>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the queue covering IBM edge 2015 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube. I'm John furrier. We are here in Las Vegas for a special presentation inside the cube. A special announcement. We have mayor AC Borden, mayor of Memphis and Jen Crozer who's the vice president at IBM alliances and Alliance. Welcome to the cube. So mayor Memphis, I'll see renounced city, great culture. Um, smarter cities is a big thing right now. So talk about why Memphis, why IBM, why are you here? What's the big announcement? What's happening in Memphis? >>Well, it's a great day for Memphis in addition to the Grizzlies had slipped that in there, but uh, one, uh, of, of, of just the handful of cities that are receiving what are known as IBM smart cities challenge grants, we pick a challenge. We have, uh, they help us come up with a solution to it. And it's not some abstract idea. In our case, it's how do we weed out the non-emergency calls from the true emergency calls and our EMS service? 120,000, over 120,000 calls a year, about 25,000 of them are not truly emergency calls. So what that does is it takes valuable time and resources away from those true emergency, a true emergency calls. It should be attended to on a priority basis. >>So I know that you have a Twitter handle and you've got a lot of followers. Is the tech culture in Memphis emerging describes the folks that they, what's it like in Memphis from a tech perspective? Are there people who have moved over or there's rabbit. I know there's a lot of folks in town really talk about the tech community. >>Even in my generation, I'm on there just to do a little quality checking. Also on a double analysis. I'm still in this from Zinn. Uh, we're one of the three cities that will received the, uh, Twitter grants, which will allow us to access us and get that data there and use it as we make decisions. So that's really going to be unique for Memphis. So yes, Memphis is a up to date. >>Jen, I gotta ask you because one of the things that's near and dear to our heart in the cube is technology for the advancement of better signal, not noise, whether that's society, education, the Twitter data, and we've talked to in heat you saw about this is that it's the signal of the humans. Um, and this notion of smarter cities is bringing technology to impact the human lives, not just making people get an iWatch or what are, there's some real benefits. Talk about the grants, talk about what IBM is doing because this is real important stuff. I mean, smarter planets to marketing slogan, but the end of the day technology can help people and talk about how that's part of the grant and, and why Memphis and what are these guys doing that's unique. That could be a great case study for others. We started building a smarter planet at one of the things we had to think about was what was the acupressure >>points that would have the biggest ripple effects. And it's cities, right? More than half of the world's population lives in cities. And that's growing by a multiplier every day. And so that's where we wanted to start and we've been really gratified when we started smarter cities challenge, which is a pro bono program. Give us your toughest problem. We will send you a team of six IBM executives for three weeks to help you solve it for free. We've had over 600 mayors apply and we've delivered more than 115 teens >>and in Memphis. I got to ask the question about how you look at the, the governing process now with mobile computing, you can hear everything. They're talking back in real time and it might not be as organized. Certainly tweeting all over the place and kind of getting that data is really key. What's your vision >>that that's the key. We know Memphis, we know what information we have with that. We have what in the world do you do with it? So what better partner than IBM? We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world. We're not the only one who's faced this challenge. So with this team of experts, the IBM professionals who will be owned the ground there, they will then say, here's what you have. Here's the best way to use it. Here's what they did in Rome. Here's what they did in Berlin, London, New York or wherever. So the key is not how much information do you have but what in the world can you do with it in real day to day solutions to those everyday problems. And let me point this out. This is much more than just technology with the process we're going to employ in Memphis using nurses perhaps as dispatchers so that they can ask a few more questions when the call comes in are perhaps helping us set up a system in which nurses will go to the homes of the individuals who we call frequent flyers who often call when, it's not true any emergency but this is because life is on the line here and you really have to have the ability to analyze in real time and apply the right solution. >>And this is why IBM's expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical. >>We always talk about, we always talk about two aspects of real time near real time, which is people get today it's close enough, but when you're in a self driving car maybe or an emergency situation, you want real time. So that's really the key here. Yeah, >>that's the gay real time information being employed in a real real life situation. And that's what any emergency call that's. >>So I've got to get under the hood a little bit cause we like to go a little bit into the engine of, of the, of the local environment. I mean it, people who know life today, they got their cell phones, they think it's easy to call nine one one. It's not that easy. You have these old systems and the cell towers are connected to the municipal networks and you've got a lot of volume of calls coming in. That's a challenge for the local, the technology team and with this new system that's going to clear it up. So, so talk how you guys go from this clogged, you know, traffic calls to really segmenting the emergencies from the nonverbal. >>Again, that's another critical point. We're confident this is going to work and it will somewhat declaw if that's a word unclog because I experienced just without the grant shows us that we could weed out so many of the other calls. They will not be coming in to your nine one one. So that's, that's a big, big help right there is to make sure if we could weed out 25,000 calls, which is what we had last year. We're not truly emergency calls, you wouldn't speak in terms of a Claude nine one one system. >>I was talking to a friend, they're like, give me an example of some of this clog networks that I go, well imagine your phone going off a million times a night. The notifications, cause we're in a notification economy that you have to kind of weed through that. So how are you guys using the data? What's the technology? Can you give some specifics to what's being implemented, the team and how the local resources inter interact with IBM? >>Well I think, you know, the mayor's called out this one source of data that he's getting and mayors we know are getting multiple strings. So we have our intelligent operations center that IBM uses to create dashboards for mayors to see real time data about several different industries or sources or areas that are important to them. But I think that your point about the humans talking is a really critical one. And I want to come back to that because it's easy for us to fixate on the technology. And I think one of the things we've seen in this program is the technology enabling city leaders to hear their constituents in new ways, what they're saying and what they're not saying. And also for them to communicate back with them and close the loop on feedback as policies and programs are inactive. And the thing about the presence of IBM is kind of like a good housekeeping. It will open up Memphis to resources from other national groups. As a matter of fact, we're already using funds from another entity to set up our dashboards for performance in all areas, including of the nine one one calls. So IBM is like this huge magnet. But once folks see, Hey, IBM is in there, others who come in and say, we're going to help Memphis as it develops this system. So >>may I have to ask you a question. If as automation and technology helps abstract away a lot of the manual clogged data and understanding the signal from the noise, what's relevant, what's real time, you have a lot more contextual visibility into your environment and the people. How would you envision the future organization of the government and education and, and uh, police, fire, et cetera, working together? What's the preferred future in your mind's eye? As technology rolls out? The preferred future will be >>the, that when we come up with an innovation like this will be a non event. It would just be, it ought to be the order of the day. Uh, government sometimes kind of lags behind. No, we want to get to the point where we're leading. Uh, quite frankly, my vision is that this soon will become a non event. It will become the order of the day. Uh, humans are citizens will not be afraid of, Oh, I bet not call. I'm going to get a computer on the end of the line or they got a gadget down. They're just going to try to innovate me and see if I'm going to say it would be the order of the day. That's, that's what we're working forward and what we are emphasizing here is not what we are taking away but what we are bringing in. Additionally for this technology, we will actually be able to have a good diagnosis, a good case record built on what we call the frequent flyers. We know the people who call every two weeks, but they will feel so much better when two days before they usually call. A nurse will show up and say, came to check on you and that's what's coming out of this will be customers. This will be the new norm >>because is work. This is already that they're happy people, happy customers, happy voters. Hey, you nailed it. Barack Obama had put in for the first time a data scientist on the white house, DJ Patel, a former entrepreneur, former venture capitalist. Data science is a big deal. Now. Um, are you guys seeing that role coming into the local presence as well? Yes, >>and it's so critical to government and the private sector. If you come up with an item that's not reducing the profit margin, you just shut it down. We can't do that in government that week. Every service we provide, we're locked into that. I cannot say, well the police department where we are, we're not breaking even on that. Let's just shut that down. We won't run three shifts. We'll cut out that third shift. So we have a mandate. It's an imperative. What we're doing here is not an option. This is an absolutely essential. >>So you're excited for the grant. What's next after the announcement? What do you guys be doing together? We've got 16 cities around the world who will be getting these teams. So it's time to schedule them and get started and have the grant now, how many mayors applied and what was the numbers again? Over the life of the program, over 600 mayors have applied for this. This year it was just over a hundred and we are sending teams to 16 cities this year. Well, you guys can get that technology go and get some more music pumping through the world. That's a great place and I'll see the technology, help them. This is a citizen. Thanks for, for sharing the great story. Congratulations, mr mayor. Thanks for joining us on the cube. We right back here in Las Vegas. You watching the cube? I'm John. We'll be right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector Welcome to the cubes Coverage of AWS 2020. This is specialized programming for the worldwide public sector. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by Mick Boccaccio, the security advisor at Splunk Met. Welcome to the Q Virtual Oh, >>thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >>So you have a really interesting background that I wanted to share with our audience. You were the first see so in the history of U. S presidential campaigns with Mayor Pete, you were also branch shape of Threat intelligence at the executive office of the President. Tell us something about about your background is so interesting. >>Uh, yeah, those and I'm a gonna Def con and I teach lock picking for funds. Ease working for Mayor Pete A. C. So the campaign was really, really unique opportunity and I'm glad I did it. I'm hoping that, you know, on both sides of the aisle, no matter what your political preference, people realize that security and campaigns can only be married together. That was an incredible experience and worked with Mayor P. And I learned so much about how campaigns work and just the overall political process. And then previous to that being at the White House and a threat intelligence, role of branch chief they're working over the last election, the 2016 election. I think I learned probably more than any one person wants Thio about elections over that time. So, you know, I'm just a security nerd. That kind of fell into those things. And and and here I am and really, really, really just fortunate to have had those experiences. >>Your phone and your email must have been blowing up the last couple of weeks in the wake of the US presidential election, where the word fraud has brought up many times everyday. But election security. When I saw that you were the first, see so for Pete Buddha Judge, that was so recent, I thought, Really, Why? Why are they just now getting folks like yourself? And you are a self described a cybersecurity nerd? Why are they Why were they just recently starting to catch on to this? >>I think it's, uh like security on the campaign and security anywhere else on credit to the Buddha Judge campaign. There is no federal or mandate or anything like that that says your campaign has toe have a security person at the head of it or any standards to implement those security. So you know that the Buddha Judge campaign kind of leaned into it. We wanna be secure. We saw everything that happened in 2016. We don't want that to be us. And I think Mawr campaigns are getting on that plane. Definitely. You know, you saw recently, uh, Trump's campaign, Biden's campaign. They all had a lot of security folks in, and I think it's the normal. Now people realize how important security is. Uh, not only a political campaign, but I guess the political process overall, >>absolutely. We've seen the rise of cyber attacks and threats and threat vectors this year alone, Ransomware occurring. Everyone attack every 11 seconds or so I was reading recently. So give me an other view of what the biggest threats are right now. >>Two elections and I think the election process in general. You know, like