>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hey, is Keith Townsend, principal at CTO Adviser, and you're watching the Cube virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm really excited whenever we get toe talk to actual end users. Builders. The conversation is dynamic. This is no exception. Back on the show, Al Vanish despondent head off architectures at logic I've been ish. Welcome back to the show. >>Thanks, Kate. Good to be here >>and on the other side of my screen or how you depend on how you're looking at it is Anthony Brooks Williams C E O off HBR Anthony, Welcome back to the Cube. I know your kind of tired of seeing us, but the conversation is gonna be good, I promise. >>Thanks very much. Look forward to being here and great as you said to talk about a use case for the customer in the real world. >>So I'll be let's start off by talking about lodge attacking. What are you guys doing in a W s in general? I mean, e no. Every company has public cloud, but Logitech and AWS and Public Cloud doesn't naturally come to mind. Help educate the audience. What do you guys doing? >>Sure, so traditionally, audience knows Logitech as the Mice and keyboard company, but we do have a lot of brands which are cool brands off logic tech If you know about gaming, Logitech G is a huge brand for us. We are in video collaboration space. We compete with the likes off Ciscos of the world, where we have hardware that goes on bond works with Zoom Google as well as Microsoft ecosystems. That has been a huge success in a B two b well for us. Beyond music industry gaming as an Astro gaming Jay Bird head phones for athletes. We are also in security system space. On top of that were also in the collaboration space off streaming as in stream labs so a Z can see logic has grown toe where that a lot off use cases, apart from just peripherals, is out there. We connected devices, so we're also looking to move towards a cloud ecosystem where we could be in on on our toes, toe provisioning information on DNA, make sure we are computing to the best of the world. So we are in AWS. We do a lot more in AWS now, compared to what we used to do in the past last five years has seen a change and a shift towards more cloud public cloud usage pure SAS environments in the ws as well And we provisioned data for analysis and essentially a data driven enterprise. Now more so on V as we move towards more future >>and Anthony talked to me about not necessarily just largest heck, but the larger market. How are you seeing companies such as logic? Heck take advantage off A W s and Public cloud. >>Yeah, but I think you mean ultimately we've seen it accelerated the show. Me Castle's just looking for a better way to connect with their prospects, you know, and leverage data in doing so. And we've seen this this driver around digital transformation and that's just being sped up the shirt, given what we've seen around covert and so a lot more companies have really pushed forward and adopting, you know, the infrastructure and the availability off systems and solutions that you find in a platform such as AWS on bets that we've seen grand deduction from our side of customers doing that, we provide the most efficient way of protesters to move data to so platforms such as I don't yes, and that's what we've seen. A big uptick picture. >>So let's focus the conversation around data data, the new oil. We've heard the taglines. Let's put some meat on the bone, so to speak and talk through How are you at logic Tech using real time data in the public cloud? >>Sure, Yeah. I mean, traditionally, if you look at it, uh, logic could selling hardware. Andi hope it >>works for >>the end consumer. Uh, we would not necessarily have an insight into how that product is being used. I think come fast forward. Today's world. It's a connected devices environment. You want to make sure when you sell something, it is working for that consumer. You would want them to be happy about that product, ensuring a seamless experience. Eso customer experience is big. You might want to see a repeat customer come about right. So So the intent is to have a lot off. It is connected experience where you could provisional feedback loop to the engineering team toe to ensure stability off the product, but also enhancements around that product in terms off usage patterns. And and we play a big role with hardware in what you're gaming, for example. And as you can see, that whole industry is growing toe where everything is connected. Probably people do not buy anything, which is a static discussing thing. It's all online gaming. So we want to ensure we don't add Leighton. See in the hardware that we have, ensuring a successful experience and repeat customers right? The essential intent is at the end of the day, to have success with what you sell because there's obviously other options on the market and you want to make sure our customers are happy with the hardware they are investing. Maurin that hardware platform and adding different, very fills along with it so that seamless experiences where we wanna make sure it's connected devices to get that insight. We also look at what people are saying about our products in terms off reviews on APS are on retail portals to ensure we we hear the wise off customer on channel. How's that energy in a positive way to improve the products as well as trying to figure out if there are marketing opportunities were you could go across sailing up cells, so that's essentially driving business towards that success, and at the end of it, that would essentially come up with a revenue generation model >>for us. So Anthony talked to me about how HBR fits into this, because when I look at cloud big, that can be a bit overbearing, like, where's where's the starting point? >>So I mean, for us, you mean the starting point Answer questions around. Acquiring the data data is generated in many places across organizations in many different platforms and many systems. And so we have the ability to have a very efficient technique in the way we go acquire data the way we capture data through this technique called CBC Chinese share the capture where you're feeding incremental updates off off the data across the network. That's the most efficient way to move this data. Firstly, across a wide area network cloud is an endpoint. Uh, you mean off that, And so, firstly, we specializing in supporting many different source systems and so we can acquire that data very efficiently, put it into our into a very scalable, flexible architecture that we have. That's that's a great foot for this modern world of great foot for the cloud. So not only can we capture data from many different source systems, their complexities and a lot of these type of the moments that customers have, we could take the data and move it very efficiently across that network at scale. Because we know, as you've said, data is the new oil that's the lifeblood of organizations today. So we can move that data efficiently at scale across the network and then put it into a system such a snowflake running in AWS like we do for a hobby and a larger taken. So that's really where we fit. I mean, we can, you know, we support data taken from many sources, too many different target systems. We make sure that data is highly accurate. When we move that data across that matches what was in the source of matches, what's in the in the target system. And we do that in this particular use case and what we see predominantly today, the source systems are capturing the data typically today. Still generated on Prem could be data that's sitting in an SFP environment. Unpack that data. Decode that data is to be complex to get out and understand it on moving across and put it in their target system, that predominance sitting in the cloud for all the benefits that we see that the cloud brings around elasticity and efficiency and operational costs the most type of things. And that's probably human in where we fit into this picture. >>You know, I think if I add a little bit there, right, So to Anthony's point for us, we generate a lot of data. You're looking at billions off rolls a day from the edge where people like you and I are using logic devices and we also have a lot off prp transactions That going so the three V s Typically that they call about big data is like the variety off data volume of data at velocity that you want to consume it. So the intent is if you need to be data driven, the data should be available for business consumption as it is being generated very near real time, and that the intent for some of these platforms like H we are, is How efficiently could you move that data, whether it's on Prem or a different cloud into AWS on giving it for business consumption of business analysis in near real time. So you know we strive, Toby Riel time. Whether it's data from China in our factory, on the shop floor, whether it's being generated from people like you and I playing a game for eight hours on generating so many events, we're gonna ensure all that data is being available for business analysis and gone out of those days where we would load that data once a day. And in the hope that we do a weekly analysis right today, we do analysis on make business decisions on that data as the data is being generated. And that's the key to success with such platforms, where we want to make sure we also look at build vs buy rather than us doing all that core and trying toe in just that data we obviously partner with which we are in certain application platforms to ensure stability off it. And they have proven with their experience the I P or the knowledge around how to build those platforms, which even if we go build it, we might need bigger teams to build that. I would rather rely on partners for that capability. And I bring more business value by enabling and implementing such solutions. >>So let's put a little color around that skill whenever I talk to CDOs. Chief data officers, data architects One of the biggest problems that they have in these massive systems you're talking about getting data from E. AARP uh, Internet of things devices, etcetera is simple data transformation. E t l data scientists spend a good droid at a time, maybe sometimes 80% of their time on that data transformation process that slows down the ability to get answers to critical business. Analytic questions. How is HBR assistant you guys and curling down at time for detail? >>Absolutely. So we we do not. We went to cloud about five years back, and the methodology that you talk about e t. L is sort of a point back in the day when you would do, you know, maybe a couple of times a day ingestion. So it's like in the the transition off the pipeline. As you are ingesting data, you would transform and massage the return, enhance the data and provisioned it for business consumption. Today we do lt we extract loaded into target and natively transform it as needed from business consumption. So So we look at each. We are, for example, is, uh, we're replicating all off our e r P data into snowflake in the cloud for real time ingestion and consumption. Uh, if you do all of this analysis on article side to it, typically you would have ah, processing where you would put put in a job toe, get that data out, and analysis comes back to you in a couple of hours out here, you could be slicing and dicing the data as needed on it's all self serve on provisioning. We do not build analysis foreign users. Neither do we do a lot off the data science. But we want to make sure when