>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's, continuous coverage with day two of UI Path forward. Five. My name is Dave Ante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. And you are watching The Cube. It's all about the robots, the automations, the transformations and beyond. Audi Gana is here. She's group executive at Vodacom and Niva is back. She's senior director of telecommunications industry for UiPath. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. >>I thank you very much. >>So Vodacom a leading telco in in Africa across the continent. Tell us more about the company. >>The company is a traditionally telecommunications company, but our vision 2025 is first to transition from being a telco to a technology company. So you'll find that a lot of the use cases that we've actually started embarking on, combined the combination of telco and FinTech. And we've got a lot of RPA bot also supporting the FinTech platform, which is quite a major step in our strategy. >>So, you know, it's interesting Mark Andreessen's famous comment, Every company's a software company. I like to think every company's a technology company, technology driven. So what does that actually mean for you? Is it like a split brain between FinTech? Cuz it's pretty clear that FinTech is always a highly, you know, technology oriented and telecom. Are they sort of together driving a, a technology business? How does that >>Work? It's, it's a, it's a converge use of the technology to add value to the customer. So what we wanna do is to get to the point where we have converged services where the Telecommunicate, cuz at the end of the day in the African market, you'll find that there's a lot of markets that are unbanked. So you find that a cell phone is a means of communication and a a mobile platform for the users. So it's a natural progression for our company to actually play in both spaces. And I think one of the things I find quite interesting is the levels of trust that a lot of citizens have in our financial platform. In that even some of the governments are paying social grants using the platform. And so it almost becomes, without the phones a lot of people cannot function type of scenario. >>Nevas is your role a global role? >>Yes, it is a global role. >>Okay. So it's interesting cause you're I think based down under, right? I am. Is that true? Okay. Obviously spent some time in, in, in the African continent. How are you, what are you seeing in terms of the, the trends in, in telecommunications that, and are you noticing there's gotta be differences across different regions? You know, a lot of times you hear, oh no, there's really kind of a global world out and I know it is, but telco seems to be one of the industries that has some uniqueness within the different breaches. What are you seeing? >>Look, we are privileged to work with more than 200 telecoms around the world. But clearly from a technology perspective, there are some regions that have embraced technology sooner than the others, particularly when it comes to automation. Now we do have use cases with all of them that we are, you know, the 200 we are working with. But the extent to which they become strategic partners, Varie is, you know, what I find is in, in the US we are doing a lot in the customer experience space with the telecoms in aj it's more back of house. And with telecoms like Vodacom, it's really strategic. You know, automation is being applied practically in every facet of work. And you know, sometimes that could be because the demand is just so great for connectivity, you know, at times there's a skills gap, but it does vary. But what's reassuring is that there is a journey and you know, at this event what I have seen is telecoms wanting to learn from other telecoms. And I must say Artie has been in huge demand. We did about 22 meetings yesterday with others wanting to know, which again is that strategic trend. >>Artie, my understanding is you've been at this for a while, this automation journey for quite some time and p i pass. Interesting. I mean it's a company that's founded in 2005 and kind of did sort of its own thing for a long time and then realized it had lightning in a bottle Yeah. For a mid last decade. But my understanding is you've seen it all. You've seen the, the legacy platforms. And so tell me about your personal journey with automation and then the companies. >>Okay, so there's the automation pre rpa, which was strangely enough, I come from banking, got a finance degree, did automated ations in one of the bigger banks. And somehow I transitioned. And I mean from a history perspective, the one of the previous platforms, which was the biggest one at the time, that's where I got to learn about rpa. And then there's another vendor that we then use in another company. So this is almost my third vendor that I'm experiencing in the RPA space. Having joined RPA space in 2015, apparently I'm kind of a veteran, >>So, So what are you seeing is what's the difference between, I mean let's call UI path, that was sort of a modern focus on simple to deploy. That's really how they get started when I first found them. How do you compare what UiPath has? And there are others, there are other modern platforms to sort of the legacy platforms. What's the >>Difference? I think it's the diversity and the applicability of the technology across multiple industries is something that still amazes me up until today. Because the kind of customers I've been meeting today, I, I would not, I met a guy who owns an ice cream company and I'm like, where would automation come in here? But he's actually quite a big customer of, of UiPath, you know. So I think that's one thing I appreciate. I think the ease of use, it has actually allowed for a lot of people to be part of the digital transformation. I think in the his, in the past technology has been seen as something that was a bit elite and that you needed to have X amount of skills and level of education. Whereas the RPA industry has almost bridged that gap in actually bringing along as many people in the journey in terms of digital transformation. And the fourth industrial revolution is now starting to become more inclusive >>Horizontal across industries. >>Yeah. >>So Vodacom headquartered in South Africa. Okay. But presence throughout the continent. Yes. I imagine that various geographies have various twists and quirks to them and different needs. But as a general premise, the African continent has led the rest of the world in terms of embracing these little mobile devices for the most mission. Critical from a personal perspective things, right? Yeah. So if you, if you're already trusting all of your finances and even interaction with your government from a financial perspective. Yeah. When you say technology platform technology is moving forward, what's more critical from that? Or how do you, how do you, how do you branch off from that? What are some of the other things that you can share with us that you're looking towards in the future that may, that that may trickle over here eventually? >>So I think what one of the things we started playing around with quite well is actually the convergence of machine learning, AI and rpa. You would find that a lot of research will tell you that this is the future of the automation and for us, we are actually living the future in that we have civil use cases that are actually extracting a lot of business value. Where we've realized that RPA in of itself, and this is obviously oversimplifying the technology is almost the unlimited hands on keyboards that you could ever have, right? And then machine learning and AI almost the becomes the unlimited brains. So when you then combine the tool, you almost have this strong technology that can revolutionize how we operate and service our customers. >>Well how do, how does that translate? Can you translate that into a user experience at this point? So I mean, we're talking about people who they, they have a motor license, they don't have a desktop computer at home. Yeah. This is their portal into the world. >>So you find that if you're speaking pure telco, and I'm obviously over simplifying there some nowhere an engineer, right? But I think at, at a very simplified level, there's a lot of legacy technology that is used in the telco space and you'll find that because of that, there's a lot of lack of integration. And you'll find that the reasons why a lot of customers call corners is because there's poor integration in a lot of instances. And it's, it's, it's, it's ad hoc. So it's not as if the system is failed completely. So what we've now done is to try and see how do we use machine learning to pick up on those anomalies on the network, right? And because each time something breaks, right, it's almost a fixed way to fix it and therefore the machine learning picking up there normally almost the hands over to the RPA bot to fix the problem within the network element. But that means is that from a customer experience perspective, instead of you actually realizing there's a problem, we've fixed it before you even know that there's a problem. And therefore, and as you can imagine, it means that you then call the course into less because now you don't have the reason to complain because we've proactively identified the problem and we proactively use RPA then to fix it. So we almost have the almost like a self-healing element in within the, the, the RPA AI space. >>You know, I think of, we don't talk about the data, we haven't talked about the data much this week. I think in many respects this industry is, is data industry. Our automation is all about what you can do with the data. You said unlimited hands, unlimited brains. Cuz to me you have unlimited data and a lot of times you just can't handle it. Yeah. So what's the data angle on all this? >>So firstly, I know a lot of people will say data is the new oil. No, >>Right? So I would never >>Say that. I always though, I think I always ask people if I give you a bucket of brain crude oil, right? What are you gonna do with it? Right? Right. And similar to data, right? So I want to almost equate data to that crude oil element, but if you don't know how to refine it, process it, get it to be reliable, it's very useless in of its natural sense. So I think one of the things we've realized is that leveraging of the analogy of the, the machine learning in the brain, if you are in the sales space, you forever trying to push new sales, right? And then chances are when a customer leaves you, you are almost in a reactor state. So, and I imagine a world where you could proactively identify a customer with the propensity to leave your company because a lot of customers don't just, they are situations where