I said, I'm just a security nerd. I've just got a weird background and done some really unique things. Eso I always attack the problems like I'm a security nerd and it comes down to, you know that that triumvirate, the people process and technology people need had to have faith in the process. Faith in the technology. You need to have a a clear source to get their information from the process. To me, I think this year, more than previous elections highlighted the lack of a federal uniforms standard for federal elections. State the state. We have different, different standards, and that kind of leads to confusion with people because, hey, my friend in Washington did it this way. But I'm in Texas and we do it this way. And I think that that standard would help a lot in the faith in the system. And then the last part of that. The technology, uh, you know, voting machines campaigns like I mentioned about campaigns. There's nothing that says a campaign has toe have a security person or a security program, and I think those are the kind of standards for, you know, just voting machines. Um, that needs to be a standard across the board. That's uniforms, so people will will have more faith because It's not different from state to state, and it's a uniformed process. >>E think whole country could have benefited from or uniformed processes in 2020. But one of the things that I like I did my first male and fellow this year always loved going and having that in person voting experience and putting on my sticker. And this year I thought in California we got all of our But there was this massive rise in mainland ballots. I mean, think about that and security in terms of getting the public's confidence. What are some of the things that you saw that you think needs to be uniforms going forward >>again? I think it goes back to when When you look at, you know, you voted by mail and I voted absentee and your ballot was due by this date. Um, you know where I live? Voting absentee. It's Dubai. This state needs we received by the state. Andi, I think this year really highlighted the differences between the states, and I'm hoping that election security and again everyone has done a super fantastic job. Um, sister has done incredible. If you're all their efforts for the working with election officials, secretaries of states on both sides of the aisle. It's an incredible work, and I hope it continues. I think the big problem election security is you know, the election is over, so we don't care again until 2022 or 2024. And I think putting something like a federalized standard, whether it be technology or process putting that in place now so that we're not talking about this in two or four years. I'm hoping that moment, um, continues, >>what would your recommendation be from building security programs to culture and awareness? How would you advise that they start? >>So, uh, one of the things that when I was on the Buddha Judge campaign, you know, like I said, we was the first person to do security for a campaign. And a lot of the staffers didn't quite have the background of professional background of work with security person. No, you know why? What I was doing there Eso my hallmark was You know, I'm trying to build a culture heavy on the cult. Um, you got to get people to buy in. I think this year when you look at what What Krebs and siesta and where the team over there have done is really find a way to tell us. Security story and every facet of the election, whether it be the machines themselves, the transporting the votes, counting the votes, how that information gets out to people websites I started like rumor control, which were were amazing amazing efforts. The public private partnerships that were there I had a chance to work with, uh, MJ and Tanya from from AWS some election project. I think everyone has skin in the game. Everyone wants to make it better. And I hope that moment, um, continues. But I think, you know, embracing that there needs to be a centralized, uniformed place, uh, for every state. And I think that would get rid of a lot of confusion >>when you talk about culture and you mentioned specifically called Do you think that people and agencies and politicians are ready to embrace the culture? Is there enough data to support that? This is really serious. We need to embrace this. We need to buy in a You said, um >>I hope right. I don't know what it could take. I'm hoping so after seeing everything you know, being at the White House from that aperture in 2016. Seeing all of that, I would, you know, think right away. Oh, my gosh. 2018, The midterms, We're gonna be on the ball. And that really didn't happen like we thought it would. 2020. We saw a different kind of technical or I guess, not as technical, uh, security problem. And I think I'm kind of shifting from that to the future. People realize. And I think, uh, both sides of the aisle are working towards security programs and security posture. I think there's a lot of people that have bought into the idea. Um, but I think it kind of starts from the top, and I'm hoping it becomes a standard, so there's not really an option. You will do this just for the security and safety of the campaigns and the electoral process. But I do see a lot more people leaning into it, and a lot more resource is available for those people that are >>talk to me about kind of the status of awareness of security. Needing to combat these issues, be able to remediate them, be able to defend against them where our folks in that awareness cycle, >>I think it ebbs and flows like any other process. Any other you know, incident, event. That happens. And from my experience in the info SEC world, normally there's a compromise. There's an incident, a bunch of money gets thrown at it and then we forget about it a year or two later. Um, I think that culture, that awareness comes in when you have folks that would sustain that effort. And again, you know, on the campaign, um, even at the White House, we try to make everyone apart of security. Security is and all the time thing that everyone has a stake in. Um, you know, I can lock down your email at work. I can make sure this system is super super secure, but it's your personal threat model. You know, your personal email account, your personal social media, putting more security on those and being aware of those, I think that's that awareness is growing. And I Seymour folks in the security community just kind of preaching that awareness more and more and something I'm really, really excited about. >>Yeah, the biggest thing I always think when we talk about security is people that were the biggest threat vector and what happened 89 months ago when so many businesses, um, in any, you know, public sector and private went from on site almost maybe 100% on site to 100% remote people suddenly going, I've got to get connected through my home network. Maybe I'm on my own personal device and didn't really have the time of so many distractions to recognize a phishing email just could come in and propagate. So it's that the people challenge e always seems to me like that might be the biggest challenge. Besides, the technology in the process is what do you think >>I again it goes back. I think it's all part of it. I think. People, um, I've >>looked at it >>slightly. Ah, friend of mine made a really good point. Once he was like, Hey, people gonna click on the link in the email. It's just I think 30% of people dio it's just it's just the nature of people after 20 some odd years and info sec, 20 some odd years and security. I think we should have maybe done a better job of making that link safer, to click on, to click on to make it not militias. But again it goes back, Thio being aware, being vigilant and to your point. Since earlier this year, we've seen a tax increase exponentially specifically on remote desktop protocols from Cove. It related themes and scams and, you know, ransomware targeting healthcare systems. I think it's just the world's getting smaller and we're getting more connected digitally. That vigilance is something you kind of have to building your threat model and build into the ecosystem. When we're doing everything, it's just something you know. I quit a lot, too. You've got junk email, your open your mailbox. You got some junk mail in there. You just throw it out. Your email inbox is no different, and just kind of being aware of that a little more than we are now might go a long way. But again, I think security folks want to do a better job of kind of making these things safer because malicious actors aren't going away. >>No, they're definitely not going away that we're seeing the threat surfaces expanding. I think it was Facebook and TIC Tac and Instagram that were hacked in September. And I think it was unsecured cloud database that was the vehicle. But talking about communication because we talk about culture and awareness communication from the top down Thio every level is imperative. How how do we embrace that and actually make it a standard as possible? >>Uh, in my experience, you know, from an analyst to a C So being able to communicate and communicate effectively, it's gonna save your butt, right? It's if you're a security person, you're You're that cyber guy in the back end, something just got hacked or something just got compromised. I need to be able to communicate that effectively to my leadership, who is gonna be non technical people, and then that leadership has to communicate it out to all the folks that need to hear it. I do think this year just going back to our elections, you saw ah lot of rapid communication, whether it was from DHS, whether it was from, you know, public partners, whether was from the team over Facebook or Twitter, you know, it was ah, lot of activity that they detected and put out as soon as they found it on it was communicated clearly, and I thought the messaging was done beautifully. When you look at all the work that you know Microsoft did on the block post that came out, that information is put out as widely as possible on. But I think it just goes back to making sure that the people have access to it whenever they need it, and they know where to get it from. Um, I think a lot of times you have compromised and that information is slow to get out. And you know that DeLay just creates a confusion, so it clearly concisely and find a place for people, could get it >>absolutely. And how do you see some of these challenges spilling over into your role as the security advisor for Splunk? What are some of the things that you're talking with customers about about right now that are really pressing issues? >>I think my Rolex Plunkett's super super weird, because I started earlier in the year, I actually started in February of this year and a month later, like, Hey, I'm hanging out at home, Um, but I do get a chance to talk to ah, lot of organizations about her security posture about what they're doing. Onda about what they're seeing and you know everything. Everybody has their own. Everybody's a special snowflakes so much more special than others. Um, credit to Billy, but people are kind of seeing the same thing. You know, everybody's at home. You're seeing an increase in the attack surface through remote desktop. You're seeing a lot more fishing. You're singing just a lot. People just under computer all the time. Um, Zoom WebEx I've got like, I don't know, a dozen different chat clients on my computer to talk to people. And you're seeing a lot of exploits kind of coming through that because of that, people are more vigilant. People are adopting new technologies and new processes and kind of finding a way to move into a new working model. I see zero trust architecture becoming a big thing because we're all at home. We're not gonna go anywhere. And we're online more than we're not. I think my circadian rhythm went out the window back in July, so all I do is sit on my computer more often than not. And that caused authentication, just, you know, make sure those assets are secure that we're accessing from our our work resource is I think that gets worse and worse or it doesn't. Not worse, rather. But that doesn't go away, no matter what. Your model is >>right. And I agree with you on that circadian rhythm challenge. Uh, last question for you. As we look at one thing, we know this uncertainty that we're living in is going to continue for some time. And there's gonna be some elements of this that air gonna be permanent. We here execs in many industries saying that maybe we're going to keep 30 to 50% of our folks remote forever. And tech companies that air saying Okay, maybe 50% come back in July 2021. As we look at moving into what we all hope will be a glorious 2021 how can businesses prepare now, knowing some amount of this is going to remain permanent? >>It's a really interesting question, and I'll beyond, I think e no, the team here. It's Plunkett's constantly discussions that start having are constantly evaluating, constantly changing. Um, you know, friends in the industry, it's I think businesses and those executives have to be ready to embrace change as it changes. The same thing that the plans we would have made in July are different than the plans we would have made in November and so on. Andi, I think, is having a rough outline of how we want to go. The most important thing, I think, is being realistic with yourself. And, um, what, you need to be effective as an organization. I think, you know, 50% folks going back to the office works in your model. It doesn't, But we might not be able to do that. And I think that constant ability Thio, adjust. Ah, lot of company has kind of been thrown into the fire. I know my backgrounds mostly public sector and the federal. The federal Space has done a tremendous shift like I never well, rarely got to work, uh, vert remotely in my federal career because I did secret squirrel stuff, but like now, the federal space just leaning into it just they don't have an option. And I think once you have that, I don't I don't think you put Pandora back in that box. I think it's just we work. We work remote now. and it's just a new. It's just a way of working. >>Yep. And then that couldn't be more important to embrace, change and and change over and over again. Make. It's been great chatting with you. I'd love to get dig into some of that secret squirrel stuff. I know you probably have to shoot me, so we will go into that. But it's been great having you on the Cube. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on election security. People processes technology, communication. We appreciate it. >>All right. Thanks so much for having me again. >>My pleasure for McClatchy. Oh, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube virtual.

