, you need to deploy faster, you need to automate things. You can't afford to have giant staffs of people who are running your applications. These things are all part of Kubernetes purvey. I think it just spoke to people in a way, they said I suffer from that every day and you just made it go away. >> And what's the core impact now? Because then now people are seeing it, what is the impact to the organizations that are rethinking their entire operation from all parts of the staff, from how they buy infrastructure, which is also Cloud, you see some Cloud there, and then that deploying applicant, what's the real impact? >> I think the most obvious, the most important part here is the way it changes how people operate and how they think about how they manage systems. It no longer becomes scary to update your application. It's just a thing you do. If you can do it with high confidence, you're going to do it more often, which means you get features and bugs fixed and you get your roll-outs done quicker. It's amazing, the result that it can have on the user experience. A user reports a bug in the morning, and you fix it in the afternoon, and you don't worry about that. >> You bring up some really interesting points. I think back 10 years ago, from a research standpoint, we were looking at how can the enterprise do some of the things that the hyperscale vendors were doing. I feel over the last 10 years, every time Google released one of the great scientific papers, we'd all get a peer inside and say like, oh hey. When I went to the first DockerCon and heard how Google was using containers, when Kubernetes first came out, it's like, oh wow, maybe the rest of us will get to do something that Google's been doing for the last 10 years. Maybe bring us back a little bit to Borg and how that led to Kubernetes. Are we still all the rest of us just doing whatever Google did 10 years ago? >> Yeah, Tim and I both worked on Borg previously, Tim on the node-agent side and I worked on the control-point side in Borg One lesson we really took from Borg is that really you can run all types of applications. People started with stateless applications and we started with that because it's simpler in Kubernetes. But really it's just a general management control plane for managing applications. With the model of one application per container, then you can manage the applications in a much more first-class way and unlock a lot of opportunities for automation in the management control plane. At Google, several years ago when we started, Google had already gone through the transition of moving most of its applications to Borg. It was after that phase that Google started its Cloud effort and the rest of the world was doing VMs. When Docker emerged, we were... In the early phases, Tim mentioned this in our keynote yesterday of open-sourcing our container runtime. When Docker emerged, it is clear it had a much better user experience for the way folks were managing applications outside of Google and we just pivoted to that immediately. >> When Docker first came out, we took a look at it, we, my node-agent team in Borg, and we went, yeah, it's kind of like poor man's version of Borglet. We sort of ignored it for awhile because we were already working on our open-source effort. We were open-sourcing it, not really to change the world and make everybody use it, but more so that we can have conversations with people like the Linux kernel community. When we said we need this feature, and they'd say well why, why do you need this, we could actually demonstrate for them why we needed it. When Docker landed, we saw the community building, and building, and building. That was a snowball of its own, right? As it caught on, we realized we know what this is going to. We know once you embrace the Docker mindset that you very quickly need something to manage all of your Docker nodes once you get beyond two or three of them. We know how to build that. We got a ton of experience here. We went to our leadership and said, please, this is going to happen with us or without us and I think the world would be better if we helped. >> I think that's an interesting point. You guys had to open-source to do collaboration with Linux to get that flywheel going for you guys out of necessity. Then when Docker validated the community acceptance of hey, we can just use containers, a lot of magic will happen, it hit the second trigger point. What happened after that? You guys just had a debate internally? Is this another MapReduce? What's happening? Like, we should get behind this. I knew there was a big argument or debate, I should say, within Google. At that time there were a lot of conversations, how do we handle this? >> That was around the time that Google Compute Engine, our infrastructures and service platform, was going GA and really starting to get usage. So then we had an opportunity to enable our customers to benefit from the kinds of techniques we had been using internally. So I don't think the debate was whether we should participate, it was more how. For example, should we have a fully managed product, should we have to do open-source, should we do managed open-source, so those were really the three alternatives that we were discussing. >> Well, congratulations, you guys done great work and certainly a huge impact to the industry. I think it's clear that the motivation to have some sort of standardization, de facto standard, whatever word can be used to kind of let people be enabled on top or below Kubernetes is great. I guess the next question is how do you guys envision this going forward as a core? If we're going to go to decomposition with low levels of granularity tying together through the network and cloud-scale and the new operating law, we'll have comments in this, how does the industry maintain the greatness of what Kubernetes is delivering and bring new things to market faster? What's your vision on this? >> I talked a little bit about this this week. We put a ton of work into extension points, extensibility of the system trying to stay very true to the original vision of Kubernetes. It is a box, and Kubernetes fits inside a box, and anything that's outside the box has to stay outside the box. This gives us the opportunity to build new ecosystems. You can see it in networking space, you can see it in storage space where whole sort of cottage industries are now springing up around doing networking for Kubernetes and doing storage for Kubernetes. And that's fantastic! You see projects like Istio, which I'm a big fan of, it's outside of Kubernetes. It works really well with Kubernetes, it's designed on top of Kubernetes infrastructure, but it's not Kubernetes. It's totally removable and you don't need it. There's systems like Knative which are taking the serverless idea and upleveling Kubernetes into serverless space. It's happening all over the place. We're trying to sort of pray fanatically, say, no, we're staying this big and no bigger. >> It's a really... From an engineering standpoint, it's much simpler if I just build a product and build everything into it. All those connection points, I go back to my engineering training. It's like every connection point is going to be another place where it could fail. Now it's got all these APIs, there's all the security issues, and things like that. But what I love what I heard right here is some of the learnings that we've had in open-source is these are all of these individual components that most of them can stand on their own. They don't even have to be with Kubernetes, but altogether you can build lots of different offerings. How do you balance that? How do you look at that from kind of a design and architecture standpoint? >> So one thing I've been looking at is how do we ensure compatibility of workloads across Kubernetes in all different environments and different configurations. How do we ensure that the tools and other systems building an ecosystem work with Kubernetes everywhere? So this is why we created the Conformance Program to certify that the critical APIs that everybody depends on behave the same way. As we try to improve the test coverage of the conformance, people are focusing on these areas of the system that are highly pluggable and extensible. So for example, the kubelet in the node has a pluggable container runtime, pluggable networks, pluggable storage systems now with CSI. So we're really focusing on ensuring we have good coverage of the Pod API, for example. And other parts of the system, people have swapped out an ecosystem, whether it's kube-proxy for our Kubernetes services or the