businesses using that data they can act on that as it's available on the example is we had a processing back in the day with demand forecasting, which we do for every product off logic for 52 weeks, looking ahead for for every week, right, and it will run for a couple of days that processing today with such platforms on in public Lot. We do that in an hour's time. Right now That's critical for business success because you want to know the methodologies you feel need Tofail or have challenges. You probably wanna have them now rather than wait a couple of days for that process in the show up, and then you do not have enough time to, at just the parameters are bringing back some other business process toe augmented. So that's what we look at. The return on investment for such investment are essentially ensuring business continuity and success outfront on faster time to deliver. >>Yeah, >>so, Anthony, this seems like this would really change the conversation within enterprises. The target customer or audience really changes from kind of this IittIe centric movement tome or strategic move. We talked to me about the conversations you've had, what customers and how this has transformed their business. >>Yeah, a few things to unpack there, um, one. You mean, obviously, customs wanna make decisions on the freshest data, so they typically relied on in the past on these batch orientated tough data movement techniques, which which will be touched on there and how we're able to reduce that that time window. Let them make decisions on the freshest data where that takes, you, choose into other parts of organizations. Because, Azzawi said, already, I mean, we know that is the lifeblood of them. There was many, I would say, Typically, I t semi, but let's call it data. Seven people sitting in the both side of organizations, if not Mawr, than used to sit in the legacy I t side. They want access to this data. They want to be able to access their daily easy. And so one of these things cloud based system SAS based systems have made that a lot easier for them. And the conversations. We have a very much driven from not only the chief data officers, but the CEOs. Now they know in order to get the advantage to win. To survive in today's times, they need to be data driven organizations, and it sounds cliche. We hear these digital transformation stories and data driven taglines. They get thrown out there, but what we've seen is where it's really it's been put to toss this year it is happening. Projects that would happen 9 12 months have been given to month Windows to happen because it's a matter of survival and so that's what's really driven. And then you also have the companies that benefit as well. You mean we're fortunate that we are able as a company globally, with composer of all to work from her very efficiently. But then support customers like Obvious who or providing these work from home technology systems that can enable another? The semester It's really moved. That's driven down from being purely I t driven to its CEO, CEO, CEO driven because its's what they've got to do. It z no longer just table stakes. >>I >>think the lines are great, right way we roll up into CEO and like I work for the CEO at at large detect. But we strive to be more service oriented than support. So I t was traditionally looked at as a support our right. But we obviously are enabling the enterprise to be data driven, so we strive to be better at what we do and how we position ourselves. As as more off service are connected to business problem, we understand the business problem and the challenge that they have on and ensuring we could find solutions and solution architectures around that problem to ensure success for that, right? And that's the key to it. Whether we build, vs, buy it. It's all about ensuring business doesn't have toe find stopgap solutions to be successful in finding a solution for their problem. >>Avi Anthony, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to peel back the layers and help the audience understand how to take thes really abstract terms and make them rial for getting answers on real time data and kind of blowing away these concepts of E t l and data transformations and how toe really put data toe work using public cloud resource sources against their real time data assets. Thank you for joining us on this installment of the Cube virtual as we cover A W s re event, make sure to check out the portal and Seymour great coverage off this exciting area off data and data analysis

>> Well, hello everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our coverage. So splunk.com for 21, you know, we talk about big data these days, you realize the importance of speed, right? We all get that, but certainly Formula One Racing understands speed and big data, a really neat marriage there. And with us to talk about that is James Hodge, who was the global vice president and chief strategy officer international at Splunk. James, good to see it today. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me and yeah, the speed of McLaren. Like I'm, I'm all for it today. >> Absolutely. And I find it interesting too, that, that you were telling me before we started the interview that you've been in Splunk going on nine years now. And you remember being at splunk.com, you know, back in the past other years and watching theCUBE and here you are! you made it. >> I know, I think it's incredible. I love watching you guys every single year and kind of the talk that guests. And then more importantly, like it reminds me of conf for every time we see theCUBE, no matter where you are, it reminds me of like this magical week there's dot com for us. >> Well, excellent. I'm glad that we could be a part of it at once again and glad you're a part of it here on theCUBE. Let's talk about McLaren now and the partnership, obviously on the racing side and the e-sports side, which is certainly growing in popularity and in demand. So just first off characterize for our audience, that relationship between Splunk and McLaren. >> Well, so we started the relationship almost two years ago. And for us it was McLaren as a brand. If you think about where they were, they recently, I think it's September a Monza. They got a victory P1 and P2. It was over 3200 days since their last victory. So that's a long time to wait. I think of that. There's 3000 days of continual business transformation, trying to get them back up to the grid. And what we found was that ethos, the drive to digital the, the way they're completely changing things, bringing in kind of fluid dynamics, getting people behind the common purpose that really seem to fit the Splunk culture, what we're trying to do and putting data at the heart of things. So kind of Formula One and McLaren, it felt a really natural place to be. And we haven't really looked back since we started at that partnership. It's been a really exciting last kind of 18 months, two years. >> Well, talk a little bit about, about the application here a little bit in terms of data cars, the, the Formula One cars, the F1 cars, they've got hundreds of sensors on them. They're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands or a hundred thousand data points almost instantly, right? I mean, there's this constant processing. So what are those inputs basically? And then how has McLaren putting them to use, and then ultimately, how is Splunk delivering on that from McLaren? >> So I learned quite a lot, you know, I'm, I'm, I been a childhood Formula One fan, and I've learned so much more about F1 over the last kind of couple of years. So it actually starts with the car going out on the track, but anyone that works in the IT function, the car can not go out on track and less monitoring from the car actually is being received by the garage. It's seen as mission critical safety critical. So IT, when you see a car out and you see the race engineer, but that thumbs up the mechanical, the thumbs up IT, get their vote and get to put the thumbs up before the car goes out on track there around about 300 sensors on the car in practice. And there were two sites that run about 120 on race day that gets streamed on a two by two megabits per second, back to the FIA, the regulating body, and then gets streams to the, the garage where they have a 32 unit rack near two of them that have all of their it equipment take that data. They then stream it over the internet over the cloud, back to the technology center in working where 32 race engineers sit in calm conditions to be able to go and start to make decisions on when the car should pit what their strategy should be like to then relate that back to the track side. So you think about that data journey alone, that is way more complicated and what you see on TV, you know, the, the race energy on the pit wall and the driver going around at 300 kilometers an hour. When we look at what Splunk is doing is making sure that is resilient. You know, is the data coming off the car? Is it actually starting to hit the garage when it hits that rack into the garage, other than streaming that back with the right latency back to the working technology center, they're making sure that all of the support decision-making tools there are available, and that's just what we do for them on race weekend. And I'll give you one kind of the more facts about the car. So you start the beginning of the season, they launched the car. The 80% of that car will be different by the end of the season. And so they're in a continual state of development, like constantly developing to do that. So they're moving much more to things like computational fluid dynamics applications before the move to wind tunnel that relies on digital infrastructure to be able to go and accelerate that journey and be able to go make those assumptions. That's a Splunk is becoming the kind of underpinning of to making sure those mission critical applications and systems are online. And that's kind of just scratching the surface of kind of the journey with McLaren. >> Yeah. So, so what would be an example then maybe on race day, what's a stake race day of an input that comes in and then mission control, which I find fascinating, right? You've got 32 different individuals processing this input and then feeding their, their insights back. Right. And so adjustments are being made on the fly very much all data-driven what would be an example of, of an actual application of some information that came in that was quickly, you know, recorded, noted, and then acted upon that then resulted in an improved performance? >> Well, the most important one is pit stop strategy. It can be very difficult to overtake on track. So starting to look at when other teams go into the pit lane and when they come out of the, the pit lane is incredibly important because it gives you a choice. Do you stay also in your current set of tires and hope to kind of get through that team and kind of overtake them, or do you start to go into the pits and get your fresh sets of tires to try and take a different strategy? There are three people in mission control that have full authority to go and make a Pit lane call. And I think like the thing that really resonated for me from learning about McLaren, the technology is amazing, but it's the organizational constructs on how they turn data into an action is really important. People with the right knowledge and access to the data, have the authority to make a call. It's not the team principle, it's not the person on the pit wall is the person with