they'll be walking down the street competitor calls them, they leave, not because they were unhappy, but a lot of customers actually had several engagements with us that were not pleasant, whatever the definition is. >>So we then saw there was almost five types of attributes that resulted in customers leaving us. So what then that said was imagine if you are an account manager, right? And you got told UiPath P two I limited has experienced 1, 2, 3, 4. Right? Actually, please go engage with them because something is happening. It means that as an account manager, you are then equipped to have a meaningful engagement with the customer because you're saying, hi UiPath, I see you've had X amount of job calls and you've had x amount of complaints in our call center. What is happening is it could be, could be your network, maybe the tower where you are, do you, And then the conversation becomes so meaningful. And I think even during covid what we found is lot of customers started using less of our data, not because they were unhappy, but it became an affordability thing, right? >>Because this is a thousands and thousands of, of data elements and pieces around Yeah. About customer transactions. There's no way one human would be able to go through all of the data and make me meaningful decisions out of it. So we then found that some customers were complaining about affordability. So we then built another model that says if an account manager is talking to a customer and they're struggling from an affordability perspective, what's the next best offer you can make to your customer while you're engaging? And then if in, if, if now your UiPath takes up that offer, then you'd find that the bot does the post engagement provisioning on the system. Because now if you then said, I've only, I can only afford 10 lines, but only pay 10 gigs, but not 10 lines and 20 gigs, that is at least better than us losing the customer. >>Yeah. Right? And we offering them almost a downward migration type of situation. Then the bot does that on the system. So you would find that we almost playing in the space of a human, human centered, intelligent automation where machine learning becomes the brain, the person is amplified in how they operate at the customer. And then the RPA bot becomes the hands that executes on that. And as the account manager you focusing on engagement and convincing, which is really what people are great and selling as opposed to going through all of the pro cause VOCA is a lot of products. So as opposed to having a person going through the products and trying to find the best product for you, you know, so we, we are using machine learning to assist the >>Humans. I I mean in every, every interaction is consistent in that case. I know I sometimes have to call three or four times to find a professional that knows enough that can help me. Yes. Such a frustrating thing as a consumer. So you are, are you, you're attacking churn with automation. So we haven't even talked about how you guys are working together, your journey and all that stuff, but, but how are you guys working here? What are you, what are you doing? You know, in addition to what you just described with with ui. iPad? >>So I think my portfolio's quite wide. So I am, my team is in every single vertical in the organization from customer care to the consumer enterprise business units to finance technology, network compliance. And we do all of this in about six countries, right? So one of the things we've actually realized is that if we are looking at customer service, we wanted to understand why do customers call us? And I think I came from a point of ignorance because I'm not from telco, so I actually realized that if we're talking billing and finance revenue assurance, customers call us because we build them arly. But technically speaking it's our systems that there's something that resulted in the customer calling us. So why do we not know about our own systems? Why are we waiting for the customers to call us? And literally those are the questions I was asking cuz I felt like why are we, why are we waiting for the customers to call us? >>So we then then found a way to try and see within the billing systems where do the breakages happen, right? So that we fix them before the customer has to call us again. So then again from a billing perspective, it means that cuz it the billing element can come in two ways where we are giving you a service and not charging you for it. We then have revenue leakage or we, you are consuming something and we are overcharging you. Then you call us and say, Whatcom is stealing my data. Yeah, you're right out there. I promise you nobody wakes up in the morning and wants to take one gig of your data. So it almost becomes a day integrity initiative that results in good customer service but then result in eradication of course. As opposed to us waiting for customers to tell us what the problem is and trying to help them fast. Cuz that's generally always been what I've picked up the energy around customer service. How do we help you fast? I'm saying why must you call us when our systems had fail that? So we almost trying to see how do we use the technology internally to give customers a better experience and then also have the financial benefits that we are now starting to see happening in the, >>What's the scope of, of your like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense >>Of this? So right now I think we over on with all of the four, five countries that we are in, we over 400 bots. Wow. Okay. So we started in 2004 years ago, this is my fourth year in Voca. We, and we are not using just one product with UiPath. It became a platform because as we became across more kinds of problems, I think what I've appreciated about part is how we've actually created a partnership. Instead of them trying to sell me products for the sake of consuming products, it became a, this is my problem, right? And then somehow they would whip out the product that solves my problem type of thing. So it became a ecosystem of solutions that >>You must love hanging out with Artie. >>I absolutely do and love, you know, I've spent a career in telecommunications myself and you know, the best days were when you could deliver an outstanding customer experience. And as you can see from what Artie has achieved when you were more proactive and predictive, you can serve your customers so much more effectively and that just lift the morale of the team because we all, you know, have this purpose in doing our jobs. But this is automation and AI built into every part of that customer journey. So end to end, you know, the customer's much happier. You know there's a problem before the customer knows you can solve the problem in most cases before they even know. And that's just what we are all in business to do to make things better. >>Great story. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate coming back >>In the queue. Thank you very much. Thank >>You. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Don't forget, go to silicon angle.com, all the news, go to the cube.net. You'll see me all these videos are available on demand as well as the other events that we do. Dave VTE for Dave Nicholson. Keep it right there. Right back at forward five UI.

[Music] hello and welcome to this power panel where we go deep with three storage industry vets two from infinidat in an analyst view to find out what's happening in the high-end storage business and what's new with infinidat which has recently added significant depth to its executive ranks and we're going to review the progress on infinidat's infinibox ssa a low-latency all-solid state system designed for the most intensive enterprise workloads to do that we're joined by phil bullinger the chief executive officer of it finidet ken steinhardt is the field cto at infinidat and we bring in the analyst view with eric bergener who's the vice president of research infrastructure systems platforms and technologies group at idc all three cube alums gents welcome back to the cube good to see you thanks very much dave good to be here thanks david as always a pleasure phil let me start with you as i mentioned up top you've been top grading your team we covered the herzog news beefing up your marketing and also upping your game and emea and apj go to market recently give us the business update on the company since you became ceo earlier this year yeah dave i'd be happy to you know the uh i joined the company in january and it's been a it's been a fast 11 months uh exciting exciting times at infinidad as you know really beginning last fall the company has gone through quite a renaissance a change in the executive leadership team uh i was really excited to join the company we brought on you know a new cfo new chief human resources officer new chief legal officer operations head of operations and most recently as has been you know widely reported we brought in eric to head up our marketing organization as a cmo and then last week richard bradbury in in london to head up international sales so very excited about the team we brought together it's uh it's resulted in or it's been the culmination of a lot of work this year to accelerate the growth of infinidat and that's exactly what we've done it's the company has posted quarter after quarter of significant revenue growth we've been accelerating our rate and pace of adding large new fortune 500 global 2000 accounts and the results show it definitely the one of the most exciting things i think this year has been infinidat has pretty rapidly evolved from a single product line uh company around the infinibox architecture which is what made us unique at the start and still makes us very unique as a company and we've really expanded out from there on that same common software-defined architecture to the ssa the solid state array which we're going to talk about in some in some depth today and then our backup appliance our data protection appliance as well all running the same software and what we see now in the field uh many customers are expanding quickly beyond you know the traditional infinibox business uh to the other parts of our portfolio and our sales teams in turn are expanding their selling motion from kind of an infinibox approach to a portfolio approach and it's it's really helping accelerate the growth of the company yeah that's great to hear you really got a deep bench and of course you you know a lot of people in the industry so you're tapping a lot of your your colleagues okay let's get into the market i want to bring in uh the analyst perspective eric can you give us some context when we talk about things like ultra low latency storage what's the market look like to you help us