>>thank you. I'm very happy to be here. It's no surprise that Kevin, 19, has changed every business, but how it's changed Business is very strong, Matic Lee, according to the company. Fortunately, we are seeing some interesting themes and some interesting opportunities that really spend across companies. So today's session we're going to talk to three different companies that have had three different experiences and look at what some of the opportunities, challenges and consistencies across these companies are. And I'm thrilled to be here today with three amazing presenters that have very different stories about how they embraced >>the >>challenges that covered 19 created and turned it into opportunity to get started. I'd like to introduce Dr Albert Chan. He is the vice president and chief of digital patient experience at Sutter Health. Following Dr Chan, we have Sean Flaherty, who is the head of technical services, the Kraft Heinz Company, and rounding out our Panelists. Today we have Jennifer Brent, the director, business operations and strategic planning for global real estate at H P E. Thank you everybody, for sharing your time and attention with us today. Let's jump right in now. As I said, we are seeing a great deal of change and opportunity. So I'm gonna ask you to the Panelists to talk a little bit about what the organization is and some of the challenges that they have experienced over the course of 2020. Dr. Shen, let's start with you. Could you please introduce us to Sutter Health and the challenges you faced over the course of 2020? >>Thank you, Mayor Bell. It's great to join everyone. Uh, center Health is a integrated delivery network in Northern California. We serve over 100 diverse communities with 14,000 clinicians and 53,000 employees. Um, and it's a great opportunity to serve our community. Thank you. >>Perfect. Uh, Dr Chen, that was great intro. Sean, could you pick up and tell us a little bit about what's going on at Kraft Heinz and what you've experienced? >>Uh huh. I'm Sean flirty, and I'm currently the head of technical services. I previously was the head of manufacturing for Oscar Mar. I've been with Kraft Heinz for over 30 plus years, working across the supply chain both internationally and domestically. Kraft Heinz is 150 years old. We make some of the most beloved products consumed by all of our employees. And we have made some major big brands. We have craft. We have pines. We have Oscar Mayer planters, bagel bites or write a classical Who laid Philadelphia? Jeff Maxwell house. That's just to name a few little my current role. I'm in charge of technical services, I said, which includes engineering, maintenance, capital spend transformational manufacturing, maintenance and all the productivity pipeline that goes with >>certainly a very wide purview for a big product line. Uh, Gen Brent H P E. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing. >>Thank you, Maribel. Appreciate it. So hopefully everyone is familiar with Hewlett Packard. Enterprise are our main mission is really to advance the way that people live and work through technology. Um, and one of the ways that I'm supporting the company, I work for the global real estate organization. Um, global real estate is is obviously a sort of a key area of focus for everyone. Um, thes days, you know, given the cove in 19 impacts that you're speaking to, Maribel. Um, HP has over 200 sites globally. We operate in over 50 countries. Um, with an employee base of over 65,000. So what we're really focused on right now in real estate is how do we sort of take what's happening right now with Cove in 19. How do we advance? You know, the way that our employees or team members live and work? How do we sort of capitalize on this particular situation and think about what the future of work looks like And how we start to design for and deliver that now? Um, so that's really what what me and the team are focused on. >>Great. So I'm gonna pick up with Dr Chan because, you know, it is covered. 19. And there's been a lot going on in the health care industry. Clearly, um, you know, in your case, could you talk a little bit about what happened when cove it hit? What kind of plans did you have to develop? Because it really wasn't businesses usual. >>Thank you, Maribel. Yes, and indeed you're right. It's a business. Not usual. But frankly, it's something in healthcare. We've always had the face. Whether regards the fires or other disasters, thistle is a unique time for us to being involved in the most intimate parts of people's lives, and this is no different. Um, let me let me harking back to a story. Actually, I think, which illustrate the point. Eso I was in clinic in late February and saw two patients who drove straight from the airport to my clinic. They had respiratory symptoms. Their daughter was concerned about their health and I got advanced warning. I've been reading about this thing called Cove in, and so I had to wear a mask gown, face shield, you name it. And I realized then and there that we had a unique challenge that was confronting us here instead of health. Which is how do we protect the patients and our inclinations as well. So, um, during the week of my birthday, actually, we, um, marshals up a group of people over 200 folks, many of whom I've never met to this day actually came together and designed a telehealth strategy to rapidly respond to covet. We took we typically, we one of things we were doing is telemedicine. And prior to covet, we had 20 video visits per day on average, and after co vid 19, we saw up to 7000 video visits per day. So the rapper was tremendous and it was over. We were essentially given this challenge over a four week period instead of a two year roadmap, which is what our initial intent waas. We trained over 4700 questions to deliver care virtually to meet the challenge, >>that it's simply amazing and shows the power of both the will of individuals and technology coming together to make amazing things happen. And I imagine, Sean, um, in your case, you probably had, well, different something similar in the sense that it's food manufacturing. It's not something that can easily be done remotely. Can you tell us a little bit about what you been experiencing during coded 19? >>Yes, eso. As you said, manufacturing is not something that's not very easily remote. And so we had to quickly address the pandemic and make sure that our operation could stay intact and make our employees feel safe and healthy and make sure that that happens. I mean, across our manufacturing facilities we have put in, um, we require face mask. We require health check assessments. We require a temperature check before anybody enters our facilities. We put digital signage across the facility to encourage social distancing. We've taken our break rooms and redid those so that there's, uh, social distance inside with plexiglass. We staggered are break hours or lunch hours so that people don't congratulate inside there. And then we also have mailed newsletters to ever employees home in both English and Spanish to promote yourself social distancing and wearing face masks outside of work so that they could protect their communities and their families. We've limited visits to a plant to one person per week, and that person can only go to a plant once a week we've done came meeting. We've done team meetings inside of our plants to promote social distancing. We've done lots of activities inside of a manufacturing, please sure that our people are safe and then they go home the same when they came and we don't have any transmission of the virus inside of our facility. >>I think this is so critical because you want people to be able to go to work, to feel safe. And, you know, our food supply chain depends on that. So really excited with the work that you've been doing and very happy that you were able to do it. Jen, I know that HP has manufacturing, but I would like to talk about something slightly different with you because I think you have a mixture of employees. So you're in real estate. How are you thinking differently about what to do with the employees? And you know, some people are calling this a hybrid work concept. What has been your experience with coded 19 and a global workforce? >>Absolutely, Maribel. Thank you. So you're absolutely right. We've got a blend in terms of our workforce. We have your sort of knowledge based workers, Aziz. Well, as you know, manufacturing based workers and also essential support. I t support workers. Um, and those latter two categories have continued to use their offices as part of the essential workforce throughout Cove in 19. And so we've implemented very similar sort of safety measures. Social distancing, you know, PP use Onda like, but as we're thinking about what the future of work looks like and really wanting thio leverage all spaces and and sort of re conceptualize or reimagined, as many people are saying, the future of office, um, we're thinking a bit more broadly. And so as a company, we are in the midst of a of a strategy transformation to become the edge of cloud platform as a service company that is the leader in the industry. Uh, similarly, we wanted to think about our strategy in terms of our workplace in a similar way. And so we're framing it as the edge toe office experience, where by the edge, we mean anything, really, that is outside of the office. So that might be your home office. That might be a customer site. That might be, you know, working on the train on your way to the office for a cafe s. So we're really trying to think of the workplaces everywhere. And how do we really design for that? How do we design for a flow, Um, of a workforce that's really moving and working in a space that at that particular time or moment or day best suits their their work. So we're really tackling this in terms of four key areas. Right now we're looking at what is that experience at the edge? What do we need to make people feel comfortable for people to feel safe and connected How are we then? Adapting our office is how are we pivoting those so that they are they really sort of foster used by a much more fluid workforce on, but they're really fostering collaboration and social and connection. Um, then we're looking at the digital experience being that sort of bridge between spaces on dat sort of equalizer, where everyone has a really similar kind of experience, has the ability to engage on. But it's that piece, really that is so core to our culture and ensuring that we continue tohave that really strong cultural element that is core core to HP. And I'm sure, um, to set our health into Kraft Heinz as well on dfo finally really the mindset because I think any time you move into something like hybrid and you have some people that aren't in your physical proximity, how you engage with them is incredibly important on DSO. I think what's what's most exciting? Really, for us is a technology company is the sort of the key, the key part or or piece that technology plays in that where you know, in the in the past, workplace technology and some of these other pieces collaboration technology may have been seen as more of a nice tohave, whereas now it's really an imperative. Um uh, in our view, for, you know, to really support the future workplace. >>I know when we were just talking with Sean, it sounded like there was quite a bit of communications and collaborations that had to happen with the employee based to make sure that they were up to speed on all the changes that were happening in terms of what their work environment, where was going to be on how it will change going forward. Um, now, on Albert side, this also makes me think that, you know, we talked about this tremendous amount of visits that you started doing with telehealth. Can you talk a little bit about the changes of how that might have changed, what the worker environment was like because I went from seeing a lot of patients in person to doing a lot of telehealth Any other changes that you had to associate with this coded 19 shift? >>Well, thank you very well. I think the biggest change is really our belief in what we could get done. So in other words, there's a there's There's always a fundamental belief of what you can achieve, and we've pushed the limits and we keep pushing it. And and really, it's been quite gratifying, actually, to see our our employees, our staff are clinicians. We had to step up to this challenge and feel empowered to do so. So we're we're seeing new models of care we're seeing, for example, patients. I, for example, I diagnosed a hernia. Believe it or not, be a video, which is I leave the graphical images side for a second. Uh, it was an incredible, credible feet and and I thought I never thought my career that I would be able to do this. But certainly you can, um, and this thing you can attitudes really changed our culture. So, as I mentioned earlier, we really marching up about 200 staff members to come together, many of whom we've never worked together. Frankly, to pull this challenge off, we change our training methodology. We, for example, instead of doing in class classroom training, we essentially held five sessions per day for four weeks straight so that we could accommodate the doctor's schedules and get people ready for telemedicine for example, one of the things we needed to do was get equipment out to our doctors. So we provisioned centrally and in a social distance. Safe manner. Um, several 1004. 4000 plus ipads, for example. So we could deploy them. So consider them centrally, deploy them locally to all our clinicians so they could connect to their patients. And the impact was felt almost immediately. We had stories from physicians who said, Hey, um, I had a family, for example, who was really concerned about their baby, and I diagnosed a neurologic disorder via video, for example, Um, in fact, one of our doctors was quoted as saying, You know, this is this is life has changed so much from Kobe 19, where we're seeing this differentiation between B C before coronavirus and a C after coronavirus and care will never be the same again. So it's an incredible transformation. >>I'm excited for the transformation that we've had because I think it'll bring care Teoh a lot more people more seamlessly, which I think is fabulous now. Yeah, Sean, we talked a little bit about what's going on in your manufacturing environment in terms of adding things like social distancing and other protocols. Were there any other manufacturing changes that happened as a result of that or any other challenges that this new environment created? >>Yes. So assed people started to eat more at home. We had to change our whole manufacturing network as, uh, retool because we service restaurants on the go and those two segments started to drop off. People started buying more of their trusted brands that they are used to. And so we had the retool across our manufacturing network in order to make more products that people wanted. That was in high demand. We increased our capacity across many of our segments. We focused on sanitation to production processes, were still ensuring the highest quality of products concert on lean flow and made flow management inside the facilities. We have put challenge all of our operational assumptions and make sure that we get the most out put that we can during this time. I mean, some of the I think there's four key things that we've learned during this. It's our our speed, agility, our death ability, and I read repeatability, and those four things have come to better ways of what better ways of working increase efficiency, greater flexibility and better focus on what the customer really wants. >>It's actually tremendous to think that you can change a manufacturing line like that that you could be that that responsive to shifts in demand. And I think that that that whole concept we've talked about business agility. If you look at it in health care, if you look at it, um, in a mixed blended environment, like what's going on at HP or if you look at it and manufacturing, we've always discussed it, but we we didn't necessarily have that huge imperative and push to get it done as fast as we've done this time. So it's It's wonderful to see that with the right vision and the right technology, you can actually policing together quite quickly and continue to evolve and adapt them as you see different changes in the marketplace. Jenna I wanted to circle back for a minute because you were talking a little bit about this edged office initiative, and how do you think that changes the employee experience? >>Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think it changes it in many ways. In many ways, we're gonna We're gonna hold on. Thio, you know, are are sort of primary core beliefs and behaviors Onda way that we operate a love, you know, the example of sort of the the art of the possible. I mean, one of our sort of call core called cultural beliefs are is is the power of yes, we can, um and I think that this what's been so fascinating and heartening about, you know, this context and the previous two examples is people are just surprised at what they've been able to do about, you know, whether that is, you know, entirely changing in manufacturing line. Whether that is, you know, taking an entire patient diagnosis kind of service entirely digital. I think that people are really becoming exposed far more than they have been in the past, to the truly to the power of technology and what we can dio Onda from an employee engagement perspective. You know, HP, as much as we've had a a pretty flexible way of working where, you know, in the past we've had people working from home. Certainly the core of our culture has always been site based. And I think what's been what you know, what we've sort of been shown through the past sort of 67 months is how much connection you could really establish virtually. You know, it may never be ah, wholesale replacement for what you're able to do in person. Um, but the kind of community feelings that were able thio develop, I think the personal connections and we're letting people into our lives a bit more than we would have. Um, otherwise, but we're really seeing a lot of adaptation. Ah, lot of, you know, efficiency gains from certain people. I think a lot of folks had preconceived ideas about not being productive at home. And I think that, you know, barring some of the sort of unique circumstances of cove it I think that's really been flipped on its head s. So I think, you know, from an engagement perspective, productivity, efficiency. Um, I think, you know, very similar to the prior two examples. What we're seeing is, you know, rethinking the way that we all work and being more sort of fluid. Relying more on technology is actually showing us that we can do things differently. Um, and in a way that actually allows people toe work a lot more flexibly in ways that that suit their own personal style without necessarily, you know, seeing any kind of negative impact on on output but actually in the reverse, you know, really seeing an accelerated positive impact. >>Wonderful. So to close out, I like each of you to tell me, what's the number one thing you've learned in the last nine months of this experience? And how do you think you can use that learning going forward? Perhaps we could start this time with Sean. Yes. So I think >>the one thing that we've learned and we started the journey was really created a culture of we versus by and the and the other thing that I think has really been important during this is management style of leadership style. I think I have had to change my leadership style from one of a servant leader because we're not in the plants now to be able to mentor coach people ends on I wonder what I'm going to call attentional leadership tension leadership. To me visibility. You still got to be seen. You still gotta be able to do things. So you got to use teams you got these virtual facetime Got to do something to make people feel engaged. You have to build trust. And remember, this has gone on for nine months. It's gonna go continue to go on a lot of the people you've never really met person yet. You have to have clarity. I think before we set goals at 123 years. Now it's 30 60 90 days because the environment keeps changing around us so fast. Diversity. You have to be very intentional about being reversed and who you slept on. Your team exclusivity. People still want to see you still want to hear you and they still want to be seen. And they still wanna hurt courage. It's x courage to speak up. It takes courage to create clarity. It takes courage to create a diverse team. It takes courage to create to lead in these chaotic times. So that's really the kind of the biggest takeaways that I've had a broken. >>Thank you, Jennifer. You wanna add anything to that? >>I love everything that Sean just said, Um, and in so many ways, it mirrors all of our key themes that we're thinking about in terms of um, you know, the goodness that we want to take from the past few months, um, and and really apply to our go forward strategy or even emphasize e guess the one the one that I would add, I think it it's probably like encompasses so much of that is really just having a bold, you know, the sort of power and believing in bold moves. So I think what's been so exciting is that we had this really quite bold idea moving Teoh. You know, the future is a hybrid, um, from a workplace strategy perspective and really seeing that embraced, um, and being pretty early on in terms of a company that was developing that strategy. And now seeing that you know, ah, lot of are are sort of competitors or peers or coming out with very similar vision statements, um, I think that that's really been a key learning. And that's been something that's, you know, that's cultural to HP. But really, the power of that kind of vision is, you know, having a sort of bold idea and going for >>it. Awesome. How about you, Albert? How >>do I beat these two? This is amazing. Um I think for me it's really an affirmation. So if I think about health care, we have this unique responsibility and opportunity privilege, if you will, to being involved in the most intimate times of patients. Lives and I have been so hardened by the commitment of our teams of our clinicians to be approachable, reachable even in this face, the pandemic and all these things we're all concerned about each and every day that we're committed to our patients. And, uh, and evidence of that. For example, Alcide, our net promoter score for video are Net net promoter score videos 82 which is on par for our in person clinical care and that that, to me reaffirms the power of relationships to connect to people and to care for people when they need us to care for them to empower them and whether it be the pace of change which we've adapted so quickly, or, um or just our ability to can do, you know we'll do, Um, it's really an affirmation that we were committed to helping people in their daily lives, and it's just an affirmation of the power of people in relationships. So, um, it's been really hardening time for all of us. >>Thank you all for such compelling and inspiring stories. I'm sure the audience will take away many tips and tricks on how to turn challenges into opportunities and strategic advantage moving forward, and now I'm going to turn it back to the Cube for the rest of the show.