the most amount of knowledge is authorized and kind of, it's an open kind of forum to go and make those decisions. If you see something wrong, you are just as likely to be able to put your hand up and say, something's wrong here. This is my, my decision than anyone else. And so when we think about all these organizations that are trying to transform the business, we can learn a lot from Formula One on how we delegate authority and just think of like technology and data as the beginning of that journey. It's the people in process that F1 is so well. >> We're talking a lot about racing, but of course, McLaren is also getting involved in e-sports. And so people like you like me, we can have that simulated experience to gaming. And I know that Splunk has, is migrating with McLaren in that regard. Right. You know, you're partnering up. So maybe if you could share a little bit more about that, about how you're teaming up with McLaren on the e-sports side, which I'm sure anybody watching this realizes there's a, quite a big market opportunity there right now. >> It's a huge market opportunity is we got McLaren racing has, you know, Formula One, IndyCar and now extreme E and then they have the other branch, which is e-sports so gaming. And one of the things that, you know, you look at gaming, you know, we were talking earlier about Ted Lasso and, you know, the go to the amazing game of football or soccer, depending on kind of what side of the Atlantic you're on. I can go and play something like FIFA, you know, the football game. I can be amazing at that. I have in reality, you know, in real life I have two left feet. I am never going to be good at football however, what we find with e-sports is it makes gaming and racing accessible. I can go and drive the same circuits as Lando Norris and Daniel Ricardo, and I can improve. And I can learn like use data to start to discover different ways. And it's an incredibly expanding exploding industry. And what McLaren have done is they've said, actually, we're going to make a professional racing team, an e-sports team called the McLaren Shadow team. They have this huge competition called the Logitech KeyShot challenge. And when we looked at that, we sort of lost the similarities in what we're trying to achieve. We are quite often starting to merge the physical world and the digital world with our customers. And this was an amazing opportunity to start to do that with the McLaren team. >> So you're creating this really dynamic racing experience, right? That, that, that gives people like me, or like our viewers, the opportunity to get even a better feel for, for the decision-making and the responsiveness of the cars and all that. So again, data, where does that come into play there? Now, What, what kind of inputs are you getting from me as a driver then as an amateur driver? And, and how has that then I guess, how does it express in the game or expressed in, in terms of what's ahead of me to come in a game? >> So actually there are more data points that come out of the F1 2021 Codemasters game than there are in Formula One car, you get a constant stream. So the, the game will actually stream out real telemetry. So I can actually tell your tire pressures from all of your tires. I can see the lateral G-Force longitudinal. G-Force more importantly for probably amateur drivers like you and I, we can see is the tire on asphalt, or is it maybe on graphs? We can actually look at your exact position on track, how much accelerator, you know, steering lock. So we can see everything about that. And that gets pumped out in real time, up to 60 Hertz. So a phenomenal amount of information, what we, when we started the relationship with McLaren, Formula One super excited or about to go racing. And then at Melbourne, there's that iconic moment where one of the McLaren team tested positive and they withdrew from the race. And what we found was, you know, COVID was starting and the Formula One season was put on hold. The FIA created this season and called i can't remember the exact name of it, but basically a replica e-sports gaming F1 series. We're using the game. Some of the real drivers like Lando, heavy gamer was playing in the game and they'd run that the same as race weekends. They brought celebrity drivers in there. And I think my most surreal zoom call I ever was on was with Lando Norris and Pierre Patrick Aubameyang, who was who's the arsenal football captain, who was the guest driver in the series to drive around Monaco and Randy, the head of race strategy as McLaren, trying to coach him on how to go drive the car, what we ended up with data telemetry coming from Splunk. And so Randy could look out here when he pressing the accelerator and the brake pedal. And what was really interesting was Lando was watching how he was entering corners on the video feed and intuitively kind of coming to the same conclusions as Randy. So kind of, you could see that race to intuition versus the real stats, and it was just incredible experience. And it really shows you, you know, racing, you've got that blurring of the physical and the virtual that it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. >> So to hear it here, as I understand what you were just saying now, the e-sports racing team actually has more data to adjust its performance and to modify its behaviors, then the real racing team does. Yep. >> Yeah, it completely does. So what we want to be able to do is turn that into action. So how do you do the right car setup? How do you go and do the right practice laps actually have really good practice driver selection. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what really could be done. And the amazing part about this is now think of it more like a digital twin, what we learn on e-sports we can actually say we've learned something really interesting here, and then maybe a low, you know, if we get something wrong, it may be doesn't matter quite as much as maybe getting an analytics wrong on race weekend. >> Right. >> So we can actually start to look and improve through digital and then start to move that support. That's over to kind of race weekend analytics and supporting the team. >> If I could, you know, maybe pun intended here, shift gears a little bit before we run out of time. I mean, you're, you're involved on the business side, you know, you've got, you know, you're in the middle east Africa, right? You've got, you know, quite an international portfolio on your plate. Now let's talk about just some of the data trends there for our viewers here in the U S who maybe aren't as familiar with what's going on overseas, just in terms of, especially post COVID, you know, what, what concerns there are, or, or what direction you're trying to get your clients to, to be taking in terms of getting back to work in terms of, you know, looking at their workforce opportunities and strengths and all those kinds of things. >> I think we've seen a massive shift. I think we've seen that people it's not good enough just to be storing data its how do you go and utilize that data to go and drive your business forwards I think a couple of key terms we're going to see more and more over the next few years is operational resilience and business agility. And I'd make the assertion that operational resilience is the foundation for the business agility. And we can dive into that in a second, but what we're seeing take the Netherlands. For example, we run a survey last year and we found that 87% of the respondents had created new functions to do with data machine learning and AI, as all they're trying to do is go and get more timely data to front line staff to go. And next that the transformation, because what we've really seen through COVID is everything is possible to be digitized and we can experiment and get to market faster. And I think we've just seen in European markets, definitely in Asia Pacific is that the kind of brand loyalty is potentially waning, but what's the kind of loyalty is just to an experience, you know, take a ride hailing app. You know, I get to an airport, I try one ride hailing app. It tells me it's going to be 20 minutes before a taxi arrives. I'm going to go straight to the next app to go and stare. They can do it faster. I want the experience. I don't necessarily want the brand. And we're find that the digital experience by putting data, the forefront of that is really accelerating and actually really encouraging, you know, France, Germany are actually ahead of UK. Let's look, listen, their attitudes and adoption to data. And for our American audience and America, America is more likely, I think it's 72% more likely to have a chief innovation officer than the rest of the world. I think I'm about 64% in EMEA. So America, you are still slightly ahead of us in terms of kind of bringing some of that innovation that. >> I imagine that gap is going to be shrinking though I would think. >> It is massively shrinking. >> So before we, we, we, we are just a little tight on time, but I want to hear about operational resilience and, and just your, your thought that definition, you know, define that for me a little bit, you know, put a little more meat on that bone, if you would, and talk about why, you know, what that is in, in your thinking today and then why that is so important. >> So I think inputting in, in racing, you know, operational resilience is being able to send some response to what is happening around you with people processing technology, to be able to baseline what your processes are and the services you're providing, and be able to understand when something is not performing as it should be, what we're seeing. Things like European Union, in financial services, or at the digital operational resilience act is starting to mandate that businesses have to be operational in resilient service, monitoring fraud, cyber security, and customer experience. And what we see is really operational resilience is the amount of change that can be absorbed before opportunities become risk. So having a stable foundation of operational resilience allows me to become a more agile business because I know my foundation and people can then move and adjust quickly because I have the awareness of my environment and I have the ability to appropriately react to my environment because I've thought about becoming a resilient business with my digital infrastructure is a theme. I think we're going to see in supply chain coming very soon and across all other industries, as we realize digital is our business. Nowadays. >> What's an exciting world. Isn't it, James? That you're, that you're working in right now. >> Oh, I, I love it. You know, you said, you know, eight and an eight and a half years, nine years at Splunk, I'm still smiling. You know, it is like being at the forefront of this diesel wave and being able to help people make action from that. It's an incredible place to be. I, is liberating and yeah, I can't even begin to imagine what's, you know, the opportunities are over the next few years as the world continually evolves. >> Well, every day is a school day, right? >> It is my favorite phrase >> I knew that. >> And it is, James Hodge. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Glad to have you on finally, after being on the other side of the camera, it's great to have you on this side. So thanks for making that transition for us. >> Thank you, John. You bet James Hodge joining us here on the cube coverage of splunk.com 21, talking about McLaren racing team speed and Splunk.