understand the profile of the customer the workloads the market segment if you would well you bet so i'll start off with a macro trend which is clearly there's more real-time data being captured every year in fact by 2024 24 of all of the data captured and stored will be real-time and that puts very different performance requirements on the storage infrastructure than what we've seen in years past a lot of this is driven by digital transformation we've seen new workload types come in big data analytics real-time big data analytics and obviously we've got legacy workloads that need to be handled as well one other trend i'll mention that is really pointing up this need for low latency consistent low latency is workload consolidation we're seeing a lot of enterprises look to move to fewer storage platforms consolidate more storage workloads onto fewer systems and to do that they really need low latency consistent low latency platforms to be able to achieve that and continue to meet their service level agreements great thank you for that all right ken let's bring you into the conversation steiny what are the business impacts of of latency i want you to help us understand when and why is high latency a problem what are the positive impacts of having a consistent low latency uh opportunity or option and what kind of workloads and customers need that right the world has really changed i mean when when dinosaurs like me started in this industry the only people that really knew about performance were the people in the data center and then as things moved into online computing over the years then people within your own organization would care about performance if things weren't going well and it was really the erp revolution the 1990s that sort of opened uh people's eyes to the need for performance particularly for storage performance where now it's not just your internal users but your suppliers are now seeing what your systems look like fast forward to today in a web-based internet world everyone can see with customer facing applications whether you're delivering what they want or not and to answer your question it really comes down to competitive differentiation for the users that can deliver a better user customer experience if you and i'm sure everybody can relate if you go online and try to place an order especially with the holiday season coming up if there's one particular site that is able to give you instantaneous response you're more likely to do business there than somebody where you're going to be waiting and it literally is that simple it used to be that we cared about bandwidth and we used to care about ios per second and the third attribute latency really has become the only one that really matters going forward we found that most customers tell us that these days almost anyone can meet their requirements for bandwidth and ios per second with very few outlying cases where that's not true but the ever unachievable zero latency instantaneous response that's always going to be able to give people competitive differentiation in everything that they do and whoever can provide that is going to be in a very good position to help them serve their customers better yeah eric that stat you threw out of 24 real time uh and that that sort of underscores the need but phil i wonder how how this fits if you could talk about how that fits into your tam expansion strategy i think that's the job of of every ceo is to think about the expanding the tam it seems like you know a lot of people might say it's not necessarily the largest market but it's strategic and maybe opens up some downstream opportunities is that how you're thinking about it or based on what ken just said you expect this to to grow over time oh we definitely expect it to grow uh dave you know the the history of infinidat has been around our infinibox product targeting the primary storage market at the at the higher end of that market you know it's we've enjoyed operating in a eight nine 10 billion dollar tan through the years and that it continues to grow and we continue to outpace market growth within that tam which is exciting what this uh what the ssa really does is it opens up a tier of workload performance that we see more and more emerging in the primary data center the infinibox classic infinibox architecture we have very very fast as we say it typically outperforms most of our all-flash uh array competitors but clearly there there are a tier of workloads that are growing in the data center that require very very tight tail latencies and and that segment is certainly growing it's where some of the most demanding workloads are on the infinibox ssa was really built to expand our participation in those segments of the market and as i mentioned up front at the same time also taking that that software architecture and moving it into the the data protection space as well which is a whole nother market space that we're opening up for the company so we really see our tam this year with more of the this portfolio approach expanding quite a bit eric how how do you see it well those real-time applications that you talked about that require that consistent ultra-low latency grow kind of in in parallel with that that time curve you know will they become a bigger part of that the the overall storage team and and the workload mix how does idc see it yeah so so they actually are going to be growing over time and a lot of that's driven by the fact of the expectations that um steinhart mentioned a little bit earlier just on the part of customers right what they expect when they interact with your i.t infrastructure so we see that absolutely growing going forward i will make a quick comment about you know when all flash arrays first hit back in 2012 um in the 10 years since they started shipping they now generate over 80 of the primary revenues out there in in the primary storage arena so clearly they've taken over an interesting aspect of what's going on here is that a lot of companies now write rfps specifically requiring an all-flash array and what's going to be interesting for infinidat is despite the fact that they could deliver better performance than many of those systems in the past they couldn't really go after the business where that rfp was written for an afa spec well now they'll certainly have the opportunity to do that in my estimation that's going to give them access to about an additional 5 billion in tam by 2025 so this is big for them as a company yeah that's a 50 increase in tamp so okay well eric you just set up my my follow-up question to you ken was going to be the tougher questions uh which we've you and i have had some healthy debates about this but i know you'll have answers so so for years you've argued that your cached architecture and magic sauce algorithms if i caught that could outperform all flash arrays we're using spinning disks so eric talked about the sort of check off item but are there other reasons for the change of heart why and why does the world need another afa doesn't this cut against your petabyte scale messaging i wonder if you could sort of add some color to that sure a great question and the good news is infinibox still does typically outperform all flash arrays but usually that's for average of latency performance and we're tending to get because we're a a caching architecture not a tiered architecture and we're caching to dram which is an order of magnitude faster than flash or even storage class memory technologies it's our software magic and that software defined storage approach that we've had that now effectively is extended to solid state arrays and some customers told us that you know we love your performance it's incredible but if you could let us effectively be confident that we're seeing you know some millisecond sub half millisecond performance consistently for every single io you're going to give us competitive differentiation and this is one of the reasons why we chose to call the product a solid state array as opposed to merely an all-flash array the more common ubiquitous term and it's because we're not dependent on a specific technology we're using dram we can use virtually any technology on the back end and in this case we've chosen to use flash but it's the software that is able to provide that caching to the front end dram that makes things different so that's one aspect is it's the software that really makes the difference it's been the software all along and still on this architecture still mentions going to across the multiple products it's still the software it's also that in that class of ultra high performance architecturally because it is based on the infinibox architecture we're able to deliver 100 availability which is another aspect that the market has evolved to come to expect and it's not rocket science or magic how we do it the godfather of computer science john von neumann all the way back in the 1950s theorized all the way back then that the right way to do ultra high availability and integrity in i.t systems of any type is in threes triple redundancy and in our case amazingly we're the only architecture that uses triple redundant active active components for every single mission critical component on the system and that gives a level of confidence to people from an availability perspective to go with that performance that is just unmatched in the market and then bring all of that together with a set it and forget it mentality for ease of use and simplicity of management and as phil mentioned being able to have a single architecture that can address now not only the ultra high performance but across the entire swath of as eric mentioned consolidation which is a key aspect as well driving this in addition to those real-time applications that he mentioned and even being able to take it down into our our infiniguard data protection device but all with the same common base of software common interface common user experience and unmatched availability and we've got something that we really think people are going to like and they've certainly been proving that of late well i was going to ask you you know what makes the the infinibox ssa different but i think you just laid it out but your contention is this is totally unique in the marketplace is that right ken yes indeed this is a unique architecture and i i literally as a computer scientist myself truly am genuinely surprised that no other vendor in the market has taken the wisdom of the godfather of computer science john von neumann and put it into practice except in the storage world for this particular architecture which transcends our entire realm all the way from the performance down to the data protection phil i mean you have a very wide observation