(soft music) >> From around the globe, It's theCube with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. Hi buddy. Welcome to the cubes coverage of VeeamON 2020, (laughs) the virtual version of VeeamON. and I'm here with Justin Warren who's the chief analyst and managing director of Pivot Nine. Justin, Good to see you. How are things down under? >> Not too bad. It was a bit of a rough start to the year. But things are looking a little bit better here in the middle of the year. It's tough times. >> And of course Justin, you may, you guys may know, as a many times you post and of course our other almost daily CUBE host these days, Stu Minivan joining us to unpack the Veeam keynotes, the trends in the marketplace. How you doing Stu? >> I'm doing great, Dave. Yeah. As you said, rather than us flying all around the country, we're in doing remote interviews every day, Its different, 2020.(laughs) >> So this has been quite a year, obviously. Because of course it was from Veeam's perspective, started out with that blockbuster exit $5 billion exit to private equity slash VC, insight capital, insight partners which was just an awesome thing for the founders. And some of the employees and actually going forward now, I think the balance of the employees really they'll have an opportunity to grow the valuation of the company even further. I think that's what we've seen with insight. I mean they want exits, so it's like they used to talk about, Ratmir Used to talk about Act Two (laughs) well now we're going to see it play out guys. So just some high level stats, a billion dollars last year in bookings. They're really shifting to an ARR model in a big way, 375,000 customers, 160 countries, 4,200 employees. Justin, do you remember when you first ran into Veeam at like some VMUG somewhere, who are these guys? Wow. They've certainly made it. >> They really have. And it's honest surprising but also not . They've feeling when I first encountered Veeam was that it's like well, who is this people? Yeah. What are they doing? It was very much SMB. It was very much practitioner, a very technical focus and people who used it just loved the product because back then the informal tagline was, it just were. And in those days it really was amazing. That there was a product that was simple and easy to use and worked on it, all of the things that they needed it to do. And I had a very, very VM focused back in that time. Hence the name of the entire company was go Veeam. And to see it grow from that one even then was quite a broad base but a very much an SMB market and see it grow across the entire industry. It's pretty remarkable. There is no really any ... Not many other companies who've pulled off this kind of growth momentum. >> Yeah. I mean Justin I think you nailed it there. I think back it's a company that hasn't stayed at a steady state still though. In the virtualization community, there were ripple effects. When Veeam went beyond just doing VMware and started to do Microsoft. Then a few years ago, I remember after we were doing the Q bed at the show, there was such a real push forward to extend the relationship with Microsoft, to the cloud. One of the things that we think we see loud and clear at this show is that VMware relationship early strong and as VMware goes to various cloud environment, Veeam can go along with that so that the relationship stays strong, but they're also in a lot of the public clouds and expanding beyond what they're doing. Yep. They're moving into the enterprising and I think one of the things we'll dig into is how enterprising is Veeam today. But absolutely it could company that very different than they were two or three years ago. And Dave, as you correctly pointed out now there's not the, who is this weird privately held company? Who's the ownership? I think there's a little bit of a more of a understanding as to, they're a big player in the space. And a little bit more a understanding as to where things go going forward. >> Well, I want to get your take on sort of their, we're going to go through a lot today, but the vision, that Danny Allan laid out in his keynote. And I think it's quite interesting. I mean, given the energy and the VC money coming into the market behind Cohesity and Rubrik the noise that they're making, what he put up as their vision is the most trusted provider of backup solutions, that deliver cloud data management. So as you guys well know, Cohesity and Rubrik really pushing this notion of data management, which means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's interesting to note that Veeam, first of all, new management, new CEO, Danny Allan, and now CTO, and obviously in a strategy role. So he's putting forth this kind of back to basics a mentality but then leapfrogging and trying to leapfrogging the data management narrative into the cloud, bringing cloud into it, super-gluing and cloud and data management which I think is really smart because when you think about multicloud data management for data protection It's got to be about cloud native and it's got to be somebody who's got no agenda around hardware or even necessarily a public cloud agenda. And Veeam wants to the be that Company. What do you think of that messaging Justin? >> I think broadly speaking, I think Veeam can pull it off. I do have some concerns around the whole data management thought. On the first thing of just being able to pull this off across the industry, I think vein is well-placed because it's always been about software. And it's always been about partnership. Though Veeam has been channel , It has been a hundred percent channel back in the day, very, very little direction. If any, at all, they are very strong on partnerships. They will partner with anybody because basically they don't really mind who else you deal with. They just want your backup to be done through Veeam. And the backup is very strong. That is what they are great at. So the risks they may own the data management side is it we've seen this play before pretty much ever backup company at some point just to talk about, Hey, we have a couple of your data. It's kind of sitting there and not really doing anything. What if we would attend this into something else and start using it for other purposes? But it's never really paid off for anybody. No, One's really done anything with their backup data in it in a true sense because we haven't seen anyone else become very good at that and be known throughout the industry of OES. Once you've backed up your data to the scene, you can then do all of these others stuff with it. I can't name anyone who's actually been quite successful at that but I can name plenty of people who've grown. >> Well Commvault is certainly tried actually guys, once you bring up the good competitive slide I want to that's a good lead in Justin. So what this data from our data partner, ETR Enterprise Technology Research, those whose watch our breaking analysis every week you see that we use this data extensively. And basically what we're showing here is the fundamental methodology that ETR uses is this thing called net score, which is kind of like net promoter score. It basically asks customers, are you buying? Are you increasing spending or decreasing spending takes the less subtracted from the more, and then you get a net score. That's the vertical axis. And it's an indicator of spending velocity, the horizontal axis it's labeled market share. It's not like IDC counts market share. It's a measure of mark pervasiveness within the survey. Then it's calculated by the mentions of the vendor divided by the total number of mentions within that sector. Now what we're showing here is a comparison of pure play data protection vendors and you can see there's no Dell EMC there's no IBM because they're not pure plays. I can't cut the data by data protection. So I got put fourth the pure plays. But let's walk through this so you could see here is you've got the pervasive company in the upper left. You can see the net scores and they could see the so the shared ends. This is 1,269 survey respondents. And you can see the shared end is the presence of these companies within that 1269, then CIOs and IT practitioners. So you can see Commvault very high presence but then interestingly and I guess not surprisingly Veeam right there. And then it drops off Veritas, Rubrik and Cohesity, and you can see where the heat map is on the vertical axis Rubrik, One of the highest net score is in the data set, and you've got Cohesity also very high, not as great of a presence in the data set. You can see Veeam very respectable. This was a 15 year old company with a relatively high net score. Really, really respectable, as I say in the solidly in the mid thirties and then Commvault getting into the pink zone and then Veritas in the red zone, low net score. And not as great as you're great at presence, which some concerns there for Veritas. So that's guys, that's the horses on the track. Anything there surprise you? Was it Veritas's position, it doesn't really surprise me, but it is remarkable just how our wife and the rest of the players that they are. And certainly that matches in the conversations the way having here with customers and others in industry. The nine Veritas just does not come out in the way that it used to. It used to be, I would have say that it would be, it used to be neck and neck with Commvault. Now we really don't hear the name Vera Tasman at all. Which is as a long time participant in the industry, Veritas was very much part of my career very early on. They were a stand by name. They were very well respected. But say seeing that sort of thing happened to it a great company, like Veritas it's a bit sad. Really? >> Well, you mean look at you're right. The Veritas was always the gold standard of a company with no hardware agenda. Who's going to be the Veritas of X? You would always use that sort of line or phrase. But now Stu, when I think about the opportunities here, It seems like multicloud is going to within the data protection space, is going to be run by somebody who can do cloud native. So in other words, running cloud native on, Azure, AWS and Google, maybe Alibaba, but cloud native, being able to take advantage of those native services on the cloud. Somebody who's got an on-prem presence who can bring that cloud experience on-prem. Who actually can do it also across clouds, a very, very high performance, low latency, very efficient, low cost. So in thinking about that multi-cloud landscapes, do how do you assess the horses on the track? >> Yeah, well, you know, Dave, first of all, one of the things Justin said, Veeam is partner-driven. One of the conversations I'm having for VeeamON is with the partner Alliance team, they are a hundred percent partner driven. And also for so many years, we talk about one of the negatives about Veeam is, Oh, well, most of their customer base is SMB, well, if you look at the cloud, one of the knocks against cloud for a long time was, Oh, it's just the really small companies that are doing a lot of clouds. Well, my data managers whether I'm a small company or a big company, so a lot of these pieces come together, Veeam has really been able to move into that cloud environment. What they're doing, sans across them . Data protection seems to be one of those areas when you talk about, the mantras, the industry like Amazon and say, okay when are they going to eat your business? Well, you know, Amazon's got a strong storage team. But data protection. They've got some very basic functionality in there but there's a robust ecosystem and companies like Veeam, I can capitalize on. >> Well, you mentioned the there in the enterprise, of course we all know the story of there a couple of years ago, there was a big enterprise, of course, they brought in some executives from VMware, some really high quality folks. They struck relationships with companies like HPE and Cisco. I think HPE in particular is it's paid off quite well but everybody wants to do business with Cisco cause they're very partner friendly and it's interesting. They kind of pull back from that not kind of. They pull back on that major initiative, the high price, direct sales people. And I remember doing a breaking analysis when Veeam got acquired or maybe it was even previous to that and making the comment to that yeah. They had to pull back on that, but I dug into the ETR data. Veeam actually has quite a presence in large companies. Maybe it's division of a large company, or maybe it's shadow IT, I don't know. People who just you don't want the simple backup but they're VMware customers. And it seems to me they really have an opportunity to go up market. Maybe kind of to reset that enterprise strategy. What do you guys think? >> Yeah, I think that's was what they were trying to do a couple of years ago. So I think hotly, they just didn't succeed quickly as they had hoped. There was also a little bit of an issue, which is something I remember speaking to the Retina Mayor about some years ago. About the challenge of being able to serve these different markets, because what SMB wants is quite different to what an enterprise want. And being able to fulfill both of those needs simultaneously from one company it's really challenging because things that you do for enterprise annoy SMB, the things that around ran complexity to be able to deal with the inherently complex environments that are enterprise. SMB just doesn't have that issue. Whereas if you can only do things in SMB type ways that annoys the enterprise, being able to satisfy both of those markets in a way that they both happy with. And so that no one else feels neglected that's pretty much what they wish that were struggling with nothing. So the hot pivot to enterprise they existing customer base, which then was rolling mostly SMB. They started to feel a little bit neglected. No, it was just a bit of a stumble. I think it feels like they've reset now and understood how to do these in a slightly more gentle fashion. But we can call it that. So rather than going for that really aggressive push into enterprise, they are just following the natural momentum, which is people who've come from SMB. And some of those medium companies grow into very large companies and bring them with them and others just that people as they move through their career will grow from a small company to maybe a medium company. And then they'll end up in a division of an enterprise scale and they used to Veeam and they want to bring what they they know in like they want to bring that experience to the company that they now work at. That is a sort of natural flow there I think for them that is only now showing the fruit of what was actually laid down a few years ago. >> Well, and I think there was something else going on there too, which is, we now know the company was positioning for an exit that was up for sale. So enterprise is very expensive, it's time consuming. The ROI is often times very long. That's why you see enterprise startups raising gobs of money and they just ,i think weren't getting the ROI. And when you think about insight, this is one of the more forward thinking, great PE or VC firms they'll live with rule of 40, right, where a rule of 35 or 80 rule of 50, where it's not just about growth, it's about growth plus EBIT. And if you add those up and it adds the 40 or 45 or 35 or whatever their target is, I don't know exactly what Insights looking forward but that's the combination that drives value. So my guess is they wanted to dial up EBIT and give it or the sale. And they might've had specific targets, who knows. That were being negotiated but i think that probably had something to do with it. And as well as you're pointing out, Justin, it takes time but us to If we look into some of the things that we're hearing from the messaging, some of the announcements and we'll get into that. Big, big discussion around digital transformation. One of the first, if not the first to do a backup for office 365, another a new version of Veeam backup for AWS. Oh. So there were some enterprisey types of things that they were there were talking about, a little glimpse at version 11.Any thoughts there, Stu. >> Yeah. Well, David, it's interesting, Justin put up a really good point there when you opt digital transformation Dave. Well, one of the things we've been saying for years, the difference between a company before and after that is you're leveraging the data. So, If I look at Veeam and say, do I protect the data absolutely? Do I secure your data? I'm involved with that. Actually one of the leadership changes, they just hired their first CSO. So bigger push for security, that'll help them a lot in what they do with it, public sector, that's where the CSO actually came from the public by that will help them. But what I didn't, haven't heard as much yet, is okay. I'm a piece of that data. And if you're going to the cloud, I can manage, I can protected and secure it. But how do I help connect people to get more value out of the data and leverage that data? So I think Justin nailed it with that. So many pieces that are important about data that Veeam does do. But that the discussion we always have in AI is be able to take that raw data and converting it into insights and out facts. >> Well, to Justin's point earlier about data management. And I want to to pick up on what you were saying about security, obviously everybody's talking about ransomware, but to me, you're talking about the CSO. The role of the CSO is obviously of course evolving it's Al board level topic. CSO, oftentimes was off as a peer, I say off, but as a peer to the CIO on purpose, they didn't want the CSO to report to the CIO cause it would have been like the Fox watching the hen house. But i think cause it was this sort of failure equals fire mentality and they wanted the truth. But I think now people have transparent discussions at the board about security. Hey, we know we're going to get penetrated. It's all about our response. Obviously we have to deal with the layers, but we're exposed, everybody's exposed. So I think increasingly organizations are realizing that it's a team sport, you've got to get everybody involved, the lines of business, the users being responsible. And of course IT, my point is that security and data protection are now becoming two sides of the same point. Almost like privacy. We've shared that before. So when you think about digital transformation, you think about data protection as part of your security portfolio? Not just something that you bolt on as an afterthought. And I think in many respects, Justin, that's maybe a bigger market opportunity for a lot of these data protection companies and backup companies, than the so-called opaque data management that you're referring to before. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that because what I'm saying from the security side of the market, particularly within large enterprise is a change in mindset from a prevention to a resilient, that kind of mindset around it and how to deal with it. Though previously there was a lot of either we'll just ignore it cause there's not really a problem and it's not going to happen to us. Then it became a kind of a fear response of just, we want to prevent it ever happening to us. Now it's kind of we've gone to an acceptance. And when going through the Kubler Ross. A framework for dealing with grief. People aren't understanding that sooner or later bad things are going to happen to us. What we need to figure out is how we deal with it when it does. And that's the mindset that you need to have when you're talking about data protection. So it's the same kind of mindset that you need for security. And now people are starting to look at, okay, how do we firstly detect if we've actually got a problem, if there's a breach or if there's a risk, how do we notice that we know that that's happening? And then once we noticed that, what do we do about it? So that's things like catching it early so that when you you'll recovery is small, which is the same general idea around software development of fail fast. You want to just pick the failures early so that you can correct them all. Basically if you find yourself in a hole stop digging and then once you've figured that out, okay now how do we recover from this in a way that is minimally disruptive to the business. And that could be like recovering from ransomware, having grilly solid backup. So you can restore weekly, that's the best protection against ransomware that you can have. Then you can start trying to figure out, okay, we know we can recover if it happens to us now let's just try to reduce the number of times that this does actually happen. That's the general idea that I'm seeing come through. More often with CSOs, with CIOs and with board level conversation. >> I want to come back to Justin and then Stu with your final thoughts. Justin, what do you take on this Veeam universal license? Was this a case of, hey we had so much complexity across our portfolio like that you're going to the Italian restaurant, you're just here you want everything in the menu or there's too much to figure out just the order for me. And they're trying to clean that up or do you see this as sort of a more innovative licensing approach? That's more cloud friendly. What do you make of that? >> I think it's a bit of both. think it's part of VeeamON thoughts as well again, from back in the very early parts of the company, the idea was that it just works. It should be simple and easy to use. So it's completely on brand for Veeam to have a simple and easy to use licensing model. There's a lot of criticism from enterprise and particularly from medium and small business, well overly complicated licensing models. We see people wrestling daily with the billing system within AWS. We see people frustrated with the licensing approach of Oracle. We see them seemingly frustrated when you not figuring out exactly what have I lost since then, what happened and what am I not licensed for in, Microsoft ecosystem. So for them to have a simple and easy to use licensing approach, it just fits right in with the rest of what the company is doing. It does also simplify the way that they organize and operate their company, as they have to deal with lots and lots of different partners, having a complicated licensing system on top of all of those other complicated licensing systems would just make their own job much, much harder. So this way it actually works for them as well as for their customers. >> Yeah. Simplicity is the watch word there Stu and I get, I mean, I get the sense in speaking to the customers, partners, that Veeam well has basically has the philosophy make it easy to and we'll sell more. We're not going to try to micromanage, to maximize revenue. You heard this certainly from some of their big partners who said that Veeam made it transparent. Our sales people for commissions and their salespeople and really make it easy to do business with. So Stu I'll give you the last word here. >> Yeah. So I think, as you mentioned, Veeam also listening and seeing what their partners are doing. So we've watched companies like AWS, trying to make a little bit simpler as to if I'm choosing compute, I don't have to be locked into one model a aisle, pay those across the environment or pure storage and other partner of Veeams. If I stay a customer, I make it easy to be able to move from one generation the next though, that cloud like model absolutely is what we expect. And when you talk to customers today, we know the only constant is change. I actually loved in the keynote. There was a I believe it was Satya Nadella that they quoted and said that, we've seen more change in the last two months that we normally would see in a decade. So Veeam being agile, moving, listening to their customers, learning with their partners and making sure that they've got things in the modern consumption model. >> Well, guys, thanks for helping us break down the VeeamON 2020, some of the trends in the market place.Some of the commentary and the keynote. Justin Warren Stu Minivan. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks Dave. >> I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Stu and Justin and the entire cube team, people right there. We'll be back with our coverage of VeeamON 2020, right after this short break. (soft music)

>> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the Churchills. It's the ninth annual awards banquet put on by the Churchills Club, and this year is all about leadership. We're excited to be joined by our next guest who knows a little bit about leadership. He's Carl Guardino, the president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Carl, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too, Jeff. >> So what is the Silicon Valley Leadership Group all about? >> The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is an association of about 360, primarily innovation economy employers that want to make a positive, proactive difference here in the region, as well as in our state and across the United States. >> What are some of the hot topics that are on top of the plate right now? Because there is a lot of craziness kind of going on here in Silicon Valley. >> There is. But what we try to do is impact those issues that are as important to families in their living rooms as they are to CEOs in their board rooms. And here in the bay area, we call those THEE issues. An acronym, T-H-E-E. The T, traffic; H, housing affordability; E, education; and the fourth E, the economy. And we try to bring together diverse points of view for those areas that unite us, where we can actually solve some of those challenges. >> Right, and those are big, big challenges. And you work both with public as well as private groups to try to bring them together to make movement on those things. >> We're a bridge. And the first thing about a bridge is that you try to bring folks together to cross the bridge and work together. The second most important thing about a bridge is that you build them, you don't burn them down. And that's the role that we try to play with 360 highly engaged CEOs and c-suite officers. >> And it's only appropriate, because tonight you'll be sitting down in a conversation with the mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo, to kind of get into some of these issues. San Jose seems to be on a roll right now, a positive roll. A lot of positive news coming out of San Jose. >> Yes, and that always starts with leadership rather than luck. San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo, 10th largest city in the United States, has been able to strike that balance of being pro-innovation economy, while also caring deeply about his citizens, the residents of San Jose, 1,053,000, and how we make sure that we have a strong and vibrant economy, but also a great quality of life. >> Right. So how do you even begin to - we'll start with traffic. The T in the THEE. To address that issue, it's so multifaceted, right, it's so tied to jobs, it's tied to housing, it's tied to the growth of the economy, you know, unfortunately freeways are slow to build, public transportation's expensive, but we continue to see growth there. How do you kind of eat that elephant, one bite at a time, with something like traffic? >> Well the role of the leadership group is, again, by bringing people together to solve complex problems in a democracy with winning solutions. So we'd rather win than whine. And when it comes to traffic, one of our core competencies is actually to lead and run ballot initiatives to fund transportation improvements throughout the region and the state. In fact, in the last 30 years alone, I've had the pleasure of going on loan from the leadership group to run ballot campaigns for transportation improvements that have totaled 30 billion dollars in revenue through those measures, approved by voters to reach into our own wallets, rather than our neighbors, to build improvements that, this Christmas, in time to go into your stocking, we'll be bringing BART to San Jose, and working on the electrification of Caltrain, linking transit and better road improvements, making it better for all of us trying to travel throughout this region. >> Right. Good, we need it. >> We do. >> And on the housing, you know, because the housing is also very closely tied to traffic, and we see that the old days of single-family homes on big pieces of dirt, those are going away. They just can't support it in higher density areas like San Fransisco, San Jose, to bring those jobs next to that. So we're seeing a huge transformation in the housing space as well. >> And we need a huge transformation, both in transportation and in housing. And it's really the flip side to the same coin. T, for tails, or transportation; H, for head, or housing. And you have to make sure that you keep those linked. In fact, one of our initiatives right now is to work with all six, fixed rail transit operators throughout the nine bay area counties. What are the current and future uses of those half miles around every fixed rail transit stop that you have? How do we maximize those uses? Here's a great example. What Google wants to do in downtown San Jose, at the Diridon SAP station, is only because of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's work to bring BART to that station, electrify Caltrain, light rail is there, Amtrak, ACE, et cetera, and they want to have 20 to 25 thousand future Google employees there within the next 10 to 12 years. Why? Because it is a sustainable location that doesn't rely on you and I slogging through traffic in our single-occupant cars. >> Right. I can't wait to see what you guys do to El Camino. That's the next one that's going to - as somebody once said in one of these traffic things, it's just a bunch of old retail stores with empty parking lots, just placed by Microsoft. Or excuse me, by Amazon. So I think we'll see a big transformation with housing and jobs, you know, along that quarter, which happens to parallel the Caltrain, and is near and dear to my heart. So a lot of good opportunities I think to make improvements. >> Jeff, there is. And as hard as transportation and traffic solutions are to put into place, housing is even tougher. And while Bay Area residents think housing is the bigger crisis, the solutions are tougher to come about, because the community isn't as united on those solutions. So the role that a group of employers like ours play, is how do we bring people together around solutions that make sure that we build homes, that are good for everyone in our society. >> Well Carl, I like your positive attitude, a lot of winning and no whining, so I wish you nothing but success. And we'll be watching. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> You're welcome. He's Carl, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Churchills in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