>>Mhm Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 aws Global Public Sector partner awards. I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and I'm delighted to present our guests. They are Jose Montero, ceo logitech the central America and Rafael Ramirez Product manager. Costa rica Ministry of Education. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >>Think in Italy >>religion and belief. Well, let's start with Rafael. Please tell us about some of the key challenges that are affecting the Ministry of Education in Post A Rekha. >>One of the main challenges was to be able to have a product that is always available to schools that is easy to use for schools and at the same time that the product should be user friendly. That is you don't need so much training for schools to use it more. A few things that we thought of was to consider our client because schools have a very limited connectivity so we could not use very highly tech technologies because that required very huge. Both advanced and our clients, the schools would be subject to a service that was not available to them. One of the main things was to consider the client and how to reach them. Thanks to Ed attack, the ministry made an alliance with a company that thought about the innovation and they recommended different services that we can provide with a cloud through the cloud so that we are able to get to take the service to deliver the service to our clients and then they can use the platform that we are building in an easy way and at the same time to take care of the quality they need. Something important about schools was that while they were using the product, they were getting benefit that made schools to be willing to participate. >>Terrific. Well Jose I'd love it if you could give us some insight on some of the services that you are providing to the ministry. >>Sure. Um, so when, when the ministry approaches and um, and we had the opportunity to work with them um, of course, as an AWS partner, we thought, well, this is couldn't be better, right? And um, so we um, we we started to think on all of the different services that AWS offers in the cloud to provide to the ministry to be able to reach this gap. That has been for a long time where you see still, you know, people using Excel, using access Microsoft access as databases, um, instead of using all of the energy and all of the, the power that the cloud has. So when we approach to them and um, and we were able to um um, to show all of these different services that AWS could um, could provide to the Minister of Education. It was it was a perfect marriage. So, um, we we started to work with uh, with them and I think it's been awesome. This is only the first part of of a project of eight stages, We are currently working on stage two and stage Three, which will come in August and in January of 2020, And, um, but we're we're super happy to to see just in this first face, everything that has come and all of the data that has come to help the Ministry of Education in order to take action in the student's lives. >>Yeah, that's really terrific to hear. Um, you know, I'd love to hear from Rafael further about why he thinks it was so important to have cloud data at the Ministry of Education level. >>Okay, I >>will give you an important example for us in our country. We would rather gather the, collect data in paper and take that to the central office and this would enter into an Excel file. This take around two months to process all this later and make decisions. Mm When we started with the first service, which was to record the number of enrollees of the students, we could pay teachers on time, we could get the number of students and know where we had the biggest needs. So this would make a very innovative solution. And when the pandemic started, we had the first active service. This allowed us to react very quickly and we realized that in the first quarter, 19,000 students were not in in our schools because we were from a face to face service to a virtual service. So we could react very quickly. We plant a strategy with the Ministry of Education that was to come back. That is the idea goes to locate where students were. And in the next four months we could reduce the dropout From 90 students to 18,000 students. After that, we initiated a Another stage to retrieve those 18,000 students back to school. This was thanks to having the information online in some countries that may not have this problem. This might be very little. But for us, this was very, very important because we were able to reach the poll a wrist households so as to bring those students back to the school. >>Terrific. Well, that's really fantastic. Um, you know, in a non covid world, how do you think this technology will really help you, uh, to enhance education within Costa rica? See I can't. The important thing. >>This is important in the idea of this innovative product for us has a strategy of having a single file of the student. This allows us to do a follow up of what the student has done during the different school years and we can identify their lacks the weaknesses and we can see which are the programs that are more appropriate. Was to replicate this in the rest of the country without a centralized file. Like we have now, we are looking to have this traceability of students so as to have strengthened our witnesses and replicate our strength in the rest of the educational system. one of the most important things when you is that this technological unit, this implementation not only reached primary school students, but also preschool kindergarten, primary school, secondary school higher education, technical Education. So we reached every single sector where the Ministry of Education was able to detect where there was a need in the country. >>Yeah, Terrific. Well, I'd love to hear more from our other guest Jose monteiro Ceo of ecotech to central America. Uh, you know, if you could give us a, you know, more insight, more depth on the services that you provide. You, you talked about like an eight step plan. If you could just highlight those eight steps. >>Sure. Um, so part of this aid stages that we're going to be developing and um, and we hope that we'll be working with the Ministry of Education and every single one of them. Um, It causes where it brings a lot of technologies. For example, there's one that were planning on using, which is recognition from AWS. Um, the fact of um, there was, there's a lot of students that come to the country that have no documentation. There's no passports, There's no um, document I. D. There's nothing, right? So it's really hard for a um within the same school system to be able to track these students, right? Because they can they can go, they can come and they can, if they want, they can change their name. They can they can do a lot of things that are maybe are not correct. And um and sometimes it's not even because they want to do something incorrect. It's just that the uh the system or the yeah the the way of doing things manually, it allows us to do these types of changes. So for example, with with the service like recognition have been able to recognize their face or or recognize their um their idea with their with their fingerprints um and and being able to a um to interact and give give an actual recognition as the word says to this student. It's amazing. It's amazing technology that allows the Ministry of Education and the students to have a voice to have a presence even though they don't have their actual documentation because of whatever reason. Um There is something behind this that helps them um b be valuable and the b at the same time, a present in the in the system. Right? And so and and with with not only that, but with the grading with um with the attendance, with with the behavior with um with a lot of things that we're creating within these stages. Uh It's gonna be, for example, let me give you a quick example. Um There's, for example, the system that we've created for the dropouts. Um The student doesn't come one day, two days, three days and automatically. Now it'll, it'll become an alert and it will start to shot emails and alerts to the different people involved in order to see, hey listen, this student has not come for the last week, two classes. Um, we need you to go and see what's going on, Right? So this is maybe it is something very small, but it can, it can change people's life and they can change students lives and um, and, and the fact of, of knowing where they are, how they are, how are they doing, how their grades are, where we can help them and activate these different types of alerts that, um, that the system allows them to, um, to do that. It helps incredibly, the life of the student in the future, of this, of this student. And uh, in that exact, that is exactly what we're trying to do here. At the end. It's not only, um, it's okay, all of the technological and all of the different efforts that we're doing, but at the end, that's what it matters. It's, it's the student, right? It's it's the fact that, um, that he can come and he can finish his school, he can graduate, he can go to college, he can, he can become an, uh, an entrepreneur and, and be some, some day here and I at AWS conference and give him give a conference, and, and and that is exactly what the Ministry of Education is looking at, what we are looking at the project per se. >>Yeah, I mean, that's a really excellent point that you're making. I mean, this technology is helping real people on the ground and actually shaping their lives for the better. So, I mean, it's really incredible, you know, I'd love to hear more now from Rafael, just a bit what insight he can provide to other ministries, who, you know, also, you know, ministers of Education, who also would consider implementing this kind of technology and also his own experience um with this project in the AWS. >>Well, the connectivity for us is really important, not only with within the institutions of the Ministry of Education, but we also have connections with the Ministry of Health, we also have connections with the software called Sienna Julia, which allows the identification of people within the country and the benefits provided by the stage. So the country where all by little is incorporating the pieces and these cloud services, we have found that before we developed everything AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem and instead of on the solution of the technology, because services are already available. So at the country level, other ministries are incorporating these services nowadays, for covid management, the Minister of Health has a set of applications that allowed to set links between people that has positive. So this has allowed us to associate the situation with that particular student in our classrooms. So little by little services are converting education and other services into a need that allows us to focus on the problem instead of on technological solutions because services are already there for us to consume >>terrific. You know, I'd love to now shift to our other guest um Jose could you give us some insight what is the next phase for your business when you look at 2021? You know, it's gonna be, I mean, we hope it's going to be a wonderful year. Uh post Covid. Uh you know, what's your vision? >>It's it's interesting that you're saying that Natalie um education has changed Covid has um has put an acceleration to um has accelerated the the whole shift of the technological change in in education. It will not, well I hope it will not go back to the same before Covid. Um it's all of these technologies that are being created that are being organized, that are being it developed um for education specifically um an area where everything has been done the same for a long time. Um we need it, it's crazy to say this, but we needed a Covid time in order to accelerate this type of of organizations right in and now like ministry, the ministries of Education, like like the Minister of Education of Costa rica, they've had this for a long time and they've they've