scheduler. So we'll be working through those areas to make sure that they have really good coverage so users can deploy, say, a Helm Chart or their takes on a configuration or whatever, however they manage their applications and have that behave the same way on Kubernetes everywhere. >> I think you guys have done a great job of identifying this enabling concept. What is good enabling technology? Allowing others to do innovation around it. I think that's a nice positioning. What are the new problem areas that you guys see to work on next? Now I see things are developing in the ecosystem. You mentioned the Istio service mesh and people see value in that. Security is certainly a big conversation we've been having this week. What new problem areas or problem sets you guys see emerging that are needed to just tackle and just knock down right away? >> The most obvious, the thing that comes up sort of in every conversation of users now is multi-cluster, multi-cloud, hybrid, whether that's two clouds or on-prem plus cloud or even across different data centers on your premises. It's a hard topic. For a long time Kubernetes was able to sort of put a finger in our ears and pretend it didn't exist while we built out the Kubernetes model. Now we're at a place where we've crossed the adoption chasm. We're into the real adoption now. It's a real problem. It actually exists and we have to deal with it, and so we're now looking at how's it supposed to work. Philosophically, what do we think is supposed to happen here? Technologically, how do we make it happen? How do these pieces fit together? What primitives can we bring into Kubernetes to make these higher level systems possible? >> Would you consider 2019 to be the year of multi-cloud, in terms of the evolution of trying to tackle some of these things from latency? >> Yeah, I'm always reluctant to say the year of something because... >> Someone has to get killed, and someone dies, and someone's winning. >> It's the year of the last desktop. >> It's the year of something. (laughs) EDI, I'm just saying. >> I think multi-cluster is definitely the hot topic right now. It's certainly almost every customer that we talk to through Google and tons of community chatter about how to make this work. >> You've seen companies like NetApp and Cisco, for instance, and how they're been getting a tail-wind from the Kubernetes. It's been interesting. You need networks. They have a lot of networks. They can play a role in it. So it's interesting how it's designed to allow people to put their hands in there without kind of mucking up the main... >> Yeah, I think that really contributes to the success of Kubernetes, the more people that can help add value to Kubernetes, more people have a stake in the success of Kubernetes, both users and vendors, and developers, and contributors. We're all stakeholders in this endeavor now and we all share common goals, I think. >> Well guys, final question for you. I know we got to break on time. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate the time. Talk about an area of Kubernetes that most people should know about that might not know about. In other words, there was a lot of hype around Kubernetes, and it's warranted, it's a lot of buzz, what's an important area that's not talked about much that people should know more about it and pay attention to within the Kubernetes realms of that world? Is there any area that you think is not talked about enough that should be focused on in the conversations, the press, or just in general? >> Wow, that's a challenging question. I spent a lot of my time in the infrastructure side of Kubernetes, the lower end of the stack, so my brain immediately goes to networking and storage and all the lower level pieces there. I think there's a lot of policy knobs that Kubernetes has that not everybody's aware of, whether those are security policies or network policies. There's a whole family of these things and I think we're going to continue to acree more and more policy as more people come up with real-use cases for doing stuff. It's hard to keep that all in your mind, but it's really valuable stuff down there. >> For programmability, it's like a Holy Grail, really. Thoughts on the things that (chuckles) put you on the spot there? >> I think this question of how people should change what they were doing before if they're going to migrate to Kubernetes. To operate any workload, you need at least monitoring and you need really CI/CD if you want to operate with any amount of velocity. When you bring those practices to Kubernetes, should you just lift and shift those into Kubernetes or do you really need to change your mindset? I think Kubernetes really provides some capabilities that create opportunities for changing the way some things happen. I'm a big fan of GitOps, for example, in managing the resources to declaritively using version control as a source of truth and keeping that in sync with the state in your for live clusters. I think that enables a lot of interesting capabilities like instant disaster recovery, for example, migrations, new locations. There are some key folks here who are talking about that, giving that message, but we're really at the early stages there. >> All right, well great to have you guys on. Thanks for the insight. We've got to wrap up. Thanks Brian, thanks Tim, appreciate it. Live coverage here, theCUBE is at KubeCon, Cloud Native, Cloud 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, we'll be back after this short break.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto studios, getting a short little break between the madness of the conference season, which is fully upon us, and we're excited to have a long time industry veteran Brian Pawlowski, the CTO of DriveScale, joining us to talk about some of the crazy developments that continue to happen in this in this world that just advances, advances. Brian, great to see you. >> Good morning, Jeff, it's great to be here, I'm a bit, still trying to get used to the timezone after a long, long trip in Europe, but I'm glad to be here, I'm glad we finally were able to schedule this. >> Yes, it's never easy, (laughs) one of the secrets of our business is everyone is actually all together at conferences, it's hard to get 'em together when when there's not that catalyst of a conference to bring everybody together. So give us the 101 on DriveScale. >> So, DriveScale. Let me start with, what is composable infrastructure? DriveScale provides product for orchestrating disaggregated components on a high-performance fabric to allow you to spin up essentially your own private cloud, your own clusters for these modern applications, scale out applications. And I just said a bunch of gobble-dee-gook, what does that mean? The DriveScale software is essentially an orchestration package that provides the ability to take compute nodes and storage nodes on high-performance fabric and securely form multi-tenant architectures, much like you would in a cloud. When we think of application deployment, we think of a hundred nodes or 500 nodes. The applications we're looking at are things that our people are using for big data, machine learning, or AI, or, or these scale out databases. Things like Vertica, Aerospike, is important, DRAM, ESES, dBase database, and, this is an alternative to the standard way of deploying applications in a very static nature onto fixed physical resources, or into network storage coming from the likes of Network Appliance, sorry NetApp, and Dell EMC. It's the modern applications we're after, the big data applications for analytics. >> Right. So it's software that basically manages the orchestration of hardware, I mean of compute, store, and networks you can deploy big data analytics applications? >> Yes. >> Ah, at scale. >> It's absolutely focused on the orchestration part. The typical way applications that we're in pursuit of right now are deployed is on 500 physical bare metal nodes from, pick your vendor, of compute and storage that is all bundled together and then laid out into physical deployment on network. What we do is just that you essentially disaggregate, separate compute, pure compute, no disks at all, storage into another layer, have the fabric, and we inventory it all and, much like vCenter for virtualization, for doing software deployment of applications, we do software deployment of scale out applications and a scale out cluster, so. >> Right. So you talked about using industry standard servers, industry standard storage, does the system accommodate different types of compute and CPUs, different types of