space in this industry and a good strong historical perspective do you think the expectations for performance and this notion of ultra low latencies you know becoming more demanding is is there a parallel so first of all why is that we've talked about a little bit but is there a parallel to the way availability remember you could have escalated over the years um because it was such a problem and now it's really become table stakes and that last mile is so hard but what are your thoughts on that i i think i think absolutely dave you know the the hallmark of infinidat is this white glove concierge level customer experience that we deliver and it's it's affirmed uh year after year in unsolicited enterprise customer feedback uh above every other competitor in our space uh infinidat sets itself apart for this um and i think that's a big part of what continues to drive and fuel the growth and success of the company i just want to touch on a couple things that ken and and eric mentioned the ssa absolutely opens up our tan because we get to we get a lot more at bats now but i think a lot of the industry looks at infinidat as well those guys are are hard drive zealots right they've their architecture is all based on rotating disk that's what they believe in and it's a hybrid versus afa world out there and they were increasingly not on the right bus and that's just absolutely not true in that our our neural cache and what ken talked about what made us unique at the start i think actually only increasingly differentiates us going forward in terms of the the set it and forget it the intelligence of our architecture the ability of that dram based cache to adapt so dynamically without any knobs and and configuration changes to massive changes in workload scale and user scale and it does it with no drama in fact most of our customers the most common feedback we get is that your platform just kind of disappears into our data infrastructure we don't think about it we don't worry about it when we install an infiniti an infinidat rack our intentions are never to come back you know we're not there showing up with trays of disk under our arms trying to upgrade a mission-critical platform that's just not our model what the ssa does is it gives our customers choice it's not about infinidat saying that used to be the shiny object now this is our new shiny object please everybody now go buy that what where where we position our ssa is it's a it's a tco latency sla choice that they can make between exactly identical customer experiences so instead of an old hybrid and a new afa we've got that same software architecture set it and forget it the neural cache and customers can choose what back-end persistent store they want based on the tco and the sla that they want to deliver to a given set of applications so probably the most significant thing that i've seen happen in the last six months at infinidat is a lot of our largest customers the the fortune 15s the fortune 50s the fortune 100s who have been long-standing infinidat customers are now on almost every sort of re-tranche of or trancha purchase orders into us we're now seeing a mix we're seeing a mix of some ssa and some classic infinibox because they're mixing and matching in a given data center down a given row these applications need this sla these applications need this la and we're able to give them that choice and frankly we don't we don't intentionally try to steer them one direction or the other they they're smart they do the math they can pick and choose what experience they want knowing that irrespective of what front door they go through into the infinidat portfolio they're going to get that same experience so i'm hearing it's not just a an rfp check off item it's more than that the market is heading in that direction eric's data on on real time and we're certainly seeing that the data-driven applications the injection of ai and you know systems making decisions in in real time um and i i'm also hearing phil that you're building on your core principles i'm hearing the white glove service the media agnostic the set it and forget it sort of principles that you guys were founded on is you're carrying that through to this this opportunity we absolutely are in the reason and you ask a good question before and i want to more completely answer it i think availability and customer experience are incredibly important today more so than ever because data center economics and data center efficiency um are more important than ever before is as customers evaluate what workloads belong in the public cloud what workloads do i want on-prem irrespective of those decisions they're trying to optimize their their operational expenses their capex expenses and so one thing that infinidat has always excelled at is consolidation bringing multiple users multiple workloads into the same common platform in the data center it says floor space and watts and and uh you know storage administration resources but to do consolidation well you've got to be incredibly reliable and incredibly predictable without a lot of fuss and drama associated with it and so i think the thing that has made infinidat really strong through the years with being a very good consolidation platform is more important now than ever before in in the enterprise storage space because it is really about data center efficiency and uh administration efficiency associated with that yeah thank you for that phil now actually ken let me come back to you i want to ask you a question about consolidation and you and i and and doc our business friend rest his soul have had some some great conversations about this over time but but as you consolidate people are sometimes worried about the blast radius could you address that concern sure well um phil alluded to software and uh it is the cornerstone of everything we bring to the table and it's not just that deep learning that transcends all the intelligence phil talked about in terms of that full wide range of product it's also protection of data across multiple sites and in multiple ways so we were very fortunate in that when we started to create this product since it is a modern product we got to start with a clean sheet of paper and basically look at everything that had been done before and even with some of the very people who created some of the original software for replication in the market were able to then say if i could do it again how would i do it today and how would it be better so we started with local replication and snapshot technology which is the foundation for being able to do full active active replication across two sites today where you can have true zero rpo no data loss even in the face of any kind of failure of a site of a server of a network of a storage device of a connection as well as zero rto immediate consistent operation with no human intervention and we can extend from that out to remote sites literally anywhere in the world in multiples where you can have additional copies of information and at any of them you can be using not only for protection against natural disasters and floods and things like that but from a cyber security perspective immutable snapshots being able to provide data that you know the bad actors can't compromise in multiple locations so we can protect today against virtually any kind of failure scenario across the swath of infinibox or infinibox ssa you can even connect infinite boxes and infinibox ssas because they are the same architecture exactly as phil said what we're seeing is people deploying mostly infinibox because it addresses the wide swath from a consolidation perspective and usually just infinibox ssa for those ultra high performance environments but the beauty of it is it looks feels runs and operates as that one single simple environment that's set it and forget it and just let it run okay so you can consolidate with with confidence uh let's end with the the independent analyst perspective eric you know how do you see this offering what do you think it means for the market is this a new category is it an extension to an existing space how do you look at that uh so i don't see it as a new category i mean it clearly falls into the current definition of afas i think it's more important from the point of view of the customer base that likes this architecture likes the availability the functionality the flexibility that it brings to the table and they can leverage it with tier zero workloads which was something that in the past they didn't have that latency consistency to do that you know i'll just make one one final comment on the software side as well so the reason software is eating the world mark andreessen is basically because of the flexibility the ease of use and the economics and if you take a look at how this particular vendor infinidat designed their product with a software-based definition they were able to swap out underneath and create a different set of characteristics with this new platform because of the flexibility in the software design and that's critical one if you think about how software is dominating so today for 2021 68 of the revenue in the external storage market that's the size of the software defined storage market that's going to be going to almost 80 by 2024 so clearly things are moving in the direction of systems that are defined in a software-defined manner yeah and data is eating software which is why you're going to need ultra low latency um okay we got to wrap it eric you've just published a piece uh this summer called enterprise storage vendor infinidat expands total available market opportunities with all flash system introduction i'm sure they can get that on your website here's a little graphic that shows you how to get that but so guys thanks so much for coming on the cube congratulations on the progress and uh we'll be watching thanks steve thanks very much dave thank you as always a pleasure all right thank you for watching this cube conversation everybody this is dave vellante and we'll see you next time [Music] you