you live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam welcome back to Miami everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Volante with my co-host Peter burst we're wrapping up day two of v-mon 2019 and so we've been talking about cloud hybrid cloud data protection backup evolving to more of an automated data management environment can bring dollars here and he is in charge of really building out the VM ecosystem that he's the vice president of global alliance architecture at VM Kent great to see you again thanks for coming on yeah thanks Dave preciate so the ecosystem is evolving you know you're in a competitive marketplace but one of the things that differentiates Veeam is you know billion dollar company and people want to do business with your customers and so the ecosystem keeps growing and growing and you guys have some you know blue chip names at the top of your sponsor list we do a good job but you're not done yet so not at all and I think Dave you know it's it's really great to see how v-mon has evolved and you know in our partner ecosystem you know we have you know you talked about us hitting a billion dollars you know we rat marinelle's we hit 350,000 customers that customer number is a huge asset for us when we talked to our partners you know that is something that they're all trying to tap into right they love you know and our customers are really passionate and we have partners that come to us and they say hey look you know and that you know the bigger partners than us and they're saying hey will you please work with us will you please you know we want to do deeper integration because our customers you know are saying we're Veeam customers and and you you know you know mister partner you have to go work with teams so that so that our solutions will work better together so it's a it's a great asset to us yeah and it's it's evolved since you know it's just certainly just the first Vemma and I was at the very first one I think was we were talking was at the Aria whatever it was five years ago so so you know ecosystem is I think Jason Buffington was quoting Archimedes today and you know livre and and that ecosystem is is you know a huge opportunity for growth ok so let's get into it well first of all I want to ask you if time was interesting global alliance architecture yes so we're not talking technical architecture necessarily we're talking about what the architecture of the ecosystem or both yeah so some money you know my role my responsibilities and what my team looks after is everything technical related to our partners so veem we're a hundred percent is fee and you know ratmir and aundrea to co-founders and leaders to the company you know that that's something that they take to heart and it's something that's actually really valuable when we talk to our partners is we don't really overlap very much especially with the infrastructure partners that we have and so you know my job is to take the great products we have and make it work really well and go deep with our partners so create value with these partners there's sometimes their product integrations storage snapshot integrations we announced the width beam program two weeks ago we are together at that next with the rest of your team talking about Nutanix mine with theme which is a secondary storage integrated solution so all of those that's all part of my roles so solution architecture and product integrations you know through our partner ecosystem which which is very broad it stretches from storage partners to platform partners to other is feeds like Oracle SAT even healthcare partners yeah Peter we were excited about the width Eames stuff dat who is with Fein yours with Vemma yeah so my team is responsible for the overall architecture with Vemma it's it's really a joint collaboration within within Veeam so we have an R&D investment that's building the intellectual property that powers the you know the system under the covers my team's responsible for the broader architecture how we bring it together how we bring it to market through the channel right and and and how we bring it to our customers and that whole experience so my team is is intimately involved in that so a lot of people talk about inflection points in the industry and clearly were in the middle one way of describing it is that the first 50 years were known process unknown technology we never gonna do accounting we knew are going to do HR where you were going to do blah blah blah blah blah and there was mainframe client-server with a lot of other stuff but the whole notion of backup and restore and data protection grew up out of the complexity in the infrastructure as we move forward it's interesting because it's known technology it's gonna be cloud relatively known yes but what's interesting is we don't know what the processes are gonna be we don't know what we're gonna automate we don't know how we're going to change the business it's all going to be data driven which places an enormous burden on IT and specifically how they use data within the business so I'm gonna ask your question it's a long preamble but I'm asking the question I asked you out in there too and this is not the test but the question is look as we move forward as data is used to differentiate a business it suggests that there's going to be greater specialization in how data use is used which could and should lead to greater specialization in the role that veem and related technologies will play within the business and the question then is is the with veem approach a way to let allow innovation to bloom so that specialization can be accommodated and supported within the VM ecosystem yeah so yeah Peter good question and so I tell you that the short answer is yes the longer answer is I wasn't shorter than the short answer is yes the longer answer is it doesn't have to be with Veeam but really our goal and and what we want to empower our partners and so really the goal of with Veeam is hey we're already working across our partner ecosystem and we you know we work with with the likes of NetApp and HP and pure and Nutanix and you know and all the platform providers as well public clouds you know our goal is is to make VM ubiquitous and drive better value to our customers and through our partners right we need partners no matter what when we're working with a customer there's always there's always a workload we're protecting and we need a place to land our backup so no matter what we're always working with one or two partners in a deal and sometimes it's multiple because then you TR out to cloud storage and in other places you know with with veem what we're trying to do is is really simplify that process for customers and so make that process from the buying experience all the way through the delivery and the deployment and the management and the ongoing management day 1 and day 2 operations we want to make that all seamless and give them higher value now one thing we're looking to enable and by adding api's with veeam is we want to leverage the strengths of the partners we have and so you know I often end up in these discussions because we have a broad partner ecosystem we've already announced - with VM solutions we have a third that you know we did last year with Cisco that's in the market that's sort of similar in nature and we're gonna add more and you know the question our partners even ask us is you know you already got three of them why are you gonna add another one you know how am I going to differentiate and the answer is you know they differentiate with their own technology and and the idea is we have these open API so that they can they can build their own solutions they fit different markets and fit different use cases some are small small customer solutions some are enterprise but our goal is to enable them to be creative and how they build on top of eeeem but but have you know Veen be a core part of that solution rather so so it is a core part of solution yes apply to specific customer absolutely okay so the term seamless always you know triggers me in a way because seamless is like open right it's evolved over time and so what was seamless you know 10 years ago wasn't really seamless in today's terms so when you talk about seamless we're talking about if I understand it deep engineering right getting access to primitives through api's and creating solutions that are differentiable as a function of your partner's core value proposition and obviously integrating with meme with 350,000 customers so you're now in the ball game with with Veen customers so so so talk about the importance of api's and how that actually gets done yeah and seamless to whom to the partners to the customer to ultimately it's to the customer boom but but but there's got to be an ease of integration as well with the partners and I'd like to understand that better yeah absolutely so I'll give you an example of something we've done in the past that's that we're trying to model this with veem program after so but a year and a half as part of our 9.5 update 3 we introduced what we call universal storage API and we've talked about our version 10 there were five core features of version 10 when we announced that two years ago in New Orleans you're the first time you were you were with us at a v-mon and one of those was Universal storage API and what that means is you know we help we help our partners we help our customers ultimately by way of our partners on the primary side of integrating storage snapshots with vmware vsphere and so when we when we go to backup a vm we take a snapshot of that vm and with this with our storage snapshot integration we then take a storage snapshot of the volume that vm is on and we can release that VM where a snapshot very quickly so it's very low touch and low impact on the environment well we we introduced this API so that we could scale we had we had done our own storage snapshot and integration with you know call it 5 or 6 storage vendors over the previous seven years eight years right in the last year and a half we've added seven right and that's the scale we're talking about and allowing our partners to build the storage snapshot plug-in together right so we have a program we invite them into that program we collaborate on it they develop the plug-in we jointly test it and we release it and so we're trying to sort of take and that's been very successful as I said eight years five or six storage snapshot vendors year and a half we've done like another seven or eight so it's been very successful and we have more that are in queue so we'll be talking about more of these as time goes on in the very near future with the width beam program we're looking to do something very similar it's gonna be an invite-only program realistically the secondary storage partner is this the universe is probably 20 the logical universe for us is probably 10 to 12 so it's not going to be huge but it's gonna be impactful for our partners and so we'll invite them into the program we'll have an agreement of us working together we'll jointly develop and test it and we'll bring it to market together at the end of the day you know both our partner and veem we have our name on it and I'm sure you heard from rat mayor and Danny and others right we have our NPS score which we really really value and it's really high it's best in the industry and if we're putting our name on a solution in the market we also want to make sure that we're working on it together in it you know it really goes through the rigor of what it takes to bring a Vemma solution tomorrow actually you know what nobody's talked this week this week about the NPS core if they maybe they have in the keynote so that it might have missed it but well I was in the keynotes what is it today well yeah so so an NPS score is basically you know from from 0 to 100 it's it's you know we'll a customer reference you or recommend you right right and so ours is 73 ok the industry the the general average in in in our space is about 28 to 30 so we're about 2 and a half times that that's core you know and that's in Frank Zubin said to me one time it's easy to have a high NPS core if you're a one product company but you're not a one product company no no we've we've evolved substantially I mean you know we've we've added agents to cover physical workload we've we've added cloud support we've added other applications we've added veem availability Orchestrator we've added beam backup for office 365 we have VA C which is the availability console for our service providers which has cloud connected it's a very broad portfolio everything comes back to beam backup and replication as the flagship foundation but we have all these other products that that now help our customers solve their problems the reason we were so excited about this with wid theme is this notion of cloud and hybrid cloud and you talk about programmable infrastructure you really have been pushing just bringing the cloud experience to your data talking about that for a while and part of that has to be infrastructure as code and it can't really do that without open api's and this sort of seamless integration well the cloud is testing us with you as well the cloud is a really an architecture for how you're going to distribute work as opposed to how you can centralize Handicap I think for a long time we got it wrong it's all presumed and it's all gonna go to the center we're in fact when you get that level of standardization and common conventions and the technologies are built to make a tea that much easier it allows you to distribute the work a lot more effectively get the data closer to where the works going to be done and that is enormous implications for how we think about things but it also means that we when we talk about bringing the cloud to the data that the data has to be there the data services that make that data part of a broader fabric have to be there and it all has to be assured so that the system knows something about where the data is and what services can be applied to it in advance of actually moving the workloads that suggests ultimately that the technology set that veem is offering is going to evolve relatively rapidly so the whole notion of you know with V today for secondary storage but I could see that becoming something that you guys take two new classes of data service providers pretty quickly I don't want you to pre-announce anything but what do you think yeah Peter I think I think you're really on to something and when we when we sort of look at the worlds right the infrastructure world were in you know and and certainly some of our partners would draw a slightly different picture but we see Veen as as the common thread in the middle right because at the end of the day and I think you mentioned it as you were just talking there you know when we talk about hybrid cloud right we see now our customers especially commercial and enterprise and large enterprise customers it is it is a very heterogeneous environment it's multiple hypervisors different storage platforms it's multiple cloud providers because they're picking best to breed for the workload and so they need a platform that's got really breadth in depth of coverage and so the the one common thread we weave between there is Veeam right so if if we are that data protection layer as I mentioned before you know we're in the middle we're protecting a primary workload and we're writing our data to a secondary workload but in the middle is Veeam and so that workload we're protecting on Prem cloud secondary data centers theme is the thread in between there you can move that data around and wherever that is we can make use for now I'll give you a good example today you know let's say we're protecting a visa or workload on Prem right we back that up to it to assist them locally so we can have fast restore but ultimately we tear that out bean cloud tier capacity tear tear that's AWS so we can we can actually recover workloads in Atos one or two we have directory store which would take a backup from on-prem and directly move it there for DRAM migration purposes or we can simply consume that that backup that's now up in the cloud because Veen backups are self-describing we can lose the system on Prem and recover it so your point about making the data close to your workload with with veeam in the middle we enable that for our customers regardless of where they want to go yeah so we think that that's going to change the mindset from protection to assurance so assure your data is local and then it's the right data it's Integris and all the other things and then ultimately you know move it and back it up to some other site so it's but it's a subtle switch it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out this is obviously well and as we talked about as you need to begin to protect things like containers like functions that come and go super quickly assurance has more meaning because there's the security threats and if you can help solve those problems through your partners through automation spinning containers up and down making it harder for the bad guys to you know a target a specific container raising essentially the cost so lowers their ROI that is a new game yeah and and I'll call out one thing a rat mayor I thought did a really good job on stage yesterday in his keynote he popped the slide which talked about the universal storage API and with theme and it had all our partners sort of around that you know that that I think he Illustrated our strategy which is hey we're focusing on the core parts of backup and replication and helping the core parts the data protection we're gonna partner with everything else that's adjacent to that we're not going to go solve maybe some of the security problems ourselves we're gonna enable some hooks secure restore maybe as an example we've announced you know in the technology keynote yesterday we announced a new API that allows partners to come in and crack open Veen backups and take a look at them one of the things could be deep inspection so you know our strategy and our goal is really to be open to our partners so that they can come in and add value and again our our goal for our customers is give them choice so give them choice of to choose best-of-breed solutions don't go do it and say hey you got to go use partner a you know hey we're gonna we're gonna have an API that others can build to and you go choose your best debris partner or your platform technology choice well and with 350,000 customers you've got a big observation space so guys have always been customer driven can give you the last word on vivant 2019 you're our last guest then we're gonna wrap with a little analysis on our end but give us the bumper sticker yeah I think the bumper sticker is hey you know we've you know from a business perspective you know we hit a billion dollars in bookings we have hit 350,000 customers the Innovation Train is really moving our Veen clouds here that we announced with update four earlier this year has gone way beyond our expectations and and we're looking to continue to build on that momentum so we're just super excited you know we if I'm the closer I'll say thanks to all of our sponsors we have a lot of great sponsors and on the cloud side on the on the Alliance partners side the channel side you know it's just it's it's a testament to where we are as a companies yeah and you're building out a great ecosystem congratulations on that and and good luck going forward and we'll see you around at the shows it's great it's great to have you guys right thank you all right you're welcome all right keep it right there everybody Peter and I went back to wrap right after this short break and watching the cube live from V Mon 2019 from Miami we'll be right back

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at San Francisco International Gate 54B, at the Alaska Elevated Experience Event. It's pretty exciting, they're really used the opportunity on the Virgin integration, to kind of rebrand everything. Redo the planes, add a lot of new technology, and we're really happy to have our next guest , she's Annabel Chang, she's the vice president of the Bay area for Alaska. Annabelle great seeing you. >> Thank you for having me. >> So congratulations on the event,-- >> Yes. >> I'm sure there's a lot of work that went into this thing. >> Just to say the least, yes. >> So in your remarks during the pressor you spent a lot of time talking about the community involvement >> Yes >> I think you said that you guys invested over a million dollars in kind of local community >> Yes >> Types of activity. So highlight a couple of those organizations and why is it important for Alaska to play in the community that has nothing to do with me getting on an airplane and flying to Seatag. >> Ah, well it actually has everything to do with that. For example, last year we partnered up with the San Jose Mayor's office and the San Jose Public Library Foundation to offer the first ever free coding camp for girls. It was a week long coding camp. Parents didn't have to worry about providing breakfast or lunch. We had it all taken care of. Why does it matter to Alaska Airlines? We also need engineers to help create the apps, to help run the planes and it is super important that we have a diverse workforce that represents our community. Whether we fly and all of the focus that are onboard, as well. >> Right, so that's pretty interesting. Cause I don't think most people would think of you doing that, right? That's a little bit outside the seat mile, kind of calculation and really investing in the community. >> Yes >> A lot of conversation too about the investment in this terminal. You guys are at all 3 Bay Area airports thank you very much. I like to be able to hop on a plane if I'm delayed. >> Yeah >> But you guys are making a big investment here at SFO. >> Yes, so actually I will add a couple of things. We actually are at 6 Northern California airports. So in addition to our big Bay Area airports, we have flights out of Santa Rosa, right into wine country, Monterey and Sacramento. >> Flights out of Santa Rosa? >> Yes. You can bring that wine right onboard. Not, not a problem. Which is really exciting. But last week we just announced that we are going to be opening up a San Francisco lounge. 8500 sq ft. in 2020 on the third floor. You'll have stunning views of the runway. It'll be like nothing else. It'll be the highest domestic lounge at SFO. >> Right. I was wondering if you could just talk about, a little bit about, thinking about the entire customer experience. I had really interesting interview at GE Aviation. >> Yes >> Years ago, where even GE was thinking about kind from the time you leave your door at your house to the arrive at your destination, and all kind of that whole experience between. When you guys talk about lounges, and terminals, and gates, you really are trying to take a much more wholistic view then simply the travel of actual miles in the air. >> 100 percent. It is all about the guest experience. We are trying to be your favorite airline. And we have to earn that loyalty. So from the moment that you are thinking about booking the flight, we already want that to be as easy of a process as possible. From the moment that you deplane and get your bags. And hopefully, we are always looking for ways to be innovative. So, you know many years ago, Alaska Airlines was the first ever to have the kiosks and mobile check-in. And we continue to look for ways to be top in the field. And actually in flight, I'm proud to share that we have the most free movies in the sky, of any airlines. All I tend to watch a few of the same movies over and over again But literally you could scroll, scroll, scroll. It goes from A to Z. Most people kind of get stuck in like the Gs. >> They don't make it past the Gs. >> Yeah, but I promise there's some goodies in the back of the alphabet. >> Right, to just kind of close. You know you talk about WiFi, and you talked about movies, about kind of the role of technology and how Alaska continues to be innovative, leveraging technology with that, with the lounge, with the new C configurations. >> Yeah >> How important to you guys to be able to execute your vision. >> So we want to be your top west coast airline. And the west coast is obviously the tech hub of the entire world. So we know that our travelers care very much about technology. So we're looking ways creative, to make sure that everyone has power. As I always say ABC, always be charging. >> Right, right. >> So we want to make sure your tablets, your phone, your laptop is always available to charge. And we are looking for ways to be creative. So, for example, we know that everyone has personal mobile phones or laptops now. And we're looking for ways to make sure we can take advantage of that technology and offer it to you. >> Right. >> I know, number 1, fast WiFi is going to be key to our success. >> Well Annabel, thanks for taking a few minutes. We look forward to getting on the plane here >> Yeah. >> In a few minutes and >> We're going to have some ice cream aren't we. >> Oh we're going to have ice cream? Yes >> Salt and straw, you don't have to wait in line hopefully. >> Yeah, thank you. >> She's Annabel, I'm Jeff >> Thank you. >> You're watching theCube, we're here at SFO, Gate 54B. Soon we'll be at 35,000 feet. Thanks for watching. >> Awesome >> Catch you next time >> (upbeat music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's International Women's Day 2018, there's stuff going on all around the world. We're up at the Accenture event at downtown San Fancisco. 400 people at the Hotel Nikko, lot of great panels, a lot of interesting conversations, a lot of good energy. Really about diversity and inclusion and not just cause it's the right thing to do, but it actually drives better business outcomes. Hm, how about that? So we're really excited to have our next guest, it's Vivienne Ming. She's a founder and chair of Socos Labs, Vivienne, welcome. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, so what is Socos Labs? >> So, Socos Labs is a think tank, it's my fifth company, because apparently, I can't seem to take a hint. And we are using artificial intelligence and neuroscience and economic theory to explore the future of what it means to be human. >> So who do you work with? Who are some of your clients? >> So we partner with enormous and wonderful groups around the world, for example, we're helping the Make A Wish Foundation help kids make better wishes, so we preserve what's meaningful to the child, but try and make it even more resonant with the community and the family that's around them. We've done wonderful work here with Accenture to look at what actually predicts the best career and life outcomes, and use that to actually help their employees. Not for Accenture's sake, but for the 425,000 people get to live better, richer lives. >> Right, right. That's interesting, cause that's really in line with that research that they released today, you know, what are these factors, I think they identified 40 that have a significant impact, and then a sub set of 14 within three buckets, it's very analytical, it's very center, it's great. >> I love numbers. I'm you know, by training, I'm a theoretical neuroscientist, which is a field where we study machine learning to better understand the brain, and we study the brain to come up with better machine learning. And then I started my first company in education, and to me, it's always about, not even just generating a bunch of numbers, but figuring out what actually makes a difference. What can you do? In education, in mental health, in inclusion, or just on the job, that will actually drive someone to a better life outcome. And one of those outcomes is they're more productive. >> Right, right. >> And they're more engaged on the job, more creative. You know, a big driver behind what I do is the incredible research on how many, it's called the Lost Einsteins Research. >> The Lost Einsteins. >> Lost Einsteins. >> So a famous economist, Raj Chetty at Stanford just released a new paper on this, showing that kids from high wealth backgrounds, are 10 times as likely as middle class peers to, for example, have patents or to have that big impact in people's lives. In our research, we find the same thing, but on the scales of orders of magnitude difference. What if every little kid in Oakland, or in Johannesburg, or in a rural village in India, had the same chances I had to invent and contribute. That's the world I want to live in. It's wonderful working with a group like Accenture, the Lego Foundation, the World Bank, that agree that that really matters. >> Right, it's just interesting, the democratization theme comes up over and over and over, and it's really not that complicated of a thing, right? If you give more people access to the data, more people access to the tools, it'd make it easier for them to manipulate the data, you're just going to get more innovation, right? It's not brain surgery. >> You get more people contributing to what we sometimes call the creative class, which you know, right now, probably is about 1.5% of the world population. Maybe 150, 200 million people, it sounds like a big number, but we're pushing eight billion. What would the world be like not if all of them, just imagine instead of 200 million people, it was 400. Or it was a billion people, what would the world be like if a billion people had the chance to really drive the good in our lives. So on my panel, I had the chance to throw out this line that I was quoted as saying once. "Ambitious men have been promising us rocket ships and AI, "and self-driving cars, "but if every little girl had been given the reins "to her own potential, we'd already have them". And we don't talk not just about every little girl, but every little kid. >> Right, right. >> That doesn't have the chance. You know, if even one percent of them had that chance, it would change the world. >> So you must be a happy camper in the world though, rendering today with all the massive compute, cloud delivery and compute and store it to anyone, I mean, all those resources asymptotically approaching zero cost and availability via cloud anywhere in this whole big data revolution, AI and machine learning. >> I love it. I mean, I wouldn't build AI, which that's, I'm a one trick pony in some sense. I do a lot of different work, but there's always machine learning under the hood for my companies. And my philanthropic work. But I think there is something as important as amazing a tool as it is, the connectivity, the automation, the artificial intelligence as a perhaps dominant tool of the future, is still just a tool. >> Jeff: Right. >> These are messy human problems, they will only ever have messy human solutions. But now, me as a scientist can say, "Here's a possible solution". And then me as an entrepreneur, or a philanthropist, can say, "Great. "Now with something like AI, we can actually share that "solution with everybody". >> Right. So give us a little bit of some surprise insights that came out of your panel, for which I was not able to attend, I was out here doing interviews. >> So you know, I would say the theme of our panel was about role modeling. >> So I was the weirdo outlier on the panel, so we had Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, we had the CFO of the Warriors, Jennifer was great, and we talked about simply being visible, and doing the work that we do in AI, in sports, in politics. That alone changes people's lives, which is a well studied phenomenon. The number one predictor of a kid from an underrepresented population, taking a scholarship, you know, believing they can be successful in politics is someone from their neighborhood went before them and showed them that it was possible. >> And seeing somebody that looks like them in that role. >> And so seeing a CFO of the Warriors, one of the great sports teams in the world today... >> Right. >> Is you know, this little Filipino woman, to put it in the way I think other people would perceive her and realize no, she does the numbers, she drives the company, and it's not despite who she is, it's because she brought something unique to the table that no one else had, plus the smarts. >> Jeff: Right. >> And made a difference to see Libby Schaaf get up there, with a lot of controversy right now, in the bigger political context. >> Jeff: Yes, yes. >> And show that you can make a difference. When people marginalize you, when I went out and raised money for my first company, I had venture capitalists literally pat me on the head and treat me like a little girl, and what I learned very quickly is there are always going to be some one that's going to see the truth in what I can bring. Go find those people, work with them, and then show the rest of the world what's possible. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, Robin Matlock is a CMO at VMware, we do a lot of stuff with VMware, and they put in a women in tech lunch thing a couple years ago, and we were talking, and I was interviewing her, she said, you know, I'd never really took the time to think about it. I was just working my tail off, and doing my thing, and you know, suddenly here I am, I'm CMO of this great company, and then it kind of took her a minute, and somebody kind of said, wait, you need to either take advantage of that opportunity in that platform to help others that maybe weren't quite so driven or are looking for those role models to say, "She looks kind of like me, "maybe I want to be the CMO of a big tech company". >> Well part of what's amazing you know, I get to work in education and work force, and part of what's amazing, whether you're talking about parents or the C Suite, or politicians is... A lot of that role modeling comes just from you being you. Go out, do good work in the world. But for some people, you know, there's an opportunity that doesn't exist for a lot of others. I'm a real outlier. I was not born a woman. I went through gender transition, it was a long time ago, and so for most people like me, being open about who you are means losing your job, it means not being taken seriously in any way, I mean, the change over the last couple of years has been astonishing. >> Jeff: It's been crazy, right? >> But part of my life is being able to be that person. I can take it. You know, my companies have made money, my inventions I've come up with have literally saved lives. >> Right. >> No one cares, in a sense, who I am anymore. That allows me to be visible. It allows me to just be very open about who I am and what I've experienced and been through, and then say to other people, it's not about me, it's not about whether I'm happy. It's about whether I'm serving my purpose. And I believe that I am, and does anything else about me really matter in this world? >> Right. It really seems, it's interesting, kind of sub text of diversity inclusion, not so much about your skin color or things that are easy to classify on your tax form, but it's really more just being your whole you. And no longer being suppressed to fit in a mold, not necessarily that's good or bad, but this is the way we did it, and thank you, we like you, we hired you, here you go, you know? Here's your big stack of rags, here's your desk, and we expect you to wear this to work. But that to me seems like the bigger story here that it's the whole person because there's so much value in the whole versus just concentrating on a slice. >> You know, it's really interesting, again, this is another area where I get to do hard numbers research, and when I do research, I'm talking looking at 122 million people. And building models to explain their career outcomes, and their life outcomes. And what we find here is one, everybody's biased. Everybody. I can't make an unbiased AI. There are no unbiased rats. The problem is when you refuse to acknowledge it. And you refuse to do something about it. And on the other side, to quote a friend of mine, "Everybody is covering for something. "Everybody has something in their life that they feel like "compromises them a little bit". So you know, even if we're talking about you know, the rich white straight guy, everyone's favorite punching bag. And I used to be one of them, so I try and take it easy. It is, the truth is, every one of them is covering for something, also. And if we can say again, it's not about me, which amazingly, actually allows you to be you. It's not about what other people think of me, it's not about whether they always agree with everything I say, or that I agree with what my boss says. It is about whether I'm making a difference in the world. And I've used that as my business strategy for the last 10 years of my life, and even when it seems like the worst strategy ever, you know, saying no to being chief scientist after you know, Fortune 50 company, one after another. Every time, my life got better. And my success grew. And it's not just an anecdote. Again, we see it in the data. So you build companies around principles like that. Who are you? Bring that person to work, and then you own the leadership challenge up, and I'm going to let that person flourish. And I'm going to let them tell me that I'm wrong. They got to prove it to me. But I'm going to let 'em tell it me, and give them the chance. You build a company like that, you know, what's clear to me is over the next 10 years, the defining market for global competition will be talent. Creative talent. And if you can't figure out how to tap the entire global work force, you cannot compete in that space. >> Right. The whole work force, and the whole person within that work force. It's really interesting, Jackie from Intel was on the panel that I got to talk, to see if she talked about you know, four really simple things, you know? Have impact. Undeniable, measurable impact, be visible, have data to back it up, and just of course, be tenacious, which is good career advice all the time, but you know. >> It's always good. >> Now when you know, cause before, a lot of people didn't have that option. Or they didn't feel they had the option to necessarily be purpose driven or be their old self, because then they get thrown out on the street and companies weren't as... Still, not that inclusive, right? >> Vivienne: I get it, believe me. >> You get it. So it is this new opportunity, but they have to because they can't get enough people. They can't get enough talent. It's really about ROI, this is not just to do the right thing. >> If even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint, there is the entire rest of the professional world competing for that traditional pipeline to get into the company. So being different, being you, it's a-- I mean, forgive me for putting it this way, but it's a marketing strategy, right? This is how you stand out from everyone else. One of my companies, we built this giant database of people all over the world, to predict how good people were at their job. And our goal was to take bias out of the hiring process. And when I was a chief scientist of that company, every time I gave a talk in public, 50 people would come up afterwards and say, "What should I do to get a better job?" And what they really meant was, what should I write on my resume, you know, how should I position myself, what's the next hot skill? >> Right. >> And my advice, which I meant genuinely, even though I don't think they always took it as such, was do good work and share it with the world. Not just my personal experience. We see it again and again in these massive data sets. The people that have the exceptional careers are the ones that just went out there and did something because it needed to get done. Maybe they did it inside their last job, maybe they did it personally as a side project, or they did a start up, or philanthropy. Whatever it was they did it, and they did it with passion. And that got noticed. So you know, again, just sort of selfishly, why compete with the other 150 million people looking for that same desirable job when the person that you are, I know it's terrifying, it is terrifying to put yourself out there. But the person you are is what you are better at than everyone else in the world. Be that person. That is your route to the best job you can possibly get. >> By rule, right? You're the best you you can be, but by rule, you're not as good at being somebody else. >> It sounds like a corny line, but the science backs it up. >> That's great. All right Vivienne, I could go on for a very long time, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. I really enjoyed the conversation. >> It was a lot of fun. >> And thanks for spending a few minutes with us. All right, she's Vivienne, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Accenture Women in Tech event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCube. Covering South by Southwest 27 deeds, brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live coverage of South by Southwest here in Austin, Texas. This is Silicon Angle's theCube, our flagship program. We're going to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Our next guest Ali Vahabaznet. >> Almost, Vahabzadeh. >> Vahazbadeh, Vahabzadeh, CEO of Chariot, a hot start up that was acquired by Ford Mobility Solutions last September. Really innovating in what I call the sharing economy which has been called, not I call, the sharing economy. But this really highlights the paradigm shift. So Ali, I want to thank you for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me, John. >> So Chariot is one of your cities not only in the Bay Area but here in Austin. Give a quick highlight of what's going on here in Austin for you guys and the freebie from the South by Southwest goers. >> Yes, Chariot is reinventing mass transit by crowdsourcing new routes in neighborhoods that either don't have the most commuter options or there's commuter options but there's not enough space on buses and trains. So we crowdsource these routes and we launch operations in these neighborhoods once we hit a tipping point and we get vehicles on the road. We started in San Francisco in 2014. We expanded to Austin, and then most recently in September we got acquired by Ford Smart Mobility to become a cornerstone of Ford's mobility strategy for many years to come. >> So this really highlights the sharing economy as I said, but what's going on is that the users interface to the real world is becoming digital. So obviously cars are not digital yet, they'll be self driving soon and Ford's announced mass production in five years. But it points to their relationship with others, collaboration. This is the big AI trend that gets surfaced in real-world benefits. >> Yeah, it's incredible. Everyone knows that Ford makes incredible cars, but Ford also wants to be a mobility company as well. With this thing that we have in our pockets, the phone, it provides a tremendous amount of data about us, commuters, riders, people who are trying to get from A to B. By harnessing that data for now it's given to us by the users themselves. By harnessing that data we can make some really intelligent and efficient choices about where our vehicles, in our example, 14-passenger Ford transit wagons, should be and could be to pick people up at the times where they need it the most. >> All right Ali, I want to kind of get you to riff on something with me. Imagine you're re-imagining the future, I love that. Or reinventing mass transit. So re-imagine some of the amazing things that are possible in your vision. Just kind of roll forward a few years. I mean we're going to have headsets and virtual reality and holograms that can bring my experience inside the vehicle. Not only am I just getting a ride somewhere, I mean in our area in Silicon Valley the Google buses and the company buses they've all gone wifi. They're working away. So I can imagine that you must have a vision for technology into your product. Can you share you vision on that? >> Yeah, imagine most people's commute is a twice-daily worst part of their day. We've moved the needle even without a lot of experimental things going on inside of Chariot. We've move it to, it's actually a decent part of your day and you don't have to worry about it anymore. What Chariot and Ford is looking forward to doing in the next couple of years is to actually make it, believe it or not, the best part of your day. You mentioned VR, entertainment options, social connecting options with other people in a Chariot who you may either want to network with professionally in the future or maybe even socially. Perhaps your next date is onboard. So there's so many things that you could be doing in that Chariot because we know your preferences. We know where you're commuting from and to. We know what you want to eat for dinner. We know where you want to go for happy hour on Thursday night and the Chariot's AI can actually be suggesting to you what Chariot to get on at what time and these folks are going to be onboard with you at that point. >> So you now I'm craving some Buffalo wings, so you just pull off the exit and I get some wings? Or bring out a Fitbit, or Johnny's going to take a bio break. I'm kind of being over the top, but this is what you're thinking, right? >> Perhaps you're on a diet and the device on your hand or the app, the diet app on your phone knows exactly what you had for breakfast and lunch. Perhaps the Chariot is headed in a certain neighborhood with a vegetarian option and you've had too much meat in the day. It could suggest to you hey, get off on this curb because there's a wonderful option here for you to have a non-protein meal. >> John: But that's in your future, you see that vision. >> It's in the future and it's not too distant from where we are right now. I mean what I think is cool between Chariot and Ford is Ford has these incredible resources. Also has vision with what they can do in the vehicle. Chariot, in a very short amount of time, in less than three years, we were able to penetrate a very attractive market of young professionals and actually have them tell us what they want to do, where they want to go from and where they want to go to. We're just scratching the surface right now. >> Tell me about your experiences here at South by Southwest. What's the vibe of the show? We've seen some touchpoints around. It's a VR show, it's some AI. Other things that you're observing that you could surface and say are the key top story lines that are developing on day one of South by Southwest? >> Yeah, you know it's my first South by Southwest, John. I was walking over here with a friend. I was remarking to her that I actually feel this is probably what world's fairs were like 100 years ago when people were discovering new technologies and companies like Ford were actually big participants in world's fairs. This feels like a 21st century world's fair. I'm just seeing such incredible installations and companies that I've never heard of before looking to make an impression on consumers or future users. Companies that don't even have a product, don't even have a service in reality right now and are just providing you a peak into their future. It's my first day here. I can't wait for the next few days. >> Well it's also a good mash up of creativity, industry, and just people, it's a melting pot of just kind of laid-back. It's Austin so it's pretty cool here. Easy living, as they say. >> Yeah, absolutely. There are people who are looking at what the future can hold. Also there are people who I can see in the look of their eyes what is my next start up going to be? Or where can I take my career next? Is it smart transportation like Chariot? Or it is something in VR or AI? Or something that doesn't even exist today? So it's great to see this collaboration. People also meeting each other who've never met each other before. Breaking plates and meeting new people for the first time. >> Okay, so personal question, last question to give you kind of on a personal note. Take your CEO of Chariot hat off at Ford Smart Mobility, put on your personal Ali hat. What are you most excited about? Not with the Chariot, but outside of Chariot as you look at the real world technically speaking. What are you most excited about? What's floating your boat, so to speak? Or driving your car or Chariot? >> Riding in a Chariot, you don't have to drive anymore. The first thing that comes to mind is I'm honored that I'm going to have dinner with a bunch of mayors this evening including Mayor Adler and several others. And I tell you what, when I started the company three years ago, no one would pick up our phone, regulators, city officials and the like. But now I think that the city and urban leaders whether it's Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor's Office, the Transit Authority, the Housing Authority, whatever the case may be, they really are open to not just innovations in transit, but innovations in housing, innovations working together, live-work. In a very short three years I've seen that sea change in the attitude. It's going to be, I think it's a dam that's opened up. I think you're only going to see this momentum accelerate with the civic authorities and innovators and technologists actually working together. >> It's a real impact. Final, final question since one popped in my head. What is AI going to do for your business, your industry, transportation and Chariot in general? What is AI's impact to your industry? I think AI's going to take cars off the street because we are going to know where people are coming from and going to at what probable hours. So we can run much more efficient routes and much more efficient networks. We'll run larger vehicles, larger format vehicles as opposed to single occupancy vehicles like you'll see on Rainey Street tonight. So that's gets me really excited because it doesn't only improve the human experience, it helps the environment and it's all good things. I can't think of a downside for AI in transportation. >> Well there might be some disruption in some transition. Let's just take one simple example. Parking lots, what are you going to turn them into? >> I can't wait to see parking lots converted into lower-income housing, into parks. >> Public easements. >> Into public easements, into more shared office workspace. >> The impact's bigger than people think. >> Just walk down Braswell Street or Congress Street. It seems like every other building is a parking garage. Or half of a building is now a parking garage. We have to stop building parking garages. We have to stop providing free parking both at home and at work so that we can force, transition people into the different formats of commuting. >> So all these jobs that are going away are now being shifted. Now again, idea for people out there watching just get in the business of retrofitting garages into housing, that's a new opportunity. >> That's my next start up, John, are you in? >> John: I'm in. >> Okay. >> Seed funding, this is theCube here live at South by Southwest at the Intel AI Lounge. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More after this short break. (upbeat instrumental music)