been thinking of the importance of making changes and everything, but until now it became a priority. Why? Because they realized that without these technologies with another pandemic, oh boy, we're going to see the effects of this and, and, and it's going to affect a lot of countries and a lot of students. Um, but it's gonna help to accelerate and understand that for example, internet, it has to be a worldwide access, just like water or electricity is in some, in our countries right now. You know, the fact of a student not having internet, um, we're taking away lot of development for this student. So I believe that after this post covid time education is going to continue to do a lot of changes and you and you'll see this and you'll see this in all of the areas in elementary, in preschool, in university, in high school. Um, you're going to see the changes that this is, um, is starting to do and we've seen it and we've seen it, but now it's going to be at a 23 or four X. So we're pretty excited. We're pretty excited what what the world it's gonna what the world's gonna bring to this table and to this specific area which is education. >>Yeah. That's really terrific to hear a silver lining in this pandemic. And just real quick uh final thoughts from rafael, are you looking to ramp up further? Uh you know, in light of what Jose has said, you know, to ramp up the digital transformation process? >>Yes, I believe this is an opportunity. The country is facing the opportunity, the resistance that we had in the sector of education, the current emergency situation. And they need to use virtual tools Have flattened these curves and narratives. Since 2000 and 20, Costa Rica started a very strong uh teach that trainer process that every four years ago it was very difficult to set to involve all teachers. But nowadays all teachers want to get trained. So we are getting there with virtual trainings with new tools, with the implementation and the use of technology in the classroom. So these kinds of emergencies somehow we have to uh, we know the pain but we know that also the gain of this whole idea of this whole situation. So this opportunity for change is something that we have to take advantage of. Thanks to these cloud services, I believe this is nowadays available and the country realized that these things are closer than what we thought of. An innovation is here to stay and I believe we have to exploit this a little by little >>terrific. Well gentlemen, thank you so much for your insights, loved hearing about the innovations taking place in the classroom, especially overseas in Costa rica. And that of course was Rafael Ramirez, the Product Manager, Costa rica, Ministry of Education, as well as Jose monteiro, the ceo of Ecotech D central America. And of course, I'm Natalie ehrlich, your host for the cube for today's session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks very much for watching. >>Mhm.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back, here on theCUBE, along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls and now we're joined by Peter Nichol, who's the CEO of Instaclustr. Peter, good to see you this morning sir. >> Thank you very much John. Nice to meet you. >> and Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. >> Good to see ya. >> Good morning Todd. >> Good morning. >> First off, let's just talk about what the two of you guys do or specifically what Instaclustr does and PubNub. Peter, if you would. >> Basically at a high level, what Instaclustr does is, we help customers to build applications that have to scale massively in a reliable way. Massive scale means terabytes or petabytes of data or even more. Reliability means the application has got to be up and running all of the time. The way we do that is, we focus on technologies in the data layer and we allow companies to essentially outsource the management of those technologies to us. So they can focus on building their application, which is what they do best, and we focus on taking a lot of the complexity away, which is helping to manage the technologies in the data layer. And the technologies that we focus on are basically in the area of storage, search, messaging, and analytics. Those technologies are Cassandra, for storage, Kafka, for messaging, Spark, for analytics, and Elasticsearch for search. We can manage all of those technologies, in any of the cloud providers, including AWS, and essentially this allows customers to outsource that and focus on their core business. We've got some great customers, PubNub being one of our best customers, a hot startup in Silicon Valley, and we're really proud to have them here with us today. >> So Todd, >> Thanks Peter. >> if you will, give us the PubNub story. >> PubNub is a company that provides a global network, which is infrastructure for real-time applications. What's a real-time application? When we started the company six, seven years ago, we made this realization that, the world was moving from applications that sort of requested data when they needed to, you know, you pull up social information, you wanted to see where something was, you ask a question, to ones where things were constantly moving and changing. So devices were emitting data and consuming data all the time. Uber was launching and everyone wanted to see where their taxi was now. Chat applications were getting big inside, dating apps and B to B apps, and B to C apps, and on top of that IoT was exploding and people needed a way to control devices and turn lights on and off. And all the infrastructure that existed at the time, didn't really address these real-time use cases. So these companies were building that stuff themselves. So PubNub launched this thing we call a Data Stream Network, but it effectively does three things. It allows you to connect to devices and leave an always-on connection over the internet, to deliver data bidirectionally to those devices. Real-time message signaling in under a quarter of a second, and then control that data going back and forth, so being able to provide logic. That core infrastructure, that sort of connect, deliver, control, powers everything from Peloton exercise bikes to Symphony Investor chat applications, athenahealth doctor, patient, nurse, kinds of collaboration and lots of IoT companies, from Logitech Harmony to Samsung smart refrigerators. Across the board, it turns out, our infrastructure has been the key to making these real-time experiences come alive. >> So you had this moment, and startups usually do, they have, you hope you do, they reach a tipping point, right, of success And things work great and you hit a boiling point (laughs) in a way, a few years back, to where things were working almost too well, and that's how you got in to Instaclustr. Tell us, give me that story if you would, or share that with our folks watching. >> Yeah absolutely, you know, it's funny, I was talking to someone recently at Amazon, at AWS, who said we rarely talk to a company your size that actually is doing more traffic than AWS is and we discovered we were doing more than twice as many messages, these control signals we talked about, around our network, more than twice as many as the world's global SMS traffic. We were doing close to 50 billion of these messages per day. So as you can imagine, that's not a simple infrastructure. We store that data, we process it, we route it, we do all these things and in one of our storage layers, built on Cassandra, we were really struggling with the expertise needed to scale this thing at the size that we needed to scale it. And we hit a tipping point about two years ago, when we realized we really needed help and we needed help immediately. We had a lot of outreach to a lot of companies, including the company themselves that had created Cassandra. But once we stumbled on Instaclustr, it was like, you know, the clouds parting, right? All of the sudden we had folks from Instaclustr on with us 24 by 7, helping us migrate, helping us move to a more stable and scaled infrastructure and we've had this ongoing relationship ever since. We now have them managing a lot of different uses of Cassandra within PubNub. >> Yeah, so, infrastructure is, (stammers) sorry, Instaclustr is built on all these open-source technologies you mentioned, like Cassandra and Spark and Kafka, but what made you choose those technologies? What was it that was attractive about them that said, you know what, this is what we want to base our company on? >> Customers are always basically looking for three things, and I think Todd summed it up very well in his business, it's basically all about scalability. If your business is successful, you want to be able to scale massively as you get more and more customers. The second thing is reliability, which means the applications have got to be always on, always up and running. The third thing is performance, which is all about latency and speed and feed and all that type of thing. We chose Cassandra because it is one of the most popular, highly scalable data bases. It's used by Apple and Netflix and big companies that have got millions of customers. We generally pick technologies, based on those three criteria, but we also focus on open-source only, for two reasons. Number one, open-source doesn't involve expensive license fees, so customers don't get locked in with expensive license fees and number two, open-source provides a degree of flexibility, cloud independence, so if you don't want to be locked in to a specific cloud provider, and you want to keep your options in the future, choose open-source. >> Okay, that's a pretty compelling sort of argument there and certainly I think the world has discovered that open-source is totally a thing that we should all be using. I'm old enough to remember when open-source was verboten and you shouldn't be using it and now it just seems to be everywhere. What is it about Instaclustr that makes you special though, because open-source, anyone could use it. I could go and download it >> Yep, yep. >> for free tomorrow, so maybe I could attempt to steal PubNub's customers, steal your customers away. So clearly that's not going to be possible for me to be able to do tomorrow. What is it about Instaclustr that you've invested in this company that makes you so special, that means that PubNub was able to rely on you? >> Right, so I think the main thing is, we have 100% of our focus on operations, not on developing proprietary IP, which we sell, which is the typical software model, we take the open-source software and we actually manage it for our customers. Basically what that means is, if they want to use Cassandra, they go to our website, they go to the customer portal, they choose the cloud provider they want to use, they choose the technology they want to use, what regions do they want to run in, what size is their cluster? They press a button and everything else is done behind the scenes by us. We do the provisioning, we install the software, and from that point on, we're managing it 24 by 7. So instead of, for example, PubNub having to build their own team for each one of these technologies, they can outsource it to us, we can do it much cheaper and we can get them to market much faster, if we're doing our job right. It's all about the operations. We can do it much cheaper and faster and that's our main advantage. The other advantage is we manage all of these different technologies in the data layer, which means that customers have one vendor they can go to, to manage several different technologies. It's all heavily, highly, integrated from one vendor. That's a big, rather than having five different vendors to manage five different technologies, we provide the complete platform. >> So Todd, what does this mean for you, now that you have this partner that you can rely on and that you can trust? What does that change for the business? What has that enabled you to be able to do now that you can look forward to saying, you know what, we can do this to grow our business. >> Well that's a good question. Like Instaclustr, we operate PubNub. Customers pay