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante five publicly traded u.s based companies have market valuations over or just near a trillion dollars as of october 29th apple and microsoft topped the list each with 2.5 trillion followed by alphabet at 2 trillion amazon at 1.7 and facebook now meta at just under a trillion off from a tie of 1.1 trillion prior to its recent troubles these companies have reached extraordinary levels of success and power what if anything could disrupt their market dominance in his book seeing digital author david micheller made three key points that i want to call out first in the technology industry disruptions of the norm the waves of mainframes minis pcs mobile and the internet all saw new companies emerge and power structures that dwarfed previous eras of innovation is that dynamic changing second every industry has a disruption scenario not just the technology industry and third silicon valley broadly defined to include seattle or at least amazon has a dual disruption agenda the first being horizontally disrupting the technology industry and the second as digital disruptors in virtually any industry how relevant is that to the future power structure of the digital industry generally in amazon specifically hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we welcome in author speaker researcher and thought leader david michela to assess what could possibly disrupt today's trillionaire companies and we're going to start with amazon dave good to see you welcome thanks dave good to see you yeah so dave approached us about a month or so ago he was working on these disruption scenarios and we agreed to make this a community research project where we're going to tap the knowledge of the cube crowd and its adjacent communities and to that end we're initiating a community survey that asks folks to rate the likelihood of seven plus one disruption scenarios so we have a slide here that sort of shows what that survey structure is going to look like and so as i say there's seven plus another one which is kind of an open open-ended and we're going to start with amazon as the disruptee so dave you've been writing about the technology industry for decades and digital disruption and china and automation and hundreds of other topics what prompted you to start this project yeah it's a great question you know as you said that the whole history of our business has been you know every decade or so you have a new set of leaders ibm digital microsoft the internet companies etc but when i started looking at it you know that seems in some ways to have actually stopped that you know microsoft is now 40 years old amazon is what 1995 is getting towards 30. you know google's been a dominant company for 20 years and you know apple of course and facebook more recently so so whatever reason this sort of longevity of these firms has been longer than we've seen in the past so i sort of say well is there anything that's going to change that so part of it and we'll get into it is what could happen to disrupt those big five but then the sort of second question was well maybe the uh disruptive energies of the of the tech business have moved elsewhere they've moved to crypto currencies or they've moved to tesla and so you start to sort of broaden your sense of disruption and when you talked about that dual disruption agenda that whole ability of tech to disrupt other sectors banking health care insurance automobiles whatever is sort of a second wave of disruption so uh we started coming out all right what sort of scenarios are we really looking at over say for the 2020s what might shake up the big five as we know them and how might disruption spread to sort of more industry specific parts of the world and that was really the the genesis of the project and really just my own thinking of all right what scenarios can i come up with and then reaching out to companies like yourselves to figure out okay how can we get more input on that how can we crowdsource it how can we get a sense of of what the community thinks of all this it's great love it and as you know we're very open to do that so we're going to crowdsource this we're going to open it up to virtually anyone and use multiple channels so let's go through some of the scenarios all of them actually and explain the reasoning behind their inclusion the first one the govern government mandated separation divestment and or limits on amazon's cloud computing retail media credit card and or in-house product groups it probably no coincidence that this was the first one you chose today but why start here well i think the government interest in doing something to get back at big tech is is pretty clear and probably one of the few things that has bipartisan support in washington these days and also government interventions have always been an enormous part of the tech industry's history the the antitrust efforts against ibm and att in particular and more recently microsoft a smaller one but it's it's always been there there's a vibe to do it now and when you look at all the big ones but particularly amazon you can see that potential divestments and breakups are sitting there right in front of you the separation of retail and aws uh perhaps breaking out credit card or music or media businesses these sorts of things are all on the surface at least relatively clean things to do and i think when you look at the formation of an alphabet or a meta those companies themselves are starting to see their own businesses as consisting of multiple firms yeah so i just want to kind of drill into the cloud piece just to emphasize the importance of aws in the context of amazon amazon announced earnings thursday night after the close aws is now a 64 billion revenue run rate company and they're growing at 39 percent year over year that's actually an accelerated growth rate from q3 2020 when the company was grew at 29 it's astounding think about a company this size moreover aws accounted for more than actually but 100 of amazon's operating profit last quarter so the aws cloud is obviously crucial as a funding vehicle and ecosystem accelerant for amazon and i just wanted to share some data points dave before we move on to these other scenarios yeah and just on that uh i think that is the fundamental point it's very easy to see aws on its own as a powerhouse but i think you know if you figure how much freedom aws money has given the retail business or the credit card business or the music businesses to launch themselves and to essentially make no money for very long periods of time uh you see that you know if you're a walmart trying to compete with amazon as a retailer well that money from aws is is an awful big problem and and so when they look at separation that's the sort of stuff people talk about right so i just want to i want to put that into context just in in terms of the the cloud business so this chart is one from our etr surveys that isolates the four hyperscale cloud providers and adds in oracle and ibm we both own public clouds but don't you know don't have nearly the the scale we don't have apple or facebook they have clouds as well and we can talk about that in a moment but the chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis it's it's really mentioned share not dollar market share but it's an indicator and the red line is an indicator of elevated spending momentum and you can see azure and aws they're up and to the right i mean amazon is 64 billion you know uh azure will claim larger because they're including their application business but just their their their i asked business obviously smaller than amazon's but you can see in the survey the respondents define cloud they include that sas business so they they both impressively have this high spending momentum on the vertical axis well above that 40 line despite their size google obviously well behind those to the left and then alibaba which has a small sample in the etr survey it's you know it's not as prominent in china but even though it's ias cloud businesses larger than google's by probably a couple billion dollars now the point is these four hyperscalers and there really are only four in my view anyway they have a presence that allows them to build new businesses and disrupt ecosystems and enact that dual disruption agenda should they choose to do so at least in the case of amazon oracle and ibm are not in a position to do that it's not part of their agenda they don't they don't have that scale but dave can you talk about your dual disruption scenario very clearly amazon fits in there and i would think alibaba as well but what about microsoft facebook apple google yeah i mean you know people often say what's the biggest difference between microsoft and amazon from from a cloud point of view and the answer is pretty clear that microsoft goes out of its way to assure its customers that it really doesn't have any interest in competing directly about them so you don't see microsoft going into the retail business or the banking business or the healthcare business all that seriously in contrast that's really what amazon is all about is taking its capabilities to essentially any industry it likes and therefore as one is as great as the service aws provides it's often being provided to people who amazon is actually competing with at least some degree or another and you know that's a huge part of microsoft's sales pitch and it's certainly a potential vulnerability down the road uh it's very hard in the end to be an essential supplier and a direct competitor at the same time but so far they've managed to do that yeah so we put together just another sort of aside here this little thought experiment to see what aws would look like as a separate entity and so it's a chart that looks at a number of tech companies and lays out their revenue run rate the growth rates gross margin probably should have done operating margin might have been more relevant but market cap and revenue multiple again given the size of aws at 64 billion run rate and accelerating growth trajectory it's just it's remarkable and so we we figured this out based on industry norms and today's valuations it's not inconceivable that aws could be you know in the trillionaire club or close to it so based on that discussion we had earlier amazon amazon's dual disruption agenda being funded by empowered by aws as we just discussed dave yeah and just keep in mind nothing that you or i are saying are predictions or saying that anything is going to happen they are possible scenarios of what might happen that seem to make some plausible sense so that when amazon is making the sort of profits that it's making aws naturally that's going to attract other companies because there's margin to to be had there and similarly you know look at uh you look at microsoft for all those years the profits it made in windows or in office software allowed it to do all kinds of other things and essentially that's what amazon is doing today but if a google or a microsoft could cut into those profits through some sort of aggressive pricing and perhaps we'll talk about that you know that would have a lot of impact on amazon as a whole all right so let's quickly go through the other description scenarios and maybe make some comments the next one sort of major companies increasingly choose to do their own cloud computing and or sell their products directly for competitive