storage? Whether it's high performance disks, or it's Flash, how does it accommodate those things? And if I'm trying to set up my big stack of hardware to then deploy your software to get it configured, what're some of the things I should be thinkin' about? >> That's actually, a great question, I'm going to try to hit three points. (clears throat) Absolutely. In fact, a core part of our orchestration layer is to essentially generalize the compute and storage components and the networking components of your data center, and do rule-based, constraint-based selection when creating a cluster. From your perspective when creating a cluster (coughs) you say "I want a hundred nodes, and I'm going to run this application on it, and I need that this environment for the application." And this application is running on local, it thinks it's running local, bare metal, so. You say "A hundred nodes, eight cores each minimum, and I want 64 gig of memory minimum." It'll go out and look at the inventory and do a best match of the components there. You could have different products out there, we are compute agnostic, storage agnostic, you could have mix and match, we will basically do a best fit match of all of your available resources and then propose to you in a couple seconds back with the cluster you want, and then you just hit go, and it forms a cluster in a couple seconds. >> A virtual cluster within that inventory of assets that I-- >> A virtual cluster that-- Yes, out of the inventory of assets, except from the perspective of the application it looks like a physical cluster. This is the critical part of what we do, is that, somebody told me "It's like we have an extension cord between the storage and the compute nodes." They used this analogy yesterday and I said I was going to reuse it, so if they listen to this: Hey, I stole your analogy! We basically provide a long extension cord to the direct-to-test storage, except we've separated out the storage from the compute. What's really cool about that, it was the second point of what you said is that you can mix and match. The mix and match occurs because one of the things your doing with your compute and storage is refreshing your compute and storage at three to five year cycles, separately. When you have the old style model of combining compute and storage in what I'd call a captured dazz scenario. You are forced to do refreshes of both compute and persistent storage at the same time, it just becomes, it's a unmanageable position to be in, and separating out the components provides you a lot of flexibility from mixing and matching different types of components, doing rolling upgrades of the compute separate from the storage, and then also having different storage tiers that you can combine SSD storage, the biggest tiers today are SSD storage and spinning disk storage, being able to either provide spinning disk, SSDs, solid-state storage, or a mixture of both for a hybrid deployment for an application without having to worry about a purchase time having to configure your box that way, we just basically do it on the fly. >> Right. So, and then obviously I can run multiple applications against that big stack of assets, and it's going to go ahead and parse the pieces out that I need for each application. >> We didn't even practice this beforehand, that was a great one too! (laughs) Key part of this is actually providing secure multi-tenant environment is the phrase I use, because it's a common phrase. Our target customer is running multiple applications, 2010, when somebody was deploying big data, they were deploying Hadoop. Quickly, (snaps) think, what were the other things then? Nothing. It was Hadoop. Today it's 10 applications, all scale out, all having different requirements for the reference architecture for the amount of compute storage. So, our orchestration layer basically allows you to provision separate virtual physical clusters in a secure, multi-tenant way, cryptographically secure, and you could encrypt the data too if you wanted you could turn on encryption to get over the wire with that data at rest encryption, think GDPR and stuff like that. But, the different clusters cannot interfere with each other's workloads, and because you're on a fully switched internet fabric, they don't interfere with performance either. But that secure multi-tenant part is critical for the orchestration and management of multiple scale out clusters. >> So then, (light laugh) so in theory, if I'm doing this well, I can continually add capacity, I can upgrade my drives to SSDs, I can put in new CPUs as new great things come out into my big cloud, not my cloud, but my big bucket of resources, and then using your software continue to deploy those against applications as is most appropriate? >> Could we switch seats? (both laugh) Let me ask the questions. (laughing) No, because it's-- >> It sounds great, I just keep adding capacity, and then it redeploys based on the optimum, right? >> That's a great summary because the thing that we're-- the basic problem we're trying to solve is that... This is like the lesson from VMware, right? One lesson from VMware was, first it was, we had unused CPU resources, let's get those unused CPU cycles back. No CPU cycle shall go unused! Right? >> I thought that they needed to keep 50% overhead, just to make sure they didn't bump against the roof. But that's a different conversation. >> That's a little detail, (both laugh) that's a little detail. But anyway. The secondary effect was way more important. Once people decoupled their applications from physical purchase decisions and rolling out physical hardware, they stopped caring about any critical piece of hardware, they then found that the simplified management, the one button push software application deployment, was a critical enabler for business operations and business agility. So, we're trying to do what VMware did for that kind of captured legacy application deployments, we're trying to do that for essentially what has been historically, bare metal, big data application deployment, where people were... Seriously in 2012, 2010, 2012, after virtualization took over the data center, and the IT manager had his cup of coffee and he's layin' back goin' "Man, this is great, I have nothing else to worry about." Then there's a (knocks) and the guy comes in his office, or his cube, and goes "Whaddya want?!" and he goes "Well, I'd like you to deploy 500 bare metal nodes to run this thing called Hadoop." and he goes "Well, I'll just give you 500 virtualized instances." a he goes "Nope, not good enough! I want to start going back to bare metal." And sense then it's gotten worse. So what we're trying to do is restore the balance in the universe, and apply for the scale out clusters what virtualization did for the legacy applications. Does that make a little bit of sense? >> Yeah! And is it heading towards the other direction ride is towards the atomic, right? So if you're trying to break the units of compute and store down to the base, so you've got a unified baseline that you can apply more volume than maybe a particular feature set, in a particular CPU, or a particular, characteristic of a particular type of a storage? >> Right. >> This way you're doing in software, and leveraging a whole bunch of it to satisfy, as you said kind of the meets min for that particular application. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think, kind of critical about the timing of all this is that virtualization drove, very much, a model of commoditization of CPUs, once VMware hit there, people weren't deploying applications on particular platforms, they were deploying applications on a virtualized hardware model, and that was how applications were always thought about from then on. From a lot of these scale out applications, not a lot of them, all of them, are designed to be hardware agnostic. They want to run on bare metal 'cause they're designed to run, when you play a bare metal application for a scale out, Apache Spark, it uses all of the CPU on the machine, you don't need virtualization because it will use all the CPU, it will use all the bandwidth and the disks underneath it. What we're doing is separating it out to provide lifecycle management between the two of them, but also allow you to change the configurations dynamically over time. But, this word of atomic kinda's a-- the disaggregation part is the first step for composability. You want to break it out, and I'll go here and say that the enterprise storage vendors got it right at one point, I mean, they did something good. When they broke out captured storage to the network and provided a separation of compute and storage, before virtualization, that was a step towards a gaining controlled in a sane management approach to what are essentially very different technologies evolving at very different speeds. And then your comment about "So what if you want to basically replace spinning disks with SSDs?" That's easily done in a composable infrastructure because it's a virtual function, you're just using software, software-defined data center, you're using software, except for the set of applications that just slip past what was being done in the virtualized infrastructure, and the network storage infrastructure. >> Right. And this really supports kind of the trend that we see, which is the new age, which is "No, don't tell me what infrastructure I have, and then I'll build an app and try and make it fit." It's really app first, and the infrastructure has to support the app, and I don't really care as a developer and as a competitive business trying to get apps to satisfy my marketplace, the infrastructure, I'm just now assuming, is going to support whatever I build. This is how you enable that. >> Right. And very importantly, the people that are writing all of these apps, the tons of low apps, Apache-- by the way, there's so many Apache things, Apache Kafka, (laughing) Apache Spark, the Hadoops of the world, the NoSQL databases, >> Flinks, and Oracle, >> Cassandra, Vertica, things that we consider-- >> MongoDB, you got 'em all. MongoDB, right. Let's just keep rolling these things off our tongue. >> They're all CUBE alumni, so we've talked to 'em all. >> Oh, this is great. >> It's awesome. (laughs) >> And they're all brilliant technologists, right? And they have defined applications that are so, so good at what they do, but they didn't all get together beforehand and say, "Hey, by the way, how can we work together to make sure that when this is all deployed, and operating in pipelines, and in parallel, that from an IT management perspective, it all just plays well together?" They solved their particular problems, and when it was just one application being deployed no harm no foul, right? When it's 10 applications being deployed, and all of a sudden the line item for big data application starts creeping past five, six, approaching 10%, people start to get a little bit nervous about the operational cost, the management cost, deployability, I talked about lifecycle management, refreshes, tech refreshes, expansion, all these things that when it's a small thing over there in the corner, okay, I'll just ignore it for a while. Yeah. Do you remember the old adventure game pieces? (Jeff laughs) I'm dating myself. >> What's adventure game, I don't know? (laughs) >> Yeah, when you watered a plant, "Water, please! Water, please!" The plant, the plant in there looked pitiful, you gave it water and then it goes "Water! Water! Give me water!" Then it starts to attack, but. >> I'll have to look that one up. (both laugh) Alright so, before I let you go, you've been at this for a while, you've seen a lot of iterations. As you kind of look forward over the next little while, kind of what do you see as some of the next kind of big movements or kind of big developments as kind of the IT evolution, and every company's now an IT company, or software company continues? >> So, let's just say that this is a great time, why I joined DriveScale actually, a couple reasons. This is a great time for composable infrastructure. It's like "Why is composalbe infrastructure important now?" It does solve a lot of problems, you can deploy legacy applications over and stuff, but, they don't have any pain points per se, they're running in their virtualization infrastructure over here, the enterprise storage over here. >> And IBM still sells mainframes, right? So there's still stuff-- >> IBM still sells mainframes. >> There's still stuff runnin' on those boxes. >> Yes there is. (laughs) >> Just let it be, let it run. >> This came up in Europe. (laughs) >> And just let it run, but there's no pain point there, what these increasingly deployed scale out applications, 2004 when the clocks beep was hit, and then everything went multi-core and then parallel applications became the norm, and then it became scale out applications for these for the Facebooks of the world, the Googles of the world, whatever. >> Amazon, et cetera. >> For their applications, that scale out is becoming the norm moving forward for application architecture, and application deployment. The more data that you process, the more scale out you need, and composable infrastructure is becoming a-- is a critical part of getting that under control, and getting you the flexibility and manageability to allow you to actually make sense of that deployment, in the IT center, in the large. And the second thing I want to mention is that, one thing is that Flash has emerged, and that's driven something called NVME over Fabrics, essentially a high-performance fabric interconnect for providing essentially local latency to remote resources; that is part of the composable infrastructure story today, and you're basically accessing with the speed of local access to solid state memory, you're accessing it over the fabric, and all these things are coming together driving a set of applications that are becoming both increasingly important, and increasingly expensive to deploy. And composable infrastructure allows you to get a handle on controlling those costs, and making it a lot more manageable. >> That's a great summary. And clearly, the amount of data, that's going to be coming into these things is only going up, up, up, so. Great conversation Brian, again, we still got to go meet at Terún, later so. >> Yeah, we have to go, yes. >> We will make that happen with ya. >> Great restaurant in Palo Alto. >> Thanks for stoppin' by, and, really appreciate the conversation. >> Yeah, and if you need to buy DriveScale, I'm your guy. (both laughing) >> Alright, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're walking the CUBE Conversation from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watchin', we'll see you at a conference soon, I'm sure. See ya next time. (intense orchestral music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're at Inforum 2018, here live on theCUBE, John Walls with Dave Vellante, and it's a pleasure now to welcome the CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips with us. Charles, good to see ya! >> Good to see you guys again, another year. It's great, it's great. >> Yeah, I tell ya, you are a man of demand aren't you? I mean, tell me about the week so far for you, how it's gone, and just your overall thoughts about the show? >> Yeah, it's been a fun Inforum for 2018 here. Great attendance, and a lot of energy level, and the common feedback we get is you guys just keep innovating and bringing new things, this is great, and that's why they come, they want to see what we're working on and kind of dream the art of the possible. We know what you, what we think you get a couple years ago, but if we don't have someone pushing us and painting a picture of what we could be doing, and we just think we might be missing it, so we want to hear it first hand. So that's what the conference is about, and hopefully they got that. >> Well, certainly thematically, human potential, you talk about that, you see that on the keynote stage, that's been a very consistent theme with our guests here, we've heard that a lot, you hear it down on the show floor. Talk about the theme if you would, a little bit, in terms of it's development, where that came from, and in how you think that's being expressed here this week. >> Well, we're one of the few companies that build mission critical operational systems, be it manufacturing or hospital operations, but we're also in HCM in a big way. And so we were talking to kind of both sides of the house, for some applications you're talking to the line of business manager, but for HCM you're talking to the CHRO, and rarely were those two people talking, and we saw obvious synergies. Don't you want to know how your people are doing, how to allocate people, and how they're performing, how they're changing the outcomes on a manufacturing floor or in a hospital, and a lot of HR directors weren't thinking like that because they think of HR, and they have their own world, they go to HR conferences and that's it. And the manufacturing guys are the same thing, and so we're trying to bring these two worlds together and say "Actually, you're in the same business, it's the same goals, and you actually could help each other a lot." And so by focusing on putting the employee at the center of all these applications and mapping all these operational processes to HR data, it's a different way of thinking about the role of HR. They can actually help drive the business, not just be an administrative function, and so it's resonating with a lot of the CHROs we met with, 'cause they want a seat at the table, they want to be more strategic, and this is a way for them to do that and at the same time the operational people want to know how their people are doing, want to develop talent, and want to know what are the tools out there I could be doing differently, and how am I doing, and which employees are working the best So, I think we can bring both sides together. >> So I first met Infor through AWS, at re:Invent, Pam Murphy came on, and we were like Infor? Back then it was like 2012, 2013 was kind of Infor who? And then we were invited to New Orleans, and then started to learn more about your micro-vertical strategy and a little bit about the platform, it was somewhat opaque to me. And now, fast forward last year and this year it's really starting to come in to view. The OS, the platform vision, the Birst acquisition, and of course Coleman, and I'm a sucker for platform plays especially when there's real R&D behind it that's actually having a business impact. So I wonder if you could talk about that piece of the strategy, I love the stack, was that sort of always your vision and now you're getting aggressive in it, did it sort of come together serendipitously, how'd we get here? >> Having our own stack and a platform was always the vision, but it's a lot harder to do than it sounds like, and it takes time. And so, when we arrived almost eight years ago, there were different applications, all had their own separate stacks and would say "This is not going to work." So, we need, just to be able to scale, to be able to serve multiple industries with different products, we can't have every development organization building their stack as well. So we set about taking that away from the development groups we're going to do this as a shared service, but it takes time, and as we build it you will adopt components of it. So what's changed is we've built out the entire stack, so, starting with ION, with integration, then we added document management, workflow, analytics, now AI and a lot of other services, Mongoose, platform as a service, on and on and on, in collaboration, those things took time, they're all on a single platform, federated security, single siloed across it all, and now it makes the developers job who's developing apps so much simpler. So they have Infor OS for the immediate platform, for cloud services they have AWS, I don't have to worry about any of those things anymore, just go and develop industry functionality. So, it's come together nicely, but the fact that we had the time to do it and the money to do it, and we weren't public, and we told our investors "This is the only way this is going to scale, this is the future, and it'll pay out later, you just got to trust us." And now that we've gotten there, they're seeing the synergy and go "Okay, now we see why you did that." >> So, Michael Dell's been on theCUBE many times, he used to talk about the 90 day shot clock, we obviously see what he's done in terms of transforming; but I want to talk about your business a little bit, because you've had that patient capital, I mean you're a quasi-public company in the sense that you do report so we can see the numbers on the income statement, but the income statement doesn't really tell the whole story It's about three billion in revenue, several hundred billion dollars on the balance sheet, but if you look at the SaaS component of it it looks rather small, maybe about 25% of the business, but from a booking standpoint I'm sure it's much, much larger than that. So how should we interpret the income statement in terms of the momentum in your business, where is all the action? >> So as a percentage of our sales, it's the highest of any of our competitors, so, about 70% of our new sales are on SaaS, we have about a $700 million SaaS business, so it's growing. There's nothing we can do about the maintenance piece of it, if it's related to perpetual, so if you take that out, it's a big percentage of our business. And over time the maintenance will turn into SaaS, so that's one of our big opportunities to look at that maintenance space and say "Move those over to cloud customers." and that's usually a financially lucrative thing for us to do, because we do even more for them, because they usually add on four or five other products when they move, they replace these third party products and so we get a bigger suite of products if they decide to move to the cloud. So that's part of the strategy, that's what UpgradeX is, let's move you from on-premise, so that maintenance revenue will turn into SaaS revenue, but bigger SaaS revenue over time. >> So let me make sure I understand, so it's not the classic case where you see a lot of software companies that are going from a perpetual model to a ratable model, you're goin' from a maintenance model which is ratable to a ratable model which is SaaS, but there's cohorts sales which increase the top line, is that correct? >> Exactly. So usually, because of what we do, we're doing something mission critical. So if you're going to take that, then you should do ACM financials, all the other things around it. So why would I move to core and leave the edge on-premise? So, almost by definition we have to do the whole suite. So when we do that it expands the deal, 'cause on-premise we may have been one vendor with 30 other ones existing, but the whole reason they want to get out of all of that is to move to the cloud and simplify. So we can't take all that with us, so we have to have the full suites, we've built that now. So now we can move them, but, it expands the size of the deal because we're replacing all these other products. >> Okay, and then some of the stats, just correct me if I don't get this right. Your SaaS business grown 50% faster than Oracle's, growing at a rate, I'd say 2X SAP's and a rate comparable to Workday, are those correct figures? >> Those are correct, and profitable. >> Oh, and profitable. >> Throw that in. (all laugh) >> Right, so okay. And then last year Koch Industries invested, so you kind of recap the company, you've made a big deal about that. One of the things that we've noted is you're seeing a tailwind there in terms of guys like Accenture and Capgemini, we've asked them "Do you guys service Koch Industries?" they said "Yep!" they helped us see the opportunity, and they said "Look, look for something substantive, we're not going to try to force you to do something, but we want you to take a look." So that's been helpful. Talk about that and maybe other things Koch has brought to the table? >> It's a, the relationship with the integrators is evolving, it probably was not a plus for us in the first four, five years. More recent years we've won enough deals where they had to say "Okay, we can't keep losin' these deals." And where they wanted to get engaged. Koch helped, because they had relationships and they wanted to run that business, that's why they're implementing our products globally, and so, they're a large customer for all of these guys, and one of the largest for Deloitte for instance, but what's really more-- that helped, but it was more the, what was happening in the market, the fact that we're in a Liberty Steel and replace SAP, or that we're in a Travis Perkins interview with SAP and Microsoft, so, if you're on the wrong side of those deals enough times your manager starts to ask you what's goin' on, and you got all these people on the bench here, okay, we train them for Infor if they're winning in that region, or in that industry. So, we just had to earn our way into it, our initial strategy was not one that, at least on the surface, looked like it was integrator-friendly because we were trying to take all those mods they like to do and put 'em in the product, and that's the whole thesis, let's the take the vertical industry features and let's put it in there once, I don't want everybody customizing my apps, we do that. And so now they've had to move up, okay we can do other things, configuration, changed management, there's AI, there's other things you can do, but you're not going to do that. So now that they've accepted that, there's a basis for us to work together, and, it just had to take time to get there. >> What can you tell us about where you