us, not for our technology, but for our ability to operate our technology at massive scale. And we provide five nines SLA, which is a fancy way for saying, if we have an outage for more than 26 seconds in a month, we provide credits back to our customers. That's a really hard, high bar to fill. And so philosophically, we see ourselves as an operations company ourselves, right? And so we're very careful about who we would bring in to the fold as part of operations, right? And so it has to be an organization that has the same security levels that we do, SOC 2 Type II Compliance, has the same understandings and philosophy around operating things at high availability, and can do it in a way that we feel like, you know, in many ways is a part of our team and not some vendor that we don't know how to get on the phone. Not some vendor that we don't really trust, right? It has to feel like it's part of our company. So really it's only been Instaclustr that we've been able to develop that trust around. And so it is actually in all of us to sort of focus on areas where we can do more innovation while keeping the five nines SLAs at 26 seconds minimum, you know, maximum, of issues any month, but allow us to focus a lot more on innovation and not on the things that, frankly, Instaclustr, as far as we can tell, is best in the world at, which is really operating this infrastructure, the Cassandra piece. >> And what do you want to take on then? You told about innovation. If there's an area of your business, you say alright, this is where 2019, where I want it to take us, what would that be? >> It's a great question. One of the big changes for PubNub, was that we built our initial business on the backs of other startups and it was great. We got to some level of scale by powering a lot of innovative interesting applications that were themselves trying to be the first real-time this and the first real-time that and the first real-time the other thing. And then about two years ago something happened, a year and a half ago, that need for real-time, for having things update in real time, inventory, prices, chat applications, moving things on a map, seeing where your trucks were, that went mainstream, and now even the largest app companies in the world, if they release any kind of application, whether it's a business application or a consumer app, if it doesn't have that same real-time experience like an Uber or like a Snapchat, people kind of look at it and say, well this feels like it was built 20 years ago, right? And so what's happened to our industry, has been the moving of the need for this real-time experience, into the mainstream. Now that's been great for us, but it also means as we are selling to a larger and larger group of, we call mainstream larger enterprise customers, the way we package our product, the way we make it consumable by larger companies, make it easier to deploy our product, make it easier to understand and adding features that round that out, is really the core of our focus right now. Is really being able to appeal to those larger companies. We already have the scale, in fact, we recently participated in an event which was the Guinness Book of World (stammers) Record's largest online event in history. And we powered the source in India for Cricket, we powered the largest social interaction, over 10 million people synchronously going through our network, all in one virtual environment. So we know we can scale this thing beyond any existing human need and now it's really about making sure it's accessible to the world's largest companies. >> So it was cricket in India? >> Yes, yes. >> I would've thought it was the Justin Warren fan club, but I guess not, I (stammers) second online, right? >> Yeah, probably. >> There's a lot of people in India who love cricket, and they all have mobile phones. >> Yes, well gentlemen, thanks for being with us, Peter, Todd, continued success and then thanks for being here on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure, thank you. >> We continue live coverage here from Las Vegas. We're in the Sands. We're here all week at AWS re-Invent. (calm digital music)

Jeff Rick here with the kubera in Mountain View California had a really cool startup phantom they're coming at this autonomous vehicle thing from a very different direction they're not a car company it's a pure software play but it really has a huge impact on the autonomous vehicle industry autonomous vehicles are met for no driver you guys have a driver but you're really assisted driving from a remote location a third party who can provide a safety solution for a number of AV operators right let's say if it's a you know one of the big OMS of ride-sharing companies they can connect to vehicle remotely and when they move the steering wheel or press the gas or brake it would actually happen in real time right we think we have the ultimate fallback mechanism at this point which is actually still a human right the machine is very very good but for these edge case scenarios you still need to bring a human back into the loop road construction areas severe weather conditions all this stuff happen all the time ok an autonomous vehicles may struggle with the situation so phantom Otto provides a solution whatever the situation is get you around an obstruction pull you over to the side of the road so you're not blocking traffic and in a much safer situation and a human's cognitive ability to process information on the fly we think that's the hidden key to making autonomous vehicles a reality it's in life-saving technologies you use a lot of off-the-shelf really simple hardware to execute this there's logitech little steering wheels over there at the big curve sam sunscreens basic cameras on the car so i get in it right we just work regardless of the kind of vehicle that a company might utilize we have to be able to control that vehicle smoothly and safely how do you guys deal with the ladies issue obviously that's our secret sauce but we've been able to get that very very low we connect multiple network at the same time a PMT horizon you know and t-mobile and a few networks right once they're bonded to get a much stronger connection these are life-saving vehicles everyone wants these deployed as rapidly as possible but we also want that deployment itself to be as safe as possible triple A's did a survey recently issued 75% of consumers are afraid of trusting the Machine and that's on this vehicle if you take a step back and look at the forest and not the trees you have 1.2 million people dying every year worldwide due to traffic accident fatalities 40,000 in the u.s. in 2016 and 94% is due to human error if we had that happen even just for two weeks in aviation in the u.s. aviation wouldn't exist right it doesn't know it so if you eliminate the human for the most part from that equation you can save a lot of lives we do view there's going to be you know a big consumer adoption kind of hurdle to overcome and a piece of that is having the passengers in the car comfortable and feeling that someone it has their back right I saw somewhat of an awakening in the government like we're really scared of this being deployed but in reality we should be scared of this not being deployed right we are working with a variety of cybersecurity firms for making sure that our solution is extremely secure from the hardware that we can offer in the car to the software to the actual control center the operation center where the drivers driving you making sure that we have ended in security the a I would say it's about 97 98 percent of the way then a reality of having autonomous vehicles interacting with other autonomous vehicles might create new edge case scenarios that don't exist yet I think the regulators are coming to the realization at this point that if we want to get these vehicles deployed right now we need to have some sort of bridge to that technological gap to get us from 98 percent to a hundred percent right now it's a relatively small number of cars a small number of players but we see a huge opportunity and huge growth in the sector of the next five years it's okay I'll go take a drive yeah sure okay we're gonna check out we're gonna take a drive we'll see you in the car [Music] we are driving a Lincoln MKZ 2017 and the reason this vehicle is so good for autonomous vehicle development is because a lot of the driving steering gas and brakes is enabled through some a system called drive-by-wire okay that means it's an electronic signal that goes through the canvas and initiates these features locomotions in the vehicle electronically we can create an artificial electronic signal and inject it where it processes that information and artificially move the steering wheel or the brakes or the gas light that way [Music] [Music] getting ready check ready three two one there we go besides operating is our safety driver we haven't started going yet so you you are on call we look both ways now this is kind of interesting as I can see what then can't see who you can see what I can see so it's kind of an infinite loop you can see almost 360 degrees around the park dan can hear everything that we can hear in the vehicle if someone is haunting that and making a right-hand turn and you think not a very good right seat driver if I complain about people getting too close to the curb but good job then stand nice and wide for every latitude longitude coordinate we would get data points such as bandwidth and latency and if there's ever some sort of dead zone he or she would know that in advance and know that they could not engage to be able you give a geofence that off and to write if there's a dead zone correct make the car go around it even if it's something looked at this is good crap how consistent is the coverage the mobile cover do you find say t-mobile is not good in a certain area but AT&T is good okay then we would use AT&T service it's the latency of shifting we're always going to make sure that you can steer that you can have breaks and other stuff that isn't as high of a priority Falls lower down the list we're now going to go into gas station gas stations obviously don't have lane markings you're doing with pedestrians different vehicles coming in and out but for us obviously since we're being driven by a human we'll be able to go through just as though it was a human in the driver seat it's really just about a human being able to read the motions of the car right take a few inches forward then you pause it's understanding that or they give a scenario so that you understand when you can move forward or one you might need to peel back but at the end of the day you hope that at some point the autonomous vehicles will be able to handle an increase moon remember of easy choices well gathering data critical data right edge case scenario data so that we can feed that back to our customers so that they can have the data that they need to further train these vehicles [Music] that was fun great job out there thank you what does it feel like a driving this thing driving remotely is actually very different from driving a car normally and I know might sound obvious but there's a lot of things we take for granted driving the car for example you don't actually understand the momentum shifts that are happening in the vehicle so you don't know how hard you're braking or you might have a dip different depth perception because the optics on the cameras all these things kind of add up into completely different driving experience as I'm developing the system I'm testing it and seeing exactly the information that I need in order to create that safe and smooth driving experience and so I'm looking at what's difficult for me as a remote operator or what information am i lacking and then I go back and develop those things so at the federal level there's a bill in the house and the bill in the Senate neither of which have been passed but we expect that one will go the distance this year so you might actually have the rare scenario where the regulation outpaces the technology which is a good problem to have right it's not a problem at all I mean a human who's going to intervene on your behalf will be really important right on the business standpoint we have several deals are already closed some pilots planned over the next few months so you'll be seeing a lot more I think of us very soon out in the market thanks for sharing the right and taking care of us appreciate it thank you we're at phantom Auto in Mountain View California thanks for watching we'll catch you next time [Music]