cost security or other reasons so dave i saw this and look at a company like walmart and others no way they're going to run their business on aws walmart as we know is building out its own cloud and maybe it doesn't have the size of a hyperscaler but it's very large it's got the technical chops it can most likely do it a lot cheaper than renting cloud space what was your thinking in this scenario yeah the broader thing here is essentially one of that computing paradigms have been proven to go in cycles you know a long time ago people shared computers and called timeshare and then people ran their own and now they're sharing again through the cloud and who knows it's possible that the cycle could shift again through some innovation and you know a lot of companies today look at the bills they're getting for cloud or for various sas services and some of them are pretty high and a lot of them will look at and say hey maybe we actually can do some of this stuff cheaper so the scenario is that essentially the the cycle shifts once again uh and it makes more sense to do stuff in-house again that's not a prediction but uh certainly something that's happened before and couldn't plausibly happen again yeah there's a lot of discussion about that in the industry of martine casado and sarah wong wrote that piece about the you know the trillion dollar basically sucking sound basically saying the the scenario was the the the premise rather was the that that sas companies their cost of goods sold are increasingly going to be you know chewed up by cloud costs and then of course mark andreessen says every company is going to be a sas company so as the sassification of business occurs that's something to consider okay next scenario is environmental policies raise costs change packaging delivery recycling rules and or consumer preferences can you comment dave on your thinking on this scenario yeah first i'll just back up a bit we're used to thinking of technology is the great disrupter and clearly that's still important but there are now other forces out there china which will talk about uh the environment uh various cultural forces and and here with the environment you see all kinds of things that could change that you know if you look at amazon and its model of very high levels of packaging lots of delivery vehicles and all the things it is doing are those necessarily the best environmentally and will there potentially be various taxes carbon metrics or things that might work against that model and tend to favor more traditional stores where people go to pick them up that seems to be a plausible scenario and i think everybody here knows that desire to do something in the in the climate environmental spaces is pretty strong and you know if you look at you know just throws aside the recycling industry itself has arguably been quite a failure in that much of what is so-called recycled is basically put in tankers and shipped to the third world which no longer wants it uh and so the backlog of packaging and concerns about packaging and uh what to do with all that you know those those issues are rising and and will be real and i i don't know whether amazon has a good answer to that they're you know they obviously are very aware of it they're working very hard to do everything they can in that space but their fundamental model of essentially packaging every good in its own little box or envelope or whatever is arguably not the greenest way of doing business got it thank you so okay so the next one is price in slash trade wars with the u.s and or china cloud and e-commerce giant so protectionism favors national players so we talking here about for example google bombing prices or alibaba or trade policy making it difficult for amazon to do business in certain parts of the world can you add some color on this one yeah all those things and i would just start with with china itself you know you could argue that covet has been the biggest disruptor of the last couple years but if you look out the next five or eight you had to look at all these things you'd probably say china the size of the chinese market the power of its vendors players like alibaba clearly can rival amazon in many different ways uh you know it's no secret that it'd be hard for amazon to they're not going to be a big success in china uh but you can see it in harder ways that you imagine across asia or other markets where alibaba is strong and you're in today's sort of environment where there's scarce goods and maybe certain products well maybe they go chinese may probably go to alibaba first and you want to buy that product well amazon doesn't have it but alibaba has it you know those sort of scenarios if you get into a sharp trade war with china or even if the current tensions continue it's quite easy to see how that could uh play some havoc with amazon's supply chains in many ways the whole amazon retail model is based on a steady flow of goods manufactured in china and that clearly is not as stable as it was right got it the next one actually caught my attention and this is a big part of the reason why we want to survey the community to see how plausible folks think this is in its its technology related scenario so that would potentially disrupt aws and by fault by default hit amazon so that's major computing innovations such as quantum edge machine machine would obsolete today's cloud architectures okay so so here what you're thinking just as aws changed the game in i.t some future innovations or new business models that we haven't conceived yet could disrupt the prevailing cloud computing model right yeah absolutely i mean you know again we'll go back to where we started that new technologies have always been the main disruptors and here we're looking at some potentially very powerful uh new technologies you know your guess is good in mind about what's gonna happen with quantum is clearly a very different way of computing quite possibly led by other vendors possibly even led by china which would be a huge issue you look at the cloud well cloud's not very good at sort of edge stuff or machine to a machine stuff or sort of near field things out cars in the highway talking to each other uh you know again amazon's totally aware of these things and they are working on it but they have a huge investment in other ways of doing things and historically that inertia that need to protect existing bases of activity and practices has made it difficult for a lot of companies to adjust to new things and so that could happen again uh and there's certainly a puzzle but yeah in all these cases so far amazon has been aware of it is trying to do it but you can still see the scenario playing out and in a truly disruptive technology it's not always possible for the incumbent to effectively cope with it okay the next scenario speaks to i think some of the work that you've done in automation and related areas software replaces centralized warehouses as delivery services are directly connected to suppliers and factories so dave this is like cut out the middle man right software and automation changes the nature of the route absolutely i mean you know in a world of ubiquitous delivery services and product standardization metrics and products being built and shipped from all over the world the concept of running them all through a centralized warehouse is at least at a minimum uh seems like something that might be uh obsoleted and replaced and you know imagine if google built a significant taxonomy of of core products that could be traced directly to where they are either manufactured supplied or brought into the country from whatever company that tries to sell them and the delivery service connected directly to that uh and so that model has always been out there i think at various times people have looked at it it hasn't happened so far and i think amazon itself is is is looking at this particularly as it gets more into food that the idea of shipping all fresh food any sort of centralized warehouse is a pretty bad idea uh and so you know that model of software essentially replacing giant automated warehouses uh is out there and and seems to me uh likely and i just say that you know alibaba for the record doesn't really use that warehouse model it uses a network of suppliers and does it that way and and there do seem to be uh some efficiencies that would likely come with that the next one is was really interesting from a historian's perspective and it's the penultimate uh scenario and that's the proverbial self-inflicted wound and you and i certainly remember ibm's you know fateful decision to outsource the microprocessor and operating system to intel and and and and and microsoft sorry ibm's decision to do that lotus you might recall it refused to allow 123 to run on windows back in the day novell buying word perfect jim barksdale a lot of young people the audience won't of course remember this but jim barksdale poo-pooing microsoft's decision to bundle internet explorer into the operating system all those were kind of self-inflicted or blind spots so this one is complacency arrogance blindness abuse of power loss of trust so much more than the examples i gave consumer and or employee backlash you're seeing some of that at facebook now and i guess this is taking their eye off the customer ball losing the day zero in amazon's case forgetting that customer obsession formula they're working backwards culture and i think this is a big reason why andy jassy was put in charge so this wouldn't happen but we've seen time and time again as the examples i just gave blind spots have absolutely killed companies haven't they dave absolutely he listed many of the most famous but perhaps my favorite of all was kennels and the founder of digital equipment corporation one of the great tech visionaries of his time who stated over and over again why would anybody want a home computer or eunuch's snake oil was his other beautiful all of those things and and so there's the blindness uh there's the area ibm who just came to the view that they and att both came to the view that they were invincible and nothing could ever crack their control of their customer base so we've seen all that i think uh more recently i think some of these things can actually go from the bottom up and you know what's happening to facebook today well they're being hurt by former employees speaking out uh you know this never really happened too much to in the ibm and t days but people calling into question amazon's work labor practices and such things is certainly a possible scenario and the whole sort of you know in the end you know people talk about a cultural backlash against technology i'm not sure i believe it'll happen but it certainly is possible that people will start to rebel against these firms you see it more likely with facebook is fairly well along there uh amazon's still popular but you know in the end and as you i think you said the the core thing that companies routinely fail on is they lose their customer focus and they get caught up in other things their financial numbers their their power inside their position of their company but they they lose track of staying close to the customer has need and terrific job of staying close to the customers over the years uh so if anyone you know was maybe less vulnerable that they they would be well along that that line but it can happen to anyone and new management is often you know one of the real tests and there's many examples of that through history when a new executive comes in will they have that same focus that same thing particularly you know as the first generation's employees get wealthy and retired in a new set of people come in you know you look at microsoft the new people who came in well they're not going to be multi-millionaires they may have missed the great runs they're there to work and and the culture of companies changes when you get to that state the m is not that there yet but you can envision that comings soon enough so you know cultural issues have always been a factor and it's hard to imagine there won't be some sort of factor going forward well and you know you talk about that the the succession of founders and ceos i mean that's what to me makes microsoft so astounding because during the bomber years it was unclear that they were ever going to become relevant again and so nadella has done a masterful job but of course they had the margins from the pc software business that allowed them to buy that time but look at intel and the troubles it's going through uh and so many other examples of companies that just sort of said all right well we're going to pack it in and either sell the company or which is again what i think makes think companies like oracle and dell which you know founder-led ceos not ceo in the case of oracle but still running the business uh so quite uh significant yeah yeah and you know we've talked a lot about things that might hurt answers but you gotta recognize how in many ways how amazing they are and most tech companies a lot of them anyways have essentially been one trick ponies i mean google still makes overwhelming amount of its money selling ads and the things it's tried to do in cars and healthcare and various things you know they've often struggled you know apple still makes the core of its money around it's it's cell phone platform amazon's one of the few that continually generates entirely new huge businesses and and you have to give them an enormous amount of credit for that you know microsoft uh was a they failed repeatedly over and over again with internet stuff and phone stuff and all these things and it really wasn't until you know satya came in and really focused on their customers and their need for enterprise services that he that he really got the company on the right track so you know amazon has always been good listeners customers and if they continue to do so it bodes well but history says other stuff comes along okay and the last scenario is open-ended dave included uh you know what did we miss is there another scenario that we haven't put forth that you could feel it could be disruptive to amazon right i mean you've got to have the at least what'd we miss yeah i mean you know these are things that me and you and i just sort of made up the top of our head these are things we see that that might happen but you know in your huge audience of people in this community every day i'm sure there are other people out there who have thoughts of what might shake things up or even doing things that might shake things up already uh and you know one of the things you do for you guys is get this sort of material out there and and see what ideas surface so hopefully people will uh participate in this and we'll see what comes out of it all right so what happens from here is we're going to publish the the link to the survey in this video description and in our posts we ask you to take the survey please tell your friends we're going to publish the results as always we do in an open and free david michelle thanks so much for putting your brain power on this and collaborating with us i'm really excited to see the results and and and run through the other giants with you as well once we see what this survey says yeah thanks david great and yeah if we can make this one work be fun to do it for for google and microsoft and facebook and apple and see where it all goes thanks a lot all right okay that's it for today remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcast i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com etr.plus is where all the cool survey data lives they just dropped their october survey with some great findings so do check that out you can reach me on twitter at d velante he's at d michelle or comment on my linkedin post or email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com this is dave vellante for dave michelle thanks for watching thecube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Extension Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for adobe summat. Twenty nineteen. I'm John for With my Coast. Jeffrey for Yu here for two days. The wall, the wall coverage We're on day to our next guest. Marc Andre Sinclair, director of digital marketing Platform Content Strategy Export Development Canada E D. C. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So love your channel. Digital marketing platform content strategy. That's kind of in the center of all the action. So, you know, you've been doing some transformation. Tell us your story. What do you guys do? What was what was that? What's the story? >> So I joined E. C. Exported moment Cata two years ago, really helping them out on the overall digital transformation. So I've been fortunate, joined the organization as the moment that they're our position. We wanted to change like we weren't a mandate to gain back some relevance in the market. CDC exists how occasion businesses go beyond the borders, go international. So they really wanted to be relevant to the market because we're not competing with the markets were really just like a compliment in a market. So we've been on that journey distrust, transformation For the last two years, we've are now competing the first phase of a transformation and just about two years, which normally takes four years in the industry. And we're now add midway to our overall digital transformation. We want a critical the number of customers that we have in four years, but it's a very aggressive target what we call normal, like a stretch goal that are serious put. So that's what we've been up to in the last two years. >> And what >> was the catalyst? Why the change? Because, well, what was going on kind of behind the scenes t make such an aggressive, so aggressive move. If you look at >> the interest you overall, there's a major shift in what is export. So exporting means merchandising guys ing good for most of the people. When when you look at the shipping industry to software and services, these folks are not perceiving themselves as being on exporter like really, you build a software, you sell it. You don't think about your software getting beyond the borders. So the industry, the overall market size, are the number of companies that we could help in. The country has grown, but our number of customer remained flat. So we wanted to catch back at that market reach. And there was a theater in Perth. Is that forced us to change? But basically it started. What? Our CEO Putting forward a strong paper cultured like really forced people to think differently and change. >> What's the progress Like how you happy with the progress so far? Absolutely. What are what are some of the things you've knocked down already? What was the pick us through the steps? They could screw up the plan. What was the What is the plan? What is completed were how much how much is left. >> OK, so it started for us as a strong investments and over all the marketing tech stocks which started obviously where I will be summit. So we started in the vestments with the Adobe expense manager and it was about us changing the technology that we had in terms of delivering a customer experience. So your approach we took wass people processing technology. But at the middle, we really put the customer experience at the forefront of everything at the art of every decisions. Makings. So for us were Margaret, we're finishing the migration as we speak right now. That's the first phase. And now with the partner that we have X censure. We're looking in terms ofthe archaic. How can we build capabilities back in the business? Because we've outsourced are full function to our partner. And now it's about how do we get the right level of cost tower scalability for the future so we can deliver premium customer experience. So a lot of activities have happened. We went into natural transformation at the same time, the organization has embraced our job overall and now we're really thinking about was the future data customer experience. So these are the biggest shift that their condition is looking at As we stand right now, we've done the migration and we can now start to think about personalization experimentations. These are all the cool things that we have ahead of us. >> What was the heavy lifting hard part of getting this off the ground? What, some learning or any experiences where you, you know, failed miserably and rebooted or reset means you learned through it oration. We see these successful projects. What's the key learnings? Have you had any moments like that? >> Definitely So So, First of all, I would like to talk a bit about the fail approach because this is something that wasn't obviously part of the organization. And that is something fundamental to a change in organizations. So to quote my boss fail stance or first attempt and learning, So you got to get out and you got to try things and we gotta experiment. Otherwise, you're not really pushing the boundaries. Eso I'm proud of her failure and actually won an award about failure last year at our, um, organizations. So they have a corporate awards that recognise people that do fails but move on and fell fast, like that's a spirit. So for us as, say, at the beginning, the biggest part of a project was to get the what I call the M V P. Zero. So we have to change from a nun premise toe called architectures. And when you start to do these things at an organization that has never done cloud, you uncover a lot of stuff a lot of security protocols, firewalls kicking in. So our first BP zero just to set the infrastructure has been quite a challenge. I think we went three times out, and the third time was the right one. But this is the critical one where you start to build credibility. And even though for us we're working and agile every two weeks without ever cradle to grave, everything full blown experience, this one was really a longer one. And we were really made sure that the requisition understood that this is complicated When you do the foundation. This >> is company goes cousins to say its foundational. So I'm going to take your time. You've got to get that right. Can't have any cracks in the foundation because you're building on top of it. Exactly. So that three attempts you. You said you went out for forbid, or how did three attempts of building it was >> so the throughout That's R about us deploying the full Levi's serology in the clouds. So first time we went uncover a few things. Second time, not anything pop up weren't aware. And then the third time we went out. Third time's a charm to say we went >> out. It was good >> way. Nailed it on that >> time. It's the >> price I didn't invite you on stage. I don't know if you caught that in the Kino. Towards the end of his keynote, he said, We need to have an award for people that disproved their own hypothesis. Exactly so. But you said it's interesting. He said. The people part was hard in the process, and yet it was a top down initiative from the CEO. So was it not bought in a kind of the mid tier management level? The senior management? Why, if the COC and we need to do this, was it hard to move those different party organization? Well, >> I'd say the people part was more about having the right talent on the right mind sets. So one to CEO put forward the culture paper, the stretch goals. Really the organization started to organize themselves on. Are we going to make that thing happened now? Like we need to work differently. And this is not about just more cash, more at counts. We need to re engineer a bit the way we were working, so I wouldn't say that there was an issue with with the way or the people of today was just like you start through higher scrums, you start the heart coach to start our appeal. These are skills says that you've never had. Like at the beginning of the project, we had new marketing talent. We had new partner for the ritual that every we have a new partner for agile and we also have new technology. So you start with a lot of new stuff at the same time. So I'd say these are natural things that you have to do. Is it easy? No, not necessarily. But we had a lot of support from the sea level standpoint. >> It sounds like you guys have a very Dev ops oriented culture because talking about failing fast is a cultural cloud concept. I mean agile iterating scrums. This's a dev ops mindset, infrastructure. It's code. Did you guys have that built in Or you said you started three years ago. Was that was that the core cultural mindset? >> So I wouldn't say that we're a dev ups type of culture of mentality, I would say, actually, it's probably the part that we still need to invest hard because now we build a fully whole machine that scaring and pushing the machine you start uncover that once you go that full cycle, few things are popping up, so you know, and and the in the nineties are beginning of this of two thousands. Like when you were thinking about nal ticks, people were always like, Okay, let's let's do this on our techs use case. Our position at the end. Let's do your documentation at the end. It tends to be the same thing with Dev up. Sometimes like we have a strong architectural when in terms of regression, automation and all these things, we truly need to invest a bit more so we can have a because we're playing every single two weeks that we wanted or not. So that's a lot of pressure on all the people that do, que way you waited to make sure everything >> you want to get it right first, then kind of bolted on after as more of an operational models >> way had a very strong foundation, and now we're spinning everything. >> It's all I got to ask you about the export piece of it because, obviously, um, international global competitiveness is a big force. Right now, people have to be global and data privacy. You mentioned. We talk about genie pr before we came on camera you an opinion on this. Do you have anything? You? Could you please share your view on TV? I really Well, I thought it's valuable. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what I didn't mention when we chatted about that before is Wei thought a lot about you. We need to comply to GDP. Are because this is ah, European regulation. And we headed up that Yes, a CZ. Because we have prisons internationally and erupts. Not everyone that has that opinion that they need to comply. But what we've uncovered was one, one or two weeks before the D days on May twenty fits that We needed to be compliant. So what has happened is in two weeks, we stop everything. We worked twenty four hours for two weeks to restructure the platform to make sure that we were, like, compliant to do CPR. And then after that, we fought a lot. Next few months, we'LL look into it. Are we going to make that thing right? Because people are scared of gpr, but that you want it or not? This is just a beginning way. See it with the California Act Canada as a castle. I'm pretty sure they're going to be very aggressive, so you need to make sure that you really invest in. There are privacy management and all these things. At the end of the day, if it's well done, your customers will love it. The issue is people are being a bit sneaky without the use data. But if you're being transparent and you're being honest with the way you use the data and you're being fully disclosing what you're doing, it's not an issue you need to embrace it. Actually, I think that's a commis it embrace it because it's going to be part of our journey that we >> want to do the tough work up front for you. He was forced to because you are building something new. And then, well, the deadlines here, so is the struggles. Hard works. He had to grind it out. So you and then once you get over that, prepare for it, invested it, nurture the strategy for that. What's the advice to give someone sets there has to do the GPR and might not be into the time pressure, but it's starting out and saying Okay, I got to get my arms around this. What's the core issues well, getting started, not colour, but like what's playbook? >> So the playbook and say like if you think about G p r. This is basically for the European. You If they're not giving you the right tio leverage cookies and tracking and all these things, you should not be doing it. So it's simply thinking in your implementation of a piece of software that goes at the beginning that says, Do you want to have full functional thief, full personalization or not? And don't look at GDP R. But look at the customer experience. If you put the customer once again at the forefront and you really think about what does it make sense? You know if if you and I get on the Web sites and we see that thing that is fronting A, I know what you've done last summer like it's kind of creepy. You don't want to have these things. And so you just build that customer experience around their privacy management, and then everything will fall together. >> So build it into the product. >> Yeah, platform, yeah, and do it the right way and compliance will follow. Don't do it to be compliant. Don't >> exactly do it through a customer experience, >> right? Right. So how's this success band in terms of getting into some of these new markets for you in terms of software and services and some of the other export markets? So, so >> interesting question, because two years ago a DC was focused on to court things, financial products and insurance products. So right now we've expended our product line, and we're now having this what we call knowledge business. So if you think about occasion, business or any business that wants to go beyond the borders, this's quite scary to go in the international game. So now we're capable of offering them a lot of insights on international market out the exports virus key questions that haven't her journey. So we're not helping them to our journey and also as were wet and better than the international supply chains. We're helping them with connecting with big, big companies that are leveraging or looking for some capabilities that we have in the country. So we've really skilled up the product line that we have. We're really shifting the model. We're working a lot with the banks and the way we're supporting the Cajun businesses so like it's days and nights, the type of products that have a solution, the experience that were providing, uh, from two years ago. Do we still have work? Absolutely. Like digital transformation is never such a thing that is completed. The key essence here. The key message is, it's never done, and the customer experience has to be at the forefront if you think about the customer experience. It just happened that most of the experiences digital these days so test our mission is never handing. >> I think I think it's a great mind set. I think that's so smart. It's not just about mobile first or cloud for just customer center. From the beginning, I'm gonna ask you the question. What's it like working with a century Iraq? That what role that they play with a easy to work with the good? What's the story? >> Absolutely. I'm very pleased with the team that we had. We have strong people from Accenture were fully leveraging the network that they have because they're distributed in the global business. Axe Central, for us, is doing all the delivery stuff, the the very difficult stuff behind the scene that is normally like your function that you haven't an organization. So we've been extremely pleased on DH. Actually, I think that the fighter fact that were capable of delivering every single two weeks and agile were pure, agile. You will hear in the industry that some people think they're our job, but they're actually hybrid Elijah. So we're full blown, agile the organization. And they've been strong partner with us on that journey. >> That's awesome. Well, I love the story looking for to keep it in touch. Keep us posted on When you get this transformation. I look forward to chatting. And thanks for sharing your story. And inside here in the Cube, my pleasure. Mark Andreessen, Claire customer here inside the cute telling about the journey and the struggles and GDP are get on it and make it an advantage. Great. Great line there. And digital is the future. I'm Jeffery Jeffery. More day to coverage with the Cube after the short break