want to go with this? I mean you've presided over public companies before, you know that business well, you were a rockstar analyst, is there an advantage to being a public company, is that something that you eventually want to do? >> I would say there are pluses and minuses, our board is evaluating that, that's going to be their call. The upside is, it would solve probably our biggest challenge which is brand recognition, almost instantly, because would be a top 10 tech IPO. It makes it a little easier to hire people because they can see public currency, they can value more quickly, and it gives you some acquisition currency; so those are the positives. But then you're on the 90 day cycle, and we're kind of on that anyway, 'cause we report publicly and we have publicly traded bonds. So for us it's, in some sense we have the worst of all worlds, right? We have the discipline of being a public company, and the scrutiny, without the capital, (laughs) and the branding, so. I think that's what everybody's evaluating. Every bank on Wall Street's visiting us telling us to go now, the window's great, you have the numbers. >> Oh, of course. (Dave and John laugh) >> And so, so we could do it, I just don't know what their decision's going to be. The advantages to being private as well, you have a little more flexibility obviously, and, we don't need the capital, we have plenty of capital coming from Koch and others who want to invest. >> Well, the flip side of that too, is you get to write your own narrative, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, we're talkin' about the nuances of the income statement, the Street is obviously right now hooked on growth heroin, and if you got the transition in the base it doesn't become a tailwind, so, no rush from that standpoint. I want to pivot to the theme of this event, which is the human potential. My understanding is you sort of were instrumental in coming up with that. HCM this year got a big play on stage, where's that come from? >> Yeah, just as I talk to CEOs who are struggling to find talent, like I mentioned on stage 6.7 million jobs that are unfulfilled. It's not like we don't have people here, we have people here with their own skills, so, you're not going to fill those jobs any other way, we're not doing immigration to any degree and scaling more, that's been shut down. We have an aging population with the baby boomers, so the most logical thing that you would do is train people who are already here who want to work. And, let's take people who have jobs that they probably aren't thrilled about, and give them different skills so they can fill these 6.7 million jobs. So to do that, you have to make these applications easier to use, and I felt like we're probably in the best position to do it because we actually know what they do for a living, 'cause we wrote all those last features in those industries, we understand what they do. And if you're just doin' HR replication or financials, you actually have no idea what they do. So, we had to learn those jobs to automate those jobs, so we can find ways to use our HCM applications to better train people, professional development, coaching, take all these HR skills, and put them as part of the applications in the context of while you're working. >> We had Anne Benedict on just a little bit ago talking about really a test case that you can be for yourself. So how are you putting these things to practice yourself, and how are you working out maybe some kinks before you take them out to somebody else? And so, you can leverage your own success for your own success, and also learn from mistakes too I would think. >> We do. So we have this program called Infor at Infor, where everything we do, we want it to be on an Infor product, which was not the case when we arrived. Like a lot of companies, a mish mash of different things, and so we've implemented not only HR Financials of course, Birst, but the big innovation has really been talent science, that every employee we hire has to take that test, and all the executives have taken it as well. And what we've discovered is, is that, when people hire and go against the talent science recommendation, 68% of the time they end up being wrong. So it's better at judging people than people are sometimes, and you can't use it exclusively, but it'll tell you these are the things you should look into, some questions you might want to ask, here's how they rate on certain skillsets, they're very well meshed for this job, they look like they'd see their best performance in this area, but ask these questions. And so people don't know how to interview and how to think about this, and so, having a guide to go into an interview is actually pretty helpful. We hire much better people now by using that. >> So it's like StrengthsFinder in a way? >> No, it's different from that, this is AI, it's kind of Moneyball for business people. >> Well you're talking about that today, almost there. >> Yeah so it's 39 personality attributes, behavioral attributes we call them, so, empathy, resistance to authority, do you have the ambition or not, and depending on the job, you think all those things are good, depends on the job, so. For some jobs, it's actually better to have low ambition because, a lot of our customers who have low wage, fast food service jobs, people who have ambition are going to leave in four months, right? They're not going to stay, so, okay we're not going to be here long, at least know that going in, and know who wants to get promoted, and other people are fine with it. And so it depends on the mix of skills, just like I said, 39 attributes, and for that job role, you tune it to the people who like that job, they look like this. And, we've also found that it's 60% more diverse when you hire using science, because you don't know that when you're looking at the data, what they look like. >> It must've been super interesting getting those reports. You took it, obviously right? >> Yeah I took it. >> How'd you do? (laughs) >> Uhhh, nobody really likes their profile. (all laugh) >> I was going to say, I imagine I would be really defensive about this, oh I don't know. >> This can't be right! >> That is not me! I am not like that! (all laughing) >> Every person on our executive team said the same thing so. That's what it's for is to, you have certain perceptions even about yourself, and it calls it out, right? And there's no gaming the system because the questions have no right or wrong answer, it just puts you in scenarios that you answer what would you do, how do you feel about this? You're not clear what they're trying to get at, and you only have 27 minutes or 22 minutes to do the test. >> So you can't game it? >> You can't game it. >> Data doesn't lie! >> And we built the science, we know when someones trying to game it, they're taking to long on multiples, and changing their answers too much, so it's-- And we've now, I think we've tested some 200 million people over time, over years, so we have 20 years of data about people. >> That's, I mean, sounds unique, certainly unique of being infused into enterprise software, I've not seen anything like this from another enterprise software company. Can you confirm that, or? >> Yeah, so, we're the only ones that do this at scale, there's a few startups trying to do it, but they're trying to do it all facial recognition which is, we think pretty ridiculous, we're trying to get away from physical attributes not use that. So there's a company out there doing that, depending on your facial movements, but this is, we're eliciting responses about your personality in response to situations that we give you, and have a bunch of scientists that crunch the data and they basically shape it to the job role. And they test your best performance, and you get a DNA profile for your best performance for that job role, and then, that's what you're matching, and it's highly accurate. So we had a company on the Las Vegas Strip use it, because they have to hire in volume a lot, and essentially what they wanted to do was get better blackjack dealers. You need somebody that's good at math, good under pressure, not too emotive, don't give away anything; and so we did that, fine tuned the test, they call us back nine months later and said "We need you to change the test." We said "We did exactly what you wanted, what happened?" He said well, the winnings went up 30%, but everybody's leaving the hotel in 24 hours 'cause they lost all their money, so we don't need them to be that good. (all laugh) >> Dial it down a little bit. >> Which we did. And so that's part of the service is we fine tune it, you tell us what your goals are, and we'll tune to that. >> That's a great story. The other surprise for me this week has been the emphasis on robotic process automation, it's a space that we've kina looked at. And a lot of people are scared about software robots replacing humans, but if you talk to people who are using RPA, they love it. It's taking away these mundane tasks, I didn't realize that you guys had such capabilities there? >> Yeah, so we built that as part of a Coleman RPA platform, and not only can we automate and use RPA for ourselves, but we've built a whole development environment for our customers to build their own, 'cause we can't think of every process that they might want to automate, and we gave that platform to our partners as well, so. We don't want them doing database schema work anymore, and they used to get paid for that, there's other things you can do up the stack in AI, here's what we want you to focus on. So we had that meeting on Monday with the partners, and they all agreed that's what we're going to do. But there's tons of mundane things that people shouldn't be spending time on, and they can be much more productive, it makes them more loyal to the company, they're enjoying their job more, and they're thinking and innovating more. So I don't see it as replacing people, as making people better. And giving that engagement that I talked about during the keynote, they're engaged now, because they can do things that are more value adding now. >> So, back to New Orleans next year? That's the first Inforum that theCUBE was ever at was in N'Orleans, and, jazz, you like jazz, obviously, right? >> I like jazz, I met with the mayor when I was down there, Mitch Landrieu at the time, and he became a customer after that meeting, so the city of New Orleans runs on Infor software, it's another reason to go there; so thank you. >> You've get--nice. >> Yeah, thank you Mitch, so that worked well. And so as a thank you we're going back down there, they're a big customer now, and it's always fun, you know what I mean, you know. >> That's great. >> Just, before you go, you mention, I watched in the keynote this morning, Brooks Koepka. >> Yes. So you're working with him. I do a little bit of work on the golf side as well, so I was just intrigued because, he's not the, well he's not Tiger, right? >> Yeah. >> U.S. Open Champion, twice over. What was the attraction to him, and then can you play in the golf world a little bit, and with those brands, and is that an entry into that world? >> Well, we always like to bet on the scrappy guy, the next up and coming generation guy, and that's kind of our brand that's what we are, the Brooklyn Nets, someone who's not quite there yet, but they're moving up, that's kind of our scrappiness, that's why we like the whole Brooklyn image as well. And we started talkin' to him, like I said, before he won the U.S. Open, because he was ranking pretty high, moving up, but wasn't well known. A quite guy, very personable when you meet him, we thought he'd be good in front of clients, let's bet on his career, and we're going to work with him; and literally three weeks later he wins the U.S. Open, we go "Okay." (all laugh) >> Good grab! >> We'll take it! (laughs) So, we didn't even think it'd happen that quickly, and now he's a rockstar so. We were planning on hosting a CX event with him, and, we're not sure how many people are going to come, but when that happened, now, everybody RSVP'd right away of course. So now it's doing exactly what we wanted. >> Do you play golf? >> I don't play golf, I just started playing, 'cause we were doing these golf tournaments with customers over the last year, but I haven't had enough time to get out there yet. >> I'll bet Brooks would give you a lesson or two. (laughs) >> Yeah, he, a lot of people want to lesson from him. >> Charles thank you >> Alright, thank you guys, >> for the time, great show. >> Good to see ya again. See ya in New Orleans. >> Thank you, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Alright guys, see ya. >> Wonderful week here in Washington, D.C. Back with more live on theCUBE here from D.C. right after this. (bubbly music)

from Las Vegas it's the queue covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas everybody you're watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host Peter Burroughs Peter great to be working with you we haven't done much this week but I'm really excited to put a great week despite that it's been a great week this day three of our wall-to-wall coverage last year at vmworld one of the biggest hottest trends was data protection same thing this year a lot of buzz a lot of hype a lot of parties Rio Barrett is here so the vice president of product marketing for the data protection division of Dell EMC welcome great to see you again great to be here brian linden is here he is the IT Directorate Melanson Heath out of Austin as well Brian thanks very much for coming on thanks for having me so Rio I mean we talked and I have talked about this yeah what's going on in data protection I mean VMworld it's not it's become the hottest topic absolutely seeing you guys some of the VC funded startups or trying to duke it out throwing big parties all right you guys got all the customers everybody wants them you're fighting like crazy cloud has now come in what's your take what's going on that's really exciting I mean data protection I started out my career in data protection you know but move forward and back in data protection is hotter than ever it's it's great and I think it has to do with the trends that are happening out in the market the big mega trends that are happening we talked about distribution you know data moving out of the data center where the four walls are no longer defining how you secure something so security recoverability are becoming really critical as you talk about edge and data moving to the edge on to cloud computing and multi cloud computing I think it's going to be one of those frontiers that the enterprise still wants to have a reign over how do I recover my data no matter where it's sitting and how do I get it back and how do I secure it so it's very exciting so Brian talked about Melanson heath set it up the company you know tax accounting Boston based in New England etc your and really want to understand the drivers in IT but start with the company please yes lesson Heath is a top-10 accounting regional accounting firm in New England we have offices in Massachusetts New Hampshire and Maine we service other clients in Vermont etc a large portion of our focus is on auditing we do a lot of misrata it's school districts town cities we also do traditional tax accounting there's been advisory the full gamut of accounting professional services you run IT yes okay what are the big drivers in your business and how are they forcing you to sort of rethink the way in which you generally approach IT but specifically approach data protection over the years we've you know we've gone from the traditional everything on premise to moving things to the cloud whether it's a SAS provider or or whatever so we really need to be able to secure our data no matter where it is whether it's in the cloud game it'll have a backup locally between our various offices etc and uptime is paramount we have deadlines that don't don't shift the IRS does not care if we have a storm or we have something wrong with our building we have our professionals have hard deadlines so I one of my tasks is to make sure that no matter what happens we have a timely backup plan and I need to be able to focus on the business and not be focusing on worrying about the backup and data protection so obviously the other part that equation is the recovery plan so really you know we this is our ninth year of the cube and at the time you know when we first started it was a lot of talk about re-architecting backup to handle the the the V blender if you will and the lack of resources now all the conversation Brian just mentioned is cloud so how are you guys - that from a product standpoint oh my god yeah this has been a big topic of conversation I think one of the areas where we really differentiated you know one of the areas that Brian is in the middle of his mid-market and we see a big propensity for an appetite for cloud from an agility standpoint from time to respond standpoint and one of the biggest trends and we heard about it at yesterday's keynote as well is cloud as a disaster recovery site especially for customers that might not have a secondary site so we recently introduced a product called the DP 4400 Brian's actually the first customer to purchase the product so in July we announced it one of the key differentiation of that product is the ease of which customers can now access cloud you know whether it's for a long term retention or cloud disaster recovery without needing any additional hardware literally it's at the fingertips you manage it exactly the way you would you can manage it directly from your VMware operational tools and have access to cloud as a secondary site whether it's for dr or long term retention so that's one of the ways for mid market customers we're really bringing that cloud and bringing it at their fingertips from a recoverability standpoint and then we've done some exciting announcements Beth was here with yang-ming talking about some of the innovations that we've been delivering in cloud whether you're a service provider whether you're a big enterprise across our portfolio so I think we have that's by far one of our key differentiations and better together stories with VMware so I'm really fascinated Brian about some of the things are doing let me let me throw a thesis at you and Andrea you've probably heard this we tend to think that there's a difference between business and digital business and that difference is the degree to which a digital business uses data as an asset in many respects if you start thinking in those terms then data protection for the new world is not just the technical data is protecting your digital business now if you think about an accounting we normally associate accounting with manual processes manual activities but there's a lot more data being generated by your clients by your by the people that are providing the services how is this relationship between data the value of your business and the value of your service is driving you to adopt these new classes of solutions for millions and Heath we are almost completely paperless so all of our data all of our work product goes through technology so we need to you know it's it's imperative that we be protected if servers go down if the site goes down our professionals don't do work and time is money so you know it first is the old thinking of having paper storage or just having local backups if there's a significant enough then we can leverage the cloud and be able to disperse our staff to places where they can sit down with a computer and do work additionally like you said we're collecting a lot more data you know our various software processes are using more machine learning to get more out of that data so having that protected as it expands is critical so increasingly the services that you're providing to your clients are themselves becoming more digital as well that's correct yes so as you think about where this ends up would you characterize yourself as especially interested in the DP 4400 and the set of services that around that as facilitating that process are you going to be able to tell a better story to your business about how they can adopt new practices offer new services etc that are more digital in nature because of this I think so I think having the DP 4400 with its cloud connections will help our our partners our principals become more comfortable with the cloud and and not not fear it they've tended to be you know a little more insular and want to see and feel and you know know that the data is there so you know being able to recover to the cloud or just use the cloud natively is going to be a game-changer for for our firm and our business just add one thing that we've talked about with Brian one of the capabilities with the DP 4400 is the instant access and restore capabilities and we're seeing more of a trend especially in secondary storage platforms much like the ones we're using with DP 4400 we're basically all your data is there right so you're doing your data for recovery your data for disaster recovery for replication is in a place and we're seeing a trend towards wanting to have flash nvme cache to be able to actually do instant access and restore not only for recoverability purposes for app tests and dev type applications and data sharing so that trend has already left the station and even in our mid tier products like DP 4400 well you know targeted specifically for commercial buyers and midsize organizations we're bringing that enterprise class capabilities and making it available to them to be able to leverage not only cloud but also on-premise and your cloud is you all cloud you some cloud you hire hybrid we do have a lot of on-premise we are migrating things over the years to the cloud and that's certainly going to be the trend and is that in effect or in part what's driving you to rethink how you approach data protection or how did that affect your data protection decisions I think having the capacity to touch all types of systems and services is is critical we need to be thinking not what we're doing now but we're gonna do any year five years from now and you know just looking back to the past five years it's a completely different IT environment so ok so I want to translate a little marketing into what it means for the customers but we agree oh when you guys announced with DP 4400 it was simply powerful was kind of attack okay so what is what are you looking for from the standpoint of simplicity and a same question on on on on power simplicity that you know the DP 4400 is a 2-u unit goes right in the rack it's not use of various interconnected components that you have to you know figure out how to connect it's one interface it's extremely simple and quick to deploy you know I have a very lean IT shop we don't have a lot of time a lot of people to be devoting hours and days and weeks to getting a deed protection environment set up our previous solutions we're much more complicated different interfaces always changing interfaces and they didn't really work well I need you know I need to be able to just set it and forget it it's it's an insurance policy is what it is you know when something goes wrong I need to know what's going to happen - from the moment that the disaster is to recognize - when our staff will be able to get back up and working okay and I the DP for 4,400 just makes that extremely simple okay so it's simple not just simpler know that right it's simple example and what about the powerful piece what is it what does that mean the power of having everything in one unit it's one interface you know giving me and my staff the power to do what we need to do without having to have a degree in data protection it's very simple to learn very simple to use it just works and a couple of the things Brian and I talked about earlier was really no one wants to impact production to do data protection write it like you said it's an insurance policy so the performance of the platform is really significant I think performance performance without compromising efficiency because at the end of the day cost is a big consideration especially for midsize organizations when they're buying a solution so I think it's really hey it's simple to use simple to deploy but it's powerful because you can get your stuff done in the you know a lot of times for data protection which is almost zero these days with the efficiency I got also saying really quickly that I would also presume that because every single document is so valuable and so essential power also relates to being able to sustain the organization of that day absolutely absolutely more you know going further into power as we was indicating is the is the performance of the backups the deduplication rate sending things over the over the network to our disaster recovery site very quickly very efficiently we can pull back you know do backups during business hours don't have to throttle it to just the overnight hours which those hours are you know off hours are getting fewer further between because in tax season in particular we have people working seven days a week all day so to send that data it's work needs to go in comp in a compact form doesn't prevent our staff from doing work whenever they want to want and need to be able to do it organizations increasingly focusing on the data data has more value means it's got to be protected in new ways bring in cloud requires new architectures games on is a big market you know thirty billion dollar plus ten when you add it all up rating it on a lot of people want it you're the leader congratulations guys all right thanks very much for coming on the cube Thanks all right keep it right there buddy the cube will be back from VMworld 2018 right after this short break [Music]