(click) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's 2018. We just got out of the CES show and all the rage is autonomous vehicles. You can't get away from it. It's what everybody's talking about. Tesla just announced their autonomous truck, their autonomous Roadster. We're here in Palo Alto, right on San Antonio Road. Googleplex and Waymo's are right up the street. So everyone is all about autonomous vehicles, but we're excited to be here at Phantom Auto and they're taking a slightly different approach for a slightly different problem. We're excited to have Shai Magzimof. He's the co-founder and CEO of Phantom Auto. Shai, great to see you. >> Nice talking to you, yeah. Thanks for having me. >> So Phantom Auto, you guys just got back from CES. You were giving demos, but you weren't stuck in, like, the little lane that was protected. You were actually driving people all over the streets. >> We were driving on the Strip, yeah, yeah. We actually were picking people from the hotel lobby, so the valet guys would let us in with an empty vehicle. These videos are actually also online, and we drove them off the Strip and back to the hotel, or to another destination. >> So you're doing a whole different thing. You do not have an autonomous vehicle. >> It's not an autonomous vehicle. >> You were the ultimate chauffeur driven vehicle. >> Right. Right. So again, for the show, we did our job to show that the vehicle can drive without a driver in the driver's seat, but what we do is actually a safety solution for autonomous vehicles. And that safety is basically what happens if an autonomous vehicle artificial intelligence doesn't work. Let's say there's something that it cannot see, or something that, you know, an unidentified object, road construction areas, severe weather conditions, all this stuff happens all the time. And autonomous vehicles may struggle with the situation so Phantom Auto provides a solution that we work with these companies. We provide them that solution that allows remote operations, so someone will connect remotely. >> So let's back up a couple steps. Autonomous vehicles are meant for no driver. You guys have a driver but you're really assisted driving with a person from a remote location. So how do you describe that in a short category? I'm sure the analysts will want you to have a category. >> The category would be the same way you think about air traffic control, right, or any type of control center, like call control centers. Any type of support for customers, you would have a bunch of people sitting in front of computers, in our case they're sitting at computers with steering wheels, we'll see that later, and they can connect to a vehicle remotely, and when they move the steering wheel or press the gas or brake, it would actually happen in realtime. So we have this software that allows this realtime, critical communication for autonomous vehicles. >> Now what's weird is when we first heard about you guys, I'm thinking, okay what is the use case? Am I going to send the Phantom Auto to go pick up my hundred-year old grandfather who probably shouldn't be driving anymore, where you're escorting it. But really it's a very different application, and I don't think most people understand that, in autonomous vehicles, there's a whole lot of use cases still that they haven't quite figured out. My favorite one is when two of them pull up to a four-way stop, and neither of them wants to go first. They get stuck in a friendly lock, right, they get paper-logger, some poor kid has his foot in the intersection and is trying to wave the car through and it won't go through. So it's corner cases that you guys are all about, to really enable that next-stage of machinery. >> When I started a company, right, I'm a big believer in autonomous vehicle, I wanted to make them happen faster and sooner because it's life-saving technology. This is going to change the world. We all want it faster. Now, the reason why we're still not there yet is because there are many corner cases, edge cases, these situations where the machine didn't train enough for, and in this situation they provide a cover. So we have a person that would sit in an office, he doesn't have to be so close nearby. When we were in Vegas a couple weeks ago, the driver was in Mountain View, so Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley to Vegas, and he moves the steering wheel and he moves it real time. >> But he's driving the car. >> Yeah. >> So one of the great knocks on cloud, right, is latency, and clearly the use case that's always brought up is if you're in a self-driving car, you don't have time for the data to get it to the cloud and back to make a decision if a little ball rolls out into the street. So latency is a big issue. How do you guys deal with the latency issue? >> That's our secret sauce, obviously, but I'm happy to share as much as I can. The high level description would be, we connect multiple networks at the same time. We would usually have only AT&T in your cellphone, right, or in your car, and then we have AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and a few networks, all of these together are bonded, and once they're bonded they get a much stronger connection. It sounds maybe easy, okay so let's plug a few phones and then get a really good connection, but it's much more complicated than that. We share and split the data across multiple networks at the same time, we prioritize the data. So, like a brake, it's very important, right, so if the remote operator is pressing the brake, you want it to be first in the vehicle, where the right side of the camera is not as critical, so lower latency for the brake, and then a little bit higher latency for something less important. >> So you've got dynamic, kind of, latent distribution. >> It's all dynamic, realtime, you know, so that's what we do, our real core. We provide this communication, real time, critical layer of communication for the video streaming and back of the data from the remote operator, back and forth all the time. >> So that's one big piece of it. Another big piece of it is the communications between the occupants in the vehicle and the driver. Another really important piece that obviously most people aren't thinking about for autonomous vehicles because they don't have that use case. But that's a pretty important piece of your solution. >> Yeah, that's a big one. I'd say that for this, you don't need to do a lot of innovation. It could be a simple call with the driver remotely. But, we're all about safety, right, and we're all about giving passengers this psychological trust, and it is true, you want to sit in a car that drives 100% of the time. If I tell you that your car today would go in and drives only 95% of the time, you would not buy this car. Same thing with autonomous vehicles. So we provide a safety and service layer. On the safety side, it's about assisting the vehicle when there's an emergency. It could be post-emergency or before it happens. Let's say you're just stuck in the middle of the lane and you don't know what happens. Even if the driver remotely wouldn't actually drive the car, you still want to be able to talk to somebody, right. So, I'd start with first the person, the driver, the human being would greet you when you enter the vehicle. It's an autonomous vehicle, he would say hello, how are you, nice to meet you, my name is let's say Ben- >> Ben is going to be your driver. >> Your driver soon, and Ben is going to tell you that whenever you have a problem, if you need any assistance, he would be there for you. That already gives you like a whole different type of experience, and when you leave the vehicle too, he's not going to be there all the time engaged with the car. The car is going to drive on an autonomous AV system, but at least he's there in case you need him. >> And again, the attention thing, which is an issue, you see with some of the test autonomous cars out there we were talking before we turned the cameras on, where the engineer's got his hands ready to grab the wheel if there's an emergency. That's not really Ben's role here. The car is going to take evasive action in terms of emergency. It's more to get out of like these weird corner cases as you said. >> Correct, it's not a test driver. Today, most autonomous vehicle companies still require and mandate it, it's actually illegal. By the regs, you have to have a person in the car. We also have a person in the car, and we do that same thing, although when Ben is driving, he's not replacing that person. He's just assisting when the autonomous vehicle system would have an issue. >> Right. So the next thing I think that's pretty interesting about your company, as you said, you're a software company. There is hardware components, you can see the back of the car, we'll take some film of the driving station, but you use a lot of off the shelf, really simple hardware to execute this. There's Logitech, little steering wheels are over there, it feels like a big video game, you've got the big, curved Samsung screens, basic cameras on the car, so talk about the opportunity to build a software company and you're leveraging somebody else's autonomous vehicle technology to really get in the middle of this with just software, a pretty cool opportunity. >> I'll tell you what. The best time of my life was earlier this year, when I was just putting this whole thing together because it was plugging in the hardware and the software, I did it together with a team that's also here in the office. Obviously, it was more challenging because from a software person to try and build this hardware, you know, is more challenging, but I'd say today, you can get anything on Amazon, you buy on eBay a part you need, you plug it in and it would just work. So, again, we did a lot of iteration, I'd say we spent a bit more money than we were supposed to. But, that works. >> Right. And then the last piece of the puzzle that I think is fascinating is the way you're going to integrate in with other people's autonomous vehicle, so again, we talked about Waymo up the street, the Google one, Uber is working on theirs, Volvo, every day you read about BMW, et cetera et cetera, so you really get to take advantage of those hardware systems, the sensor systems, the control systems, not only from those autonomous vehicles, but you're seeing now all this stuff that's coming in factory, right, avoidance collision and radar and all types of sensors, so you will have to be able to take advantage of those different platforms and integrate your system into those various platforms. >> Right. So we would work with a company, let's say if it's one of the big OEMs or ride-sharing companies, we would know how their vehicle is set up, all we need for our solution to work is a bunch of cameras and a few modems, right, so cameras everybody have, it's one of the most essential things in an autonomous vehicle- >> Right, right. >> We would just tag into these cameras, use the modems that we need for the software to run, and that's about it. So it's a pretty straightforward solution to allow remote control assistant for autonomous vehicles. >> I'm just curious, when you're talking to customers or potential partners, what is the piece that really resonates with them when you kind of explain your solution and how it fits with what they're trying to accomplish? >> Right, so our solution is really trying to help them reach market faster, so we're not replacing anybody's work. We're adding another layer of support and safety so when yous computer crashed, when your software crashed in the car, we're going to be there with another redundancy system to support with a driver remotely. So, that's what we do at the service level. >> Okay, so can I go take a drive? >> Yeah, sure. Let's do it. >> All right, we're going to check it out, we're going to take a drive. We'll see you in the car. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we are here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive two days of coverage of Cisco's new inaugural event called DevNet Create. An extension of their classical developer group DevNet, DevNet Create really going into the ethos of DevOps, the infrastructruous code targeting cloud-native and app developers, the collision between applications and infrastructure. A new direction for Cisco, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Bhavana Srines- >> Bhavana: Srinivas. >> Srinivas, solutions architect at PubNub, which provides real-time pubs. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, it's great to be here and talk to you guys. >> So, PubNub, you couldn't get PubSub but it relates. Explain what you guys do real quick. >> Yeah, so what PubNub is is it provides real-time infrastructure as a service. So we realized that a lot of people were trying to build these real-time, always-on applications wherein when something happens in real life, you want that message or event to be translated to several of your friends or other users instantly. So, everyone is trying to build a real-time app like, say, a taxi dispatcher like Lyft or for example, a chat application where if I send a message my friends need to receive it instantly. Anyone trying to build these kind of real-time applications were building the infrastructure before they even got to the best part, which is their business logic. So, we decided that we will provide that infrastructure, we'll provide that plumbing. We'll build a global distributed network for all of these app developers to build their always-on applications. So, what we do is provide this real-time, bidirectional communication between devices in a very scalable manner and it's very, it focuses on real-time communication. >> And the key there is that most apps are mobile, you require this so you want to get them accelerated because, let's face it, most apps don't make it, right? So why build all the plumbing? >> Bhavana: Right. >> Focus on getting to figuring out the best app experience. >> Exactly, so it's for mobile, web, and even for IoT devices because everyone now wants to talk to each other. You're not going to let that gradual sit by itself, you want to connect it. So, like you said, it's meant to go to market quickly. Like you said, not every company has the resources or the time and the effort to put in to building this infrastructure, so why don't we provide this as a service? So now they're focusing on their business logic and try and make that app look pretty. >> So you're clearly in the world of cloud-native, which really is pure cloud, mostly startups. Because why have a data center? If you're a startup, I mean anyone that does a startup these days, if you have data center you're either crazy or you have so much case you just want to spend it. Why would you want to do it? You just go right to the cloud. >> Right, right, right, so we call ourselves more of a network because we're not... Think of it as a CDN but for real-time data. It's not longer static files- >> Peter: CDN is smaller messages deterministic performance. >> Exactly, exactly, you nailed it. So, what we're- >> John: You nailed it. >> Peter: I'm the man! (laughter) >> All right, so talk to me about where your use cases are. Give us some examples of customers and some specific apps that are on the network. >> For sure, so, if you take eBay for instance. They use PubNub for buyer-seller chat. So, you go on eBay, you want to talk to that buyer before you actually buy that thing. So, that chat application is powered by PubNub. Or for instance, you go to Logitech and then you want to control all these devices in your house, and PubNub is what enables that from your mobile phone to all the devices in your house. That is PubNub in play there. Or, if for instance, Lyft uses us for to see where exactly the driver is in real-time. So you're able to see every instantly. So, it's such a low-lying infrastructure that we play in almost 35 different industries. Whether it's real-time chat or taxi dispatch, multiplayer game, like Pocket Gems uses us. That's where it's real-time at it's core, right? So, you have two screens, people are playing a game. You want to see what the other person is doing, right? That's the essence of a multiplayer game. And so you can imagine how important it is to be real-time in such a use case, and that's where PubNub fits in. >> But just so we're clear, we're not talking about scada kinds of, system control kinds of things. Low-level IoT protocols, we're talking about a machine that serve human types of speeds. >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> A few hundred milliseconds, that kind of stuff. >> Exactly, exactly, so we're protocol, we call ourselves protocol agnostic. So, as long as a device can speak ECP it can understand PubNub. So, all you're dealing with is that high-level application level APIs. >> Peter: So you're still layer seven? >> Yes, very much layer seven. >> Peter: That's important. >> Yeah, but then the way we provide that layer seven API is by building out this very robust network. >> All right, so explain to us how you guys play with microservices because you're doing a topic on, Always-on Apps are Driving Microservices to the Edge. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so far you understood that PubNub's almost like a message pipeline between devices. If you have a message to throw out, PubNub will route it for you anywhere in the world. So then we decided that people are sending all these small bits of data through our network, but let's do something with that data. So, maybe if there's a chat application and people are talking to each other, maybe you want to translate it in-stream. So you put in a function there on the PubNub network that says, "Hey, if my destination is going to a "Spanish-speaking person, translate it." Or if I want to do sentiment analysis because I have a customer support kind of app, data's flowing between an agent and a customer, then let's do some sentiment analysis on it. So, what we added to this humongous network is the ability to put small pieces of logic on it. So that it acts on the data flowing though the network. And so it becomes easy to spin up these microservices through PubNub and that's what I'm going to be talking about. So it's, yeah-- >> John: So it's a brand new innovation. >> Bhavana: Sorry? >> A new innovation opportunity for you guys-- >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> To apply logic into a data stream while it's in motion. >> Of course, yes, so we recently even did have a BLOCK, we call this BLOCK, event handlers. So, we have a BLOCK with Cisco Spark. So if you wanted to do any kind of collaboration using that Cisco Spark, you can now send data through PubNub and instantly, in real-time it will sync up with Cisco Spark. >> So, Bhavana I got to get your perspective on something. We talk to a lot of enterprises and you're involved with a lot of cutting edge companies. Microservices, cloud-native, they're doing cutting edge stuff. They don't have time to be bothered with old-fashioned stuff because they have no baggage. There's no legacy, a lot of these enterprises have legacy environments, they're trying to be relevant, and they're looking to design great apps. Is there a pattern that you've seen or observation that you've noticed on these successful new, emerging companies that could be an opportunity for someone to look at and say, "Hmm, I should to more of that." What's the trend? >> (laughs) That's a loaded question. But we talk to a lot of small and medium businesses and also a lot of enterprise level companies. But then, it's just that the sales cycles are much slower. You can't go to a company and say that, "Hey, I know you're building a technical product. "Speed up your development process," right? So it's up to them to do that. So with enterprises at least they have the resource and time to do so. But, like you said, they have a lot of legacy systems. So, it's hard to tear that down and-- >> John: Build new. >> Build new stuff that you have, which might be more optimized but we try to make it work. So we're trying to now, like I said, if you're within the PubNub eco-system, you can use our BLOCKS but then everyone understands https. So we've now included a BLOCKs endpoint, where if you just dock http, you can get in to the PubNub network. So ways to use our network using their infrastructure. So we're trying to make this network accessible for anyone, irrespect of whether they use-- >> John: So integrate easily into these older legacy environments. >> Bhavana: Exactly. >> Well, but so one of the places where at least PubSub initially started was the idea that you could have a published without having to know who the clients were. >> Bhavana: Right, right, right, right. >> So you anticipate, does PubNub anticipate that you're actually going to be in a position to say, I as a real-time device, who has a real-time service, can put something into PubNub and then devices out there can subscribe to it? So a device manufacturer may sell something, it takes advantage of that centralized service, but have it operate in a deterministic, high-quality high-reliability way? Is that kind of the direction you're taking? >> Yeah, but at the end of the day, someone has to build an application. >> Peter: Sure. >> So for instance, even in Insteon, they use PubNub. They integrate PubNub within their devices and they're now selling it at Best Buys and whatnot. So it's like when I as a customer buy an Insteon product, I don't know there's PubNub in there. But then using PubNub, Insteon's now able to collect data about my usage patterns or where I can be saving energy, et cetera so the- >> But then the alternative for them is to build a full-stack system, manage it, have system integrators, have operators-- >> I mean, that was exactly the case at Insteon. They had 23 on-call support agents all day, every day, trying to do exactly what PubNub did for them without that. >> John: Yeah, they save all that cost. It's kind of like why people use Amazon. >> Right, exactly. >> (laughs) I don't need a data center, I don't need staff. All right, what did you think about this event? Obviously, Cisco has been first in a lot of markets and succeeded in networking but didn't really knock it out of the park on smart home or-- >> Peter: Linksys. >> (laughs) And so on and so forth but now, with cloud-native, we're saying is that the opportunity for them? >> Bhavana: Yeah. >> What's your take on Cisco's moving up the stack? >> I mean, I think it's great. This is one of the first conferences that DevNet is hosting for developers, right? I just got here but we've had a booth here and people are saying really great things. And there's been a steady crowd. And apparently there have been great talks. So I'm actually very excited to give my talk and then go on. >> Peter: What time is your talk, today? >> Yeah, today at 5 p.m. and then I'm here tomorrow as well. So, excited to check out the whole experience. >> Great to have you on theCube and thanks for sharing PubNub and we look forward to getting more updates from you. And congratulations on your success. >> Bhavana: Thank you. >> And your customers, thanks for sharing. >> It was great to be here, thank you so much. >> John: Thanks so much. >> So you should stop by our booth when you- >> We'll stop by and check out PubNub, the real-time pub-sub service used by all cutting edge companies in the cloud-native. This is theCUBE, Cube Cloud. Check out our content at youtube.com/siliconangle. That's our Cube Cloud, all the content there for you. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more live, exclusive coverage from Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning.