>>Okay. Okay. We're back at Caesar's Forum. The Snowflake summit 2022. The cubes. Continuous coverage this day to wall to wall coverage. We're so excited to have the analyst panel here, some of my colleagues that we've done a number. You've probably seen some power panels that we've done. David McGregor is here. He's the senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research. To his left is Tony Blair, principal at DB Inside and my in the co host seat. Sanjeev Mohan Sanremo. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. I'm glad we can. Thank you. You're very welcome. I wasn't able to attend the analyst action because I've been doing this all all day, every day. But let me start with you, Dave. What have you seen? That's kind of interested you. Pluses, minuses. Concerns. >>Well, how about if I focus on what I think valuable to the customers of snowflakes and our research shows that the majority of organisations, the majority of people, do not have access to analytics. And so a couple of things they've announced I think address those are helped to address those issues very directly. So Snow Park and support for Python and other languages is a way for organisations to embed analytics into different business processes. And so I think that will be really beneficial to try and get analytics into more people's hands. And I also think that the native applications as part of the marketplace is another way to get applications into people's hands rather than just analytical tools. Because most most people in the organisation or not, analysts, they're doing some line of business function. Their HR managers, their marketing people, their salespeople, their finance people right there, not sitting there mucking around in the data. They're doing a job and they need analytics in that job. So, >>Tony, I thank you. I've heard a lot of data mesh talk this week. It's kind of funny. Can't >>seem to get away from it. You >>can't see. It seems to be gathering momentum, but But what have you seen? That's been interesting. >>What I have noticed. Unfortunately, you know, because the rooms are too small, you just can't get into the data mesh sessions, so there's a lot of interest in it. Um, it's still very I don't think there's very much understanding of it, but I think the idea that you can put all the data in one place which, you know, to me, stuff like it seems to be kind of sort of in a way, it sounds like almost like the Enterprise Data warehouse, you know, Clouded Cloud Native Edition, you know, bring it all in one place again. Um, I think it's providing, sort of, You know, it's I think, for these folks that think this might be kind of like a a linchpin for that. I think there are several other things that actually that really have made a bigger impression on me. Actually, at this event, one is is basically is, um we watch their move with Eunice store. Um, and it's kind of interesting coming, you know, coming from mongo db last week. And I see it's like these two companies seem to be going converging towards the same place at different speeds. I think it's not like it's going to get there faster than Mongo for a number of different reasons, but I see like a number of common threads here. I mean, one is that Mongo was was was a company. It's always been towards developers. They need you know, start cultivating data, people, >>these guys going the other way. >>Exactly. Bingo. And the thing is that but they I think where they're converging is the idea of operational analytics and trying to serve all constituencies. The other thing, which which also in terms of serving, you know, multiple constituencies is how snowflake is laid out Snow Park and what I'm finding like. There's an interesting I economy. On one hand, you have this very ingrained integration of Anaconda, which I think is pretty ingenious. On the other hand, you speak, let's say, like, let's say the data robot folks and say, You know something our folks wanna work data signs us. We want to work in our environment and use snowflake in the background. So I see those kind of some interesting sort of cross cutting trends. >>So, Sandy, I mean, Frank Sullivan, we'll talk about there's definitely benefits into going into the walled garden. Yeah, I don't think we dispute that, but we see them making moves and adding more and more open source capabilities like Apache iceberg. Is that a Is that a move to sort of counteract the narrative that the data breaks is put out there. Is that customer driven? What's your take on that? >>Uh, primarily I think it is to contract this whole notion that once you move data into snowflake, it's a proprietary format. So I think that's how it started. But it's hugely beneficial to the customers to the users, because now, if you have large amounts of data in parquet files, you can leave it on s three. But then you using the the Apache iceberg table format. In a snowflake, you get all the benefits of snowflakes. Optimizer. So, for example, you get the, you know, the micro partitioning. You get the meta data. So, uh, in a single query, you can join. You can do select from a snowflake table union and select from iceberg table, and you can do store procedures, user defined functions. So I think they what they've done is extremely interesting. Uh, iceberg by itself still does not have multi table transactional capabilities. So if I'm running a workload, I might be touching 10 different tables. So if I use Apache iceberg in a raw format, they don't have it. But snowflake does, >>right? There's hence the delta. And maybe that maybe that closes over time. I want to ask you as you look around this I mean the ecosystems pretty vibrant. I mean, it reminds me of, like reinvent in 2013, you know? But then I'm struck by the complexity of the last big data era and a dupe and all the different tools. And is this different, or is it the sort of same wine new new bottle? You guys have any thoughts on that? >>I think it's different and I'll tell you why. I think it's different because it's based around sequel. So if back to Tony's point, these vendors are coming at this from different angles, right? You've got data warehouse vendors and you've got data lake vendors and they're all going to meet in the middle. So in your case, you're taught operational analytical. But the same thing is true with Data Lake and Data Warehouse and Snowflake no longer wants to be known as the Data Warehouse. There a data cloud and our research again. I like to base everything off of that. >>I love what our >>research shows that organisation Two thirds of organisations have sequel skills and one third have big data skills, so >>you >>know they're going to meet in the middle. But it sure is a lot easier to bring along those people who know sequel already to that midpoint than it is to bring big data people to remember. >>Mrr Odula, one of the founders of Cloudera, said to me one time, John Kerry and the Cube, that, uh, sequel is the killer app for a Yeah, >>the difference at this, you know, with with snowflake, is that you don't have to worry about taming the zoo. Animals really have thought out the ease of use, you know? I mean, they thought about I mean, from the get go, they thought of too thin to polls. One is ease of use, and the other is scale. And they've had. And that's basically, you know, I think very much differentiates it. I mean, who do have the scale, but it didn't have the ease of use. But don't I >>still need? Like, if I have, you know, governance from this vendor or, you know, data prep from, you know, don't I still have to have expertise? That's sort of distributed in those those worlds, right? I mean, go ahead. Yeah. >>So the way I see it is snowflake is adding more and more capabilities right into the database. So, for example, they've they've gone ahead and added security and privacy so you can now create policies and do even set level masking, dynamic masking. But most organisations have more than snowflake. So what we are starting to see all around here is that there's a whole series of data catalogue companies, a bunch of companies that are doing dynamic data masking security and governance data observe ability, which is not a space snowflake has gone into. So there's a whole ecosystem of companies that that is mushrooming, although, you know so they're using the native capabilities of snowflake, but they are at a level higher. So if you have a data lake and a cloud data warehouse and you have other, like relational databases, you can run these cross platform capabilities in that layer. So so that way, you know, snowflakes done a great job of enabling that ecosystem about >>the stream lit acquisition. Did you see anything here that indicated there making strong progress there? Are you excited about that? You're sceptical. Go ahead. >>And I think it's like the last mile. Essentially. In other words, it's like, Okay, you have folks that are basically that are very, very comfortable with tableau. But you do have developers who don't want to have to shell out to a separate tool. And so this is where Snowflake is essentially working to address that constituency, um, to San James Point. I think part of it, this kind of plays into it is what makes this different from the ado Pere is the fact that this all these capabilities, you know, a lot of vendors are taking it very seriously to make put this native obviously snowflake acquired stream. Let's so we can expect that's extremely capabilities are going to be native. >>And the other thing, too, about the Hadoop ecosystem is Claudia had to help fund all those different projects and got really, really spread thin. I want to ask you guys about this super cloud we use. Super Cloud is this sort of metaphor for the next wave of cloud. You've got infrastructure aws, azure, Google. It's not multi cloud, but you've got that infrastructure you're building a layer on top of it that hides the underlying complexities of the primitives and the a p I s. And you're adding new value in this case, the data cloud or super data cloud. And now we're seeing now is that snowflake putting forth the notion that they're adding a super path layer. You can now build applications that you can monetise, which to me is kind of exciting. It makes makes this platform even less discretionary. We had a lot of talk on Wall Street about discretionary spending, and that's not discretionary. If you're monetising it, um, what do you guys think about that? Is this something that's that's real? Is it just a figment of my imagination, or do you see a different way of coming any thoughts on that? >>So, in effect, they're trying to become a data operating system, right? And I think that's wonderful. It's ambitious. I think they'll experience some success with that. As I said, applications are important. That's a great way to deliver information. You can monetise them, so you know there's there's a good economic model around it. I think they will still struggle, however, with bringing everything together onto one platform. That's always the challenge. Can you become the platform that's hard, hard to predict? You know, I think this is This is pretty exciting, right? A lot of energy, a lot of large ecosystem. There is a network effect already. Can they succeed in being the only place where data exists? You know, I think that's going to be a challenge. >>I mean, the fact is, I mean, this is a classic best of breed versus the umbrella play. The thing is, this is nothing new. I mean, this is like the you know, the old days with enterprise applications were basically oracle and ASAP vacuumed up all these. You know, all these applications in their in their ecosystem, whereas with snowflake is. And if you look at the cloud, folks, the hyper scale is still building out their own portfolios as well. Some are, You know, some hyper skills are more partner friendly than others. What? What Snowflake is saying is that we're going to give all of you folks who basically are competing against the hyper skills in various areas like data catalogue and pipelines and all that sort of wonderful stuff will make you basically, you know, all equal citizens. You know the burden is on you to basically we will leave. We will lay out the A P. I s Well, we'll allow you to basically, you know, integrate natively to us so you can provide as good experience. But the but the onus is on your back. >>Should the ecosystem be concerned, as they were back to reinvent 2014 that Amazon was going to nibble away at them or or is it different? >>I find what they're doing is different. Uh, for example, data sharing. They were the first ones out the door were data sharing at a large scale. And then everybody has jumped in and said, Oh, we also do data sharing. All the hyper scholars came in. But now what snowflake has done is they've taken it to the next level. Now they're saying it's not just data sharing. It's up sharing and not only up sharing. You can stream the thing you can build, test deploy, and then monetise it. Make it discoverable through, you know, through your marketplace >>you can monetise it. >>Yes. Yeah, so So I I think what they're doing is they are taking it a step further than what hyper scale as they are doing. And because it's like what they said is becoming like the data operating system You log in and you have all of these different functionalities you can do in machine learning. Now you can do data quality. You can do data preparation and you can do Monetisation. Who do you >>think is snowflakes? Biggest competitor? What do you guys think? It's a hard question, isn't it? Because you're like because we all get the we separate computer from storage. We have a cloud data and you go, Okay, that's nice, >>but there's, like, a crack. I think >>there's uniqueness. I >>mean, put it this way. In the old days, it would have been you know, how you know the prime household names. I think today is the hyper scholars and the idea what I mean again, this comes down to the best of breed versus by, you know, get it all from one source. So where is your comfort level? Um, so I think they're kind. They're their co op a Titian the hyper scale. >>Okay, so it's not data bricks, because why they're smaller. >>Well, there is some okay now within the best of breed area. Yes, there is competition. The obvious is data bricks coming in from the data engineering angle. You know, basically the snowflake coming from, you know, from the from the data analyst angle. I think what? Another potential competitor. And I think Snowflake, basically, you know, admitted as such potentially is mongo >>DB. Yeah, >>Exactly. So I mean, yes, there are two different levels of sort >>of a on a longer term collision course. >>Exactly. Exactly. >>Sort of service now and in salesforce >>thing that was that we actually get when I say that a lot of people just laughed. I was like, No, you're kidding. There's no way. I said Excuse me, >>But then you see Mongo last week. We're adding some analytics capabilities and always been developers, as you say, and >>they trashed sequel. But yet they finally have started to write their first real sequel. >>We have M c M Q. Well, now we have a sequel. So what >>were those numbers, >>Dave? Two thirds. One third. >>So the hyper scale is but the hyper scale urz are you going to trust your hyper scale is to do your cross cloud. I mean, maybe Google may be I mean, Microsoft, perhaps aws not there yet. Right? I mean, how important is cross cloud, multi cloud Super cloud Whatever you want to call it What is your data? >>Shows? Cloud is important if I remember correctly. Our research shows that three quarters of organisations are operating in the cloud and 52% are operating across more than one cloud. So, uh, two thirds of the organisations are in the cloud are doing multi cloud, so that's pretty significant. And now they may be operating across clouds for different reasons. Maybe one application runs in one cloud provider. Another application runs another cloud provider. But I do think organisations want that leverage over the hyper scholars right they want they want to be able to tell the hyper scale. I'm gonna move my workloads over here if you don't give us a better rate. Uh, >>I mean, I I think you know, from a database standpoint, I think you're right. I mean, they are competing against some really well funded and you look at big Query barely, you know, solid platform Red shift, for all its faults, has really done an amazing job of moving forward. But to David's point, you know those to me in any way. Those hyper skills aren't going to solve that cross cloud cloud problem, right? >>Right. No, I'm certainly >>not as quickly. No. >>Or with as much zeal, >>right? Yeah, right across cloud. But we're gonna operate better on our >>Exactly. Yes. >>Yes. Even when we talk about multi cloud, the many, many definitions, like, you know, you can mean anything. So the way snowflake does multi cloud and the way mongo db two are very different. So a snowflake says we run on all the hyper scalar, but you have to replicate your data. What Mongo DB is claiming is that one cluster can have notes in multiple different clouds. That is right, you know, quite something. >>Yeah, right. I mean, again, you hit that. We got to go. But, uh, last question, um, snowflake undervalued, overvalued or just about right >>in the stock market or in customers. Yeah. Yeah, well, but, you know, I'm not sure that's the right question. >>That's the question I'm asking. You know, >>I'll say the question is undervalued or overvalued for customers, right? That's really what matters. Um, there's a different audience. Who cares about the investor side? Some of those are watching, but But I believe I believe that the from the customer's perspective, it's probably valued about right, because >>the reason I I ask it, is because it has so hyped. You had $100 billion value. It's the past service now is value, which is crazy for this student Now. It's obviously come back quite a bit below its IPO price. So But you guys are at the financial analyst meeting. Scarpelli laid out 2029 projections signed up for $10 billion.25 percent free time for 20% operating profit. I mean, they better be worth more than they are today. If they do >>that. If I If I see the momentum here this week, I think they are undervalued. But before this week, I probably would have thought there at the right evaluation, >>I would say they're probably more at the right valuation employed because the IPO valuation is just such a false valuation. So hyped >>guys, I could go on for another 45 minutes. Thanks so much. David. Tony Sanjeev. Always great to have you on. We'll have you back for sure. Having us. All right. Thank you. Keep it right there. Were wrapping up Day two and the Cube. Snowflake. Summit 2022. Right back. Mm. Mhm.

>>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Cubes. Coverage of Mongo db World 2022. This is the first Mongo live mongo DB World. Since 2019, the Cube has covered a number of of mongo shows actually going back to when the company was called Engine. Some of you may recall Margo since then has done an i p o p o in 2017, it's It's been a rocket ship company. It's up. It'll probably do 1.2 billion in revenue this year. It's got a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Uh, despite the tech clash, it's still got a 19 or $20 million valuation growing above 50% a year. Uh, company just had a really strong quarter, and and there seems to be hitting on all cylinders. My name is Dave Volonte. And here to kick it off with me as Sanjeev Mohan, who was the principal at Sanremo. So great to see you. You become a wonderful cube contributor, Former Gartner analyst. Really sharp? No, the database space in the data space generally really well, so thanks for coming back on >>you. You know, it's just amazing how exciting. The entire data space is like they used to say. Companies are All companies are software companies. All companies are data >>companies, >>so data has become the the foundation. >>They say software is eating the world. Data is eating software and a little little quips here. But this is a good size show. Four or 5000 people? I don't really know exactly. You know the numbers, but it's exciting. And of course, a lot of financial services were here at the Javits Centre. Um, let's let's lay down the basics for people of Mongo, DB is a is a document database, but they've been advancing. That's a document database as an alternative to R D. B M s. Explain that, but explain also how Mongo has broadened its capabilities and serving a lot more use cases. >>So that's my forte is like databases technology. But before even I talk about that, I have to say I am blown away by this mongo db world because mongo db uh, in beckons to all of us during the pandemic has really come of age, and it's a billion dollar company. Now we are in this brand new Javits Centre That's been built during the pandemic. And and now the company is holding this event the high 1000 people last year. So I think this company has really grown. And why has it drawn is because its offerings have grown to more developers than just a document database document databases. Revolution revolutionised the whole DBM s space where no sequel came up. Because for a change, you don't need a structured schema. You could start bringing data in this document model scheme, uh, like varying schema. But since then, they've added, uh, things like such. So they have you seen such? They added a geospatial. They had a time series last year, and this year they keep adding more and more so like, for example, they are going to add some column store indexes. So from being a purely transactional, they are now starting to address analytical. And they're starting to address more use cases, like, you know, uh, like what? What was announced this morning at keynote was faceted search. So they're expanding the going deeper and deeper into these other data >>structures. Taking Lucy made a search of first class citizens, but I want to ask you some basic questions about document database. So it's no fixed schemes. You put anything in there? Actually, so more data friendly. They're trying to simplify the use of data. Okay, that's that's pretty clear. >>What are the >>trade offs of a document database? >>So it's not like, you know, one technology has solved every problem. Every technology comes with its own tradeoffs. So in a document, you basically get rid of joining tables with primary foreign keys because you can have a flexible schemer and so and wouldn't sing single document. So it's very easy to write and and search. But when you have a lot of repeated elements and you start getting more and more complex, your document size can start expanding quite a bit because you're trying to club everything into a single space. So So that is where the complexity goes >>up. So what does that mean for for practitioner, it means they have to think about what? How they how they are ultimately gonna structure, how they're going to query so they can get the best performances that right. So they're gonna put some time in up front in order to make it pay back at the tail end, but clearly it's it's working. But is that the correct way of thinking about >>100% in, uh, the sequel world? You didn't care about the sequel. Analytical queries You just cared about how your data model was structured and then sequel would would basically such any model. But in the new sequel world, you have to know your patterns before you. You invest into the database so it's changed that equation where you come in knowing what you are signing up. >>So a couple of questions, if I can kind of Colombo questions so to Margo talks about how it's really supporting mission critical applications and at the same time, my understanding is the architecture of mongo specifically, or a document database in general. But specifically, you've got a a primary, uh, database, and you and that is the sort of the master, if you will, right and then you can create secondaries. But so help me square the circle between mission critical and really maybe a more of a focus on, say, consistency versus availability. Do customers have to sort of think about and design in that availability? How do they do that? How a Mongol customers handling that. >>So I have to say, uh, my experience of mongo db was was that the whole company, the whole ethos was developed a friendly. So, to be honest, I don't think Mongo DB was as much focused on high availability, disaster, recovery, even security. To some extent, they were more focused on developer productivity. >>And you've experienced >>simplicity. Make it simple, make the developers productive as fast as you can. What has really, uh, was an inflexion point for Mongo DB was the launch of Atlas because the atlas they were able to introduce all of these management features and hide it abstracted from the end users. So now they've got, you know, like 2014 is when Atlas came out and it was in four regions. But today they're in 100 regions, so they keep expanding, then every hyper scale cloud provider, and they've abstracted that whole managed. >>So Atlas, of course, is the managed database as a service in the cloud. And so it's those clouds, cloud infrastructure and cloud tooling that has allowed them to go after those high available application. My other question is when you talk about adding search, geospatial time series There are a lot of specialised databases that take time series persons. You have time series specialists that go deep into time series can accompany like Mongo with an all in one strategy. Uh, how close can they get to that functionality? Do they have to be? You know, it's kind of a classic Microsoft, you know, maybe not perfect, but good enough. I mean, can they compete with those other areas? Uh, with those other specialists? And what happens to those specialists if the answer is yes. What's your take on that? If that question >>makes sense So David, this is not a mongo db only issue This is this is an issue with, you know, anytime serious database, any graph database Should I put a graph database or should I put a multifunctional database multidimensional database? And and I really think there is no right or wrong answer. It just really comes down to your use case. If you have an extremely let's, uh, complex graph, you know, then maybe you should go with best of breed purpose built database. But more and more, we're starting to see that organisations are looking to simplify their environment by going in for maybe a unified database that has multiple data structures. Yeah, well, >>it's certainly it's interesting when you hear Mongo speak. They don't They don't call out Oracle specifically, but when they talk about legacy r d m r d B m s that don't scale and are complex and are expensive, they're talking about Oracle first. And of course, there are others. Um, And then when they talk about, uh, bespoke databases the horses for courses, databases that they show a picture of that that's like the poster child for Amazon. Of course, they don't call out Amazon. They're a great partner of Amazon's. But those are really the sort of two areas that mangoes going after, Um, now Oracle. Of course, we'll talk about their converged strategy, and they're taking a similar approach. But so help us understand the difference. There is just because they're sort of or close traditional r d B M s, and they have all the drawbacks associated with that. But by the way, there are some benefits as well. So how do you see that all playing >>out? So you know it. Really, uh, it's coming down to the the origins of these databases. Uh, I think they're converging to a point where they are offering similar services. And if you look at some of the benchmark numbers or you talk to users, I from a business point of view, I I don't think there's too much of a difference. Uh, technology writes. The difference is that Mongo DB started in the document space. They were more interested in availability rather than consistency. Oracle started in the relation database with focus on financial services, so asset compliance is what they're based on. And since then they've been adding other pieces, so so they differ from where they started. Oracle has been in the industry for some since 19 seventies, so they have that maturity. But then they have that legacy, >>you know, I love. Recently, Oracle announced the mongo db uh, kpi. So basically saying why? Why leave Oracle when you can just, you know, do the market? So that, to me, is a sign that Mongo DB is doing well because the Oracle calls you out, whether your workday or snowflake or mongo. You know, whoever that's a sign to me that you've got momentum and you're stealing share in that marketplace, and clearly Mongo is they're growing at 50 plus percent per year. So thinking about the early I mentioned 10 gen Early on, I remember that one of the first conferences I went to mongo conferences. It was just It was all developers. A lot of developers here as well. But they have really, since 2014, expanded the capabilities you talk about, Atlas, you talked about all these other you know, types of databases that they've added. If it seems like Mongo is becoming a platform company, uh, what are your thoughts on that in terms of them sort of up levelling the message there now, a billion dollar plus company. What's the next? You know, wave for Mongo. >>So, uh, Oracle announced mongo db a p i s a W s has document d. B has cost most db so they all have a p. I compatible a p. I s not the source code because, you know, mongo DB has its own SPL licence, so they have written their own layer on top. But at the end of the day, you know, if you if you these companies have to keep innovating to catch up with Mongo DB because we can announce a brand new capability, then all these other players have to catch up. So other cloud providers have 80% or so of capabilities, but they'll never have 100% of what Mongo DB has. So people who are diehard Mongo DB fans they prefer to stay on mongo db. They are now able to write more applications like you know, mongo DB bought realm, which is their front end. Uh, like, you know, like, if you're on social media kind of thing, you can build your applications and sink it with Atlas. So So mongo DB is now at a point where they are adding more capabilities that more like developers like, You know, five G is coming. Autonomous cars are coming, so now they can address Iot kind of use cases. So that's why it's becoming such a juggle, not because it's becoming a platform rather than a single document database. >>So atlases, the near the midterm future. Today it's about 60% of revenues, but they have what we call self serve, which is really the traditional on premise stuff. They're connecting those worlds. You're bringing up the point that. Of course, they go across clouds. You also bring up the point that they've got edge plays. We're gonna talk to Verizon later on today. And they're they've got, uh, edge edge activity going on with developers. I I call it Super Cloud. Right, This layer that floats above. Now, of course, a lot of the super Cloud concert says we're gonna hide the underlying complexity. But for developers, they wanna they might want to tap those primitives, so presumably will let them do that. But But that hybrid that what we call Super Cloud that is a new wave of innovation, is it not? And do you? Do you agree with that? And do you see that as a real opportunity from Mongo in terms of penetrating a new tan? >>Yes. So I see this is a new opportunity. In fact, one of the reasons mongo DB has grown so quickly is because they are addressing more markets than they had three pandemic. Um, Also, there are all gradations of users. Some users want full control. They want an eye as kind of, uh, someone passed. And some businesses are like, you know, we don't care. We don't want to deal with the database. So today we heard, uh, mongo db. Several went gear. So now they have surveillance capability, their past. But if you if you're more into communities, they have communities. Operator. So they're addressing the full stack of different types of developers different workloads, different geographical regions. So that that's why the market is expected. >>We're seeing abstraction layers, you know, throughout the started a physical virtual containers surveillance and eventually SuperClubs Sanjeev. Great analysis. Thanks so much for taking your time to come with the cube. Alright, Keep it right there. But right back, right after this short break. This is Dave Volonte from the Javits Centre. Mongo db World 2022. Thank you. >>Mm.

>>Hello, and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit 2022, a summit New York city coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the cube got great guest here, Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here's on the cube. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of gonna called Ze know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, John, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, was about 16, I graduated out of high school early. Um, worked at this company, Bebo running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things are probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16, so I was not able to actually go into the casino on my own <laugh> um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as C security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of this? >>Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean, you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials are in the workforce. It's changing. Like no one's putting package software on servers. >>Yeah, no, I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale to I, I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? Uh, you were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. >>All right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now, as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind and cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Ze is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it'll deploy on a AWS using Al AWS tools. >>So, right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company >>About a year and a half old now. >>Right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. Um, that's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. Mm-hmm <affirmative> they don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. Um, they want to say, run this API on a AWS in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. >>Yeah. So I think the problem you're solving is, is that there's a lot of want to be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And the people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love that infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? Yeah. >>We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I built this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have? So how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cause they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. You, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw, has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So, Hey, this is a AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll configure your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage AWS reli ability of you don't have to trust us. You have to trust S and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance, oh, the servers not 99% downtime, uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stays up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey, S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh>, uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's a lot of schools playing >>With serverless. >>Yeah. Playing with a lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool Lam stuff as well, going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>That's a good feeling, isn't it? Oh >>Yeah. There's nothing >>Like that. Tools versus platforms. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool, she becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on our reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the piece of the stacks. We do C I C D management. We do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used awesome in conjunction more. >>Right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps for people on a DevOps team. Do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z? Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 man DevOps teams. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, so, you know, as more structured people come in, because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AOL service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy for >>You. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineer salary. So we charge, uh, a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for based >>On the requirement scale. Yeah. You know, so back into the people cost, you must offer her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah. There's a discounts kind of at scale, >>Then you pass through the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. Oh. So >>They have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your Aless account in, um, it, which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your cost down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better. And >>The better, the old guy on the cube here. >><laugh> I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. AWS is obviously the biggest cloud. Um, and it's constantly coming out with new services. Yeah. But we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds. Um, and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools from multiple clouds. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. Awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I've always, I was a computer science undergraduate in the, in the eighties and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? So mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things much. You've got a lot of, a lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering, merging as a huge skill. What's it? What's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the data's really relevant, but it's you got other language opportunities, you got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion stay away from yeah. Or >>Stay away from that's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classrooms great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm abandoning the project. Move on. Yeah. Because you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this certain, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. >>You can launch a project, >>Can see gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. >>So you're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Um, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is DJing me this idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps that a win. >>I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And, and, and someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time <laugh> and, and became such a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike, right. Outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know, >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on, what you're looking for. You're hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and have the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out ze.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find a Z. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. Right? Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon. Um, now 20 we're on great new project here. The cube builders are all young. They're growing in to the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's, uh, tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a cue. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Thanks.

>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

>>Mm. Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable and secure. That's what it's all about. So far, we've covered the rapid migration to WiFi 60 technology and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're gonna get into private five g to do that. Let's welcome Masumi here. Who is vice president and general manager of mobile cable and the Iot business at Cisco and Greg Dorey, who is the vice president of product management for the networking experiences group of Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access that whole portfolio enterprise five G Cisco DNA spaces, Cisco, Iasi A lot of stuff there. Uh, Greg gentlemen, welcome, >>Dave. Thank you for having us. >>Yeah, our pleasure. So let's start with you on the topic of private five g five g. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, you know what's unique about Cisco's private five G? >>So, most importantly, delivering private five G in enterprise terms that's super important to look at five p. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at private five g with the lens of enterprise. What enterprise really needs is five g going to come and displace a lot of existing technology? Or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise has an excellent Their digitisation is you need. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work, and what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people things and space together. And I strongly believe the combination of WiFi six n five g for private network is going to accelerate that journey, bringing people things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why are our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continent. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using WiFi technology and five G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink. Do I have to go and build a new background is a common background that will support both WiFi as well as five t Most importantly, delivering this enter offer as a service with the ease of consumption is of operation and trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workloads on. >>I like it. So couple takeaways there are inclusive of all workers, not just knowledge workers non disruptive. Everybody loves to hear that. And of course, the as a service model is key. So let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for five g, right? It's lightning fast. They've got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody is excited about. The question, though, is is five g gets introduced. You know it's going to power things like Coyote Networks. Is that going to replace WiFi and legacy Wired broadband? >>Absolutely not. So we see private five years, an augmentation to the enterprise on top of WiFi WiFi. As you heard in the previous conversation, WiFi is bringing more capability with WiFi six and WiFi 16 and five G is going to be yet another augmentation. WiFi and fight. The will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg. >>Yeah, I think it's sort of like I like to say it's an and not an AR because there's enough use cases out there. Richard Pryor Spectrum And you know, spectrum >>is a constraint, so >>you have private five G, your WiFi six and both offer opportunities. So, for example, in an indoor carpet setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing or connecting your laptop, WiFi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation, uh, factory where you need seven nines of reliability, private five g is a better technology. Similarly outdoor large areas. It's probably private. Five g right like this, you can have easy handoff between public and private, so it's use case driven, and once it's used case driven, it's going to be an are because there's so many next time use cases, whether it's a are we are drones, self driving cars, you name it right, like And so I think these two technologies five g and Y 5 60 is gonna work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah, and just the data volumes are gonna be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is, every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that is going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of five g. >>Dave, this is a fantastic question, and this is why we have spent me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continual. I'll start with the foundation first, back down. So we have been building this enterprise backbone, supporting what Wild Connexion as well as WiFi Connexion. We wanted to make sure that as private five G camps within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your background is the common backbone that will support both WiFi WiFi six WiFi 60 as well as private five g. You rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cap 90 that will also support a private key access. The second aspect of private five G is as you build any new technology into enterprise. Oftentimes we get into this trap to get to an outcome. We move fast and we create asylum. And then that silo operation creates a barriers to mainstream it. So upfront we have to think about not creating another silent and how we're doing it. Number one is a device that can connecting to WiFi network or a private five G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage. The identity will create continue of the common identity across the WiFi access or five t access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is, how are we going to reach in all our staff are enterprise staff is well trained with WiFi technology and white technology. Now five G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit, but it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning problems. This is where our simple to consume simple to operate model of sass comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud deliberate service enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning car. Adopting this technology last but not list on how you're going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise, Oftentimes you need a huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SARS will allow Enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as you go model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to break to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg to your >>So we we talk about it in two different ways. One is a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it Isis Co ice platform. And so years and years of policy and identities Excess service, radio service they use, uh, etcetera are plugged in already into our eyes. Right. So if you can share that with this private five years as a service, uh, infrastructure that Muslims been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge because we're not forcing enterprises to create new identities, a new policy. So thats sort of step one to make it easier. Uh, you also talk through something where, in the case of a public five g network, for example, the It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Was this for WiFi? You have to log into an S I D in your hotel or in your home and home. It's automatic, but that's that logging process that creates friction. And that's a problem, because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call us open roaming, right? Like that's, uh, identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers could be, um, anything that anyone who owns an identity and they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that Onboarding can be automatic and once on boarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between five and five G. And so that's again another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers because you share across public private G and WiFi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption. As we enter into this heterogeneous >>world, >>I can't wait. Let's let's talk about how this thing scales in the go to market, what are the most likely or maybe preferred or obvious routes to market for private five g Francisco >>so they stay tuned when when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that exposed to the spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries, there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have talked to very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market? Partnering with many service providers and mobile operators, where in countries where we don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators that you will hear more about as we come to mobile world Congress is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology even if they don't have the spectrum in places where the enterprise might have direct spectrum access. We'll also bring in our relativist providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our cell services or a cloud deliberate services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with menaces providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises are most important. Primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise. Make it intuitive and trust it from day one. >>Outstanding. Okay. Assume, Greg, Thanks so much. It's great to have you guys. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. Mm mm.

>>from around >>the globe. It's >>the cube presenting future >>Cloud one >>event. A >>world of opportunities >>brought to you by Cisco. >>Okay. We're here with costume. Does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product management for Cloud, compute at Cisco. KTV J Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave >>to be here. >>Katie. Let's talk about cloud. You. And I, last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no, that's that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um there's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift, in fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on devops and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform uh is inter site, we've been investing in Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today. There were clothes of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud, Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any any version of that, Whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi, cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to uh to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently. And then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners, their suite of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. It's just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets. And then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh, we'll talk about some more of those days. >>Great. Thank you. Katie VJ Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCII corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >>Mhm. Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and compute group right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers >>and applications >>team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh as you rightly said, harsher Carp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with Harsher Card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed. I see to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations and we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russia Carbonara. >>Yeah, telephone gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there, the inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud Native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend. What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud Native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now. Cloud native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for a. Ks and this just gave a little over one month ago now, what interstate Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supportive target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered, as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and cognitive to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we have today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager. The Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to I K s are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking. Right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed, it needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud. And we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mash Manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So couple of things to close on. First of all. Um, inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing, the second thing I close with is, um we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with Public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale is everything they're doing to innovate superfast. All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world including Cisco. How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube, the leader in tech event >>coverage. >>Mm mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for the host of the cube here for virtual event Cameron Siva who's here with corporate vice president with a M. D. Uh CVP and business development. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Nice to be. It's an honor to be here. >>You know, love A. M. D. Love the growth, love the processors. Epic 7000 and three series was just launched. Its out in the field. Give us a quick overview of the of the of the processor, how it's doing and how it's going to help us in the data center and the edge >>for sure. No this is uh this is an exciting time for A. M. D. This is probably one of the most exciting times uh to be honest and in my 2020 plus years of uh working in sex industry, I think I've never been this excited about a new product as I am about the the third generation ethic processor that were just announced. Um So the Epic 7003, what we're calling it a series processor. It's just a fantastic product. We not only have the fastest server processor in the world with the AMG Epic 7763 but we also have the fastest CPU core so that the process of being the complete package to complete socket and then we also the fastest poor in the world with the the Epic um 72 F three for frequency. So that one runs run super fast on each core. And then we also have 64 cores in the CPU. So it's it's addressing both kind of what we call scale up and scale out. So it's overall overall just just an enormous, enormous product line that that I think um you know, we'll be we'll be amazing within within IBM IBM cloud. Um The processor itself includes 256 megabytes of L three cache, um you know, cash is super important for a variety of workloads in the large cache size. We have shown our we've seen scale in particular cloud applications, but across the board, um you know, database, uh java all sorts of things. This processor is also based on the Zen three core, which is basically 19% more instructions per cycle relative to ours, N two. So that was the prior generation, the second generation Epic Force, which is called Rome. So this this new CPU is actually quite a bit more capable. It runs also at a higher frequency with both the 64 4 and the frequency optimized device. Um and finally, we have um what we call all in features. So rather than kind of segment our product line and charge you for every little, you know, little thing you turn on or off. We actually have all in features includes, you know, really importantly security, which is becoming a big, big team and something that we're partnering with IBM very closely on um and then also things like 628 lanes of pc I E gen four, um are your faces that grew up to four terabytes so you can do these big large uh large um in memory databases. The pc I interfaces gives you lots and lots of storage capability so all in all super products um and we're super excited to be working with IBM honest. >>Well let's get into some of the details on this impact because obviously it's not just one place where these processes are going to live. You're seeing a distributed surface area core to edge um, cloud and hybrid is now in play. It's pretty much standard now. Multi cloud on the horizon. Company's gonna start realizing, okay, I gotta put this to work and I want to get more insights out of the data and civilian applications that are evolving on this. But you guys have seen some growth in the cloud with the Epic processors, what can customers expect and why our cloud providers choosing Epic processors, >>you know, a big part of this is actually the fact that I that am be um delivers upon our roadmap. So we, we kind of do what we say and say what we do and we delivered on time. Um so we actually announced I think was back in august of 2019, their second generation, Epic part and then now in March, we are now in the third generation. Very much on schedule. Very much um, intern expectations and meeting the performance that we had told the industry and told our customers that we're going to meet back then. So it's a really super important pieces that our customers are now learning to expect performance, jenin, Jenin and on time from A. M. D, which is, which is uh, I think really a big part of our success. The second thing is, I think, you know, we are, we are a leader in terms of the core density that we provide and cloud in particular really values high density. So the 64 cores is absolutely unique today in the industry and that it has the ability to be offered both in uh bare metal. Um, as we have been deployed in uh, in IBM cloud and also in virtualized type environment. So it has that ability to spend a lot of different use cases. Um and you can, you know, you can run each core uh really fast, But then also have the scale out and then be able to take advantage of all 64 cores. Each core has two threads up to 128 threads per socket. It's a super powerful uh CPU and it has a lot of value for um for the for the cloud cloud provider, they're actually about over 400 total instances by the way of A. M. D processors out there. And that's all the flavors, of course, not just that they're generation, but still it's it's starting to really proliferate. We're trying to see uh M d I think all across the cloud, >>more cores, more threads all goodness. I gotta ask you, you know, I interviewed Arvin the ceo of IBM before he was Ceo at a conference and you know, he's always been, I know him, he's always loved cloud, right? So, um, but he sees a little bit differently than just being like copying the clouds. He sees it as we see it unfolding here, I think Hybrid. Um, and so I can almost see the playbook evolving. You know, Red has an operating system, Cloud and Edge is a distributed system, it's got that vibe of a system architecture, almost got processors everywhere. Could you give us a sense of the over an overview of the work you're doing with IBM Cloud and what a M. D s role is there? And I'm curious, could you share for the folks watching too? >>For sure. For sure. By the way, IBM cloud is a fantastic partner to work with. So, so, first off you talked about about the hybrid, hybrid cloud is a really important thing for us and that's um that's an area that we are definitely focused in on. Uh but in terms of our specific joint partnerships and we do have an announcement last year. Um so it's it's it's somewhat public, but we are working together on Ai where IBM is a is an undisputed leader with Watson and some of the technologies that you guys bring there. So we're bringing together, you know, it's kind of this real hard work goodness with IBM problems and know how on the AI side. In addition, IBM is also known for um you know, really enterprise grade, yeah, security and working with some of the key sectors that need and value, reliability, security, availability, um in those areas. Uh and so I think that partnership, we have quite a bit of uh quite a strong relationship and partnership around working together on security and doing confidential computer. >>Tell us more about the confidential computing. This is a joint development agreement, is a joint venture joint development agreement. Give us more detail on this. Tell us more about this announcement with IBM cloud, an AMG confidential computing. >>So that's right. So so what uh you know, there's some key pillars to this. One of this is being able to to work together, define open standards, open architecture. Um so jointly with an IBM and also pulling in something assets in terms of red hat to be able to work together and pull together a confidential computer that can so some some key ideas here, we can work with work within a hybrid cloud. We can work within the IBM cloud and to be able to provide you with, provide, provide our joint customers are and customers with uh with unprecedented security and reliability uh in the cloud, >>what's the future of processors, I mean, what should people think when they expect to see innovation? Um Certainly data centers are evolving with core core features to work with hybrid operating model in the cloud. People are getting that edge relationship basically the data centers a large edge, but now you've got the other edges, we got industrial edges, you got consumers, people wearables, you're gonna have more and more devices big and small. Um what's the what's the road map look like? How do you describe the future of a. M. D. In in the IBM world? >>I think I think R I B M M D partnership is bright, future is bright for sure, and I think there's there's a lot of key pieces there. Uh you know, I think IBM brings a lot of value in terms of being able to take on those up earlier, upper uh layers of software and that and the full stack um so IBM strength has really been, you know, as a systems company and as a software company. Right, So combining that with the Andes Silicon, uh divided and see few devices really really is is it's a great combination, I see, you know, I see um growth in uh you know, obviously in in deploying kind of this, this scale out model where we have these very large uh large core count Cpus I see that trend continuing for sure. Uh you know, I think that that is gonna, that is sort of the way of the future that you want cloud data applications that can scale across multi multiple cores within the socket and then across clusters of Cpus with within the data center um and IBM is in a really good position to take advantage of that to go to, to to drive that within the cloud. That income combination with IBM s presence on prem uh and so that's that's where the hybrid hybrid cloud value proposition comes in um and so we actually see ourselves uh you know, playing in both sides, so we do have a very strong presence now and increasingly so on premises as well. And we we partner we were very interested in working with IBM on the on on premises uh with some of some of the key customers and then offering that hybrid connectivity onto, onto the the IBM cloud as well. >>I B M and M. D. Great partnership, great for clarifying and and sharing that insight come, I appreciate it. Thanks for for coming on the cube, I do want to ask you while I got you here. Um kind of a curveball question if you don't mind. As you see hybrid cloud developing one of the big trends is this ecosystem play right? So you're seeing connections between IBM and their and their partners being much more integrated. So cloud has been a big KPI kind of model. You connect people through a. P. I. S. There's a big trend that we're seeing and we're seeing this really in our reporting on silicon angle the rise of a cloud service provider within these ecosystems where hey, I could build on top of IBM cloud and build a great business. Um and as I do that, I might want to look at an architecture like an AMG, how does that fit into to your view as a doing business development over at A. M. D. I mean because because people are building on top of these ecosystems are building their own clouds on top of cloud, you're seeing data. Cloud, just seeing these kinds of clouds, specialty clouds. So I mean we could have a cute cloud on top of IBM maybe someday. So, so I might want to build out a whole, I might be a cloud. So that's more processors needed for you. So how do you see this enablement? Because IBM is going to want to do that, it's kind of like, I'm kind of connecting the dots here in real time, but what's your, what's your take on that? What's your reaction? >>I think, I think that's I think that's right and I think m d isn't, it isn't a pretty good position with IBM to be able to, to enable that. Um we do have some very significant osD partnerships, a lot of which that are leveraged into IBM um such as Red hat of course, but also like VM ware and Nutanix. Um this provide these always V partners provide kind of the base level infrastructure that we can then build upon and then have that have that A P I. And be able to build build um uh the the multi cloud environments that you're talking about. Um and I think that, I think that's right. I think that is that is one of the uh you know, kind of future trends that that we will see uh you know, services that are offered on top of IBM cloud that take advantage of the the capabilities of the platform that come with it. Um and you know, the bare metal offerings that that IBM offer on their cloud is also quite unique um and hyper very performance. Um and so this actually gives um I think uh the the kind of uh call the medic cloud that unique ability to kind of go in and take advantage of the M. D. Hardware at a performance level and at a um uh to take advantage of that infrastructure better than they could in another cloud environments. I think that's that's that's actually very key and very uh one of the one of the features of the IBM problems that differentiates it >>so much headroom there corns really appreciate you sharing that. I think it's a great opportunity. As I say, if you're you want to build and compete. Finally, there's no with the white space with no competition or be better than the competition. So as they say in business, thank you for coming on sharing. Great great future ahead for all builders out there. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks thank you very much. >>Okay. IBM think cube coverage here. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio and health happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for a long time but actually first time on the program also a Boston area native I believe yes Jim and so it's Jim Sullivan who's the CEO of nwn Jim's thanks so much for joining us let's do it's great to be here watching you guys forever and first time and happy to be here so we've got a lot of shared history we both we overlapped a little bit at a company that some people might remember was EMC before it was the largest acquisition in tech history you've worked for a number of companies we've covered here on the cube XIV actifi oh and the like so tell us first you know nwn it's not a company that you know the vast majority of people are going to know of but you know good-sized company been around for a while Waltham based tell us tell us a little bit about what brought you to nwn thanks to yet nwn is a you know solution service provider been around 10 years hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues 1,300 customers and a lot of really incredible you know platform offering service offerings and so was really excited to be able to kind of get involved with the company and begin to look at we could do for the industry and for customers all right yeah you talk about it you know an area that that's transforming greatly I mean tech in general you know we say that the the only constant in industry is change when you talk about services you talk about platforms that means a lot of things to a lot of people maybe explain a little bit that the spaces that end everyone plays in and where some of the core capability of the company are sure so if you look at as you know this a lot of everything for you know digital transformation is around the end-user experience so we all want to have great access to you know voice video you know clean network the ability to kind of have this great experience to collaborate with customers so India nwn really the core offerings unified communications which has really always been a kind of core of the company the network's underpinning those communications along with a contact center collaboration security and so security really wraps around everything and then those are the core areas where we are but the core IP of the company is the platform that can manage all those environment you know as a self-service function that the customers use or that arts contacts and her team can kind of run okay so when I hear that the solutions that you're talking about the the thing that comes kind of front and center in the industry that I've been hearing about it's the CX it's the customer experience you know what is the ultimate end users how are they interacting with as well as the employees themselves you know if you've got people at the contact centers that are running things how are you making their jobs easier so you know how does that play into you know what you're seeing in the market and how nwn you know delivers offerings in that space so everything's really tied together whether you have a device a a phone system everything's gonna be tied into the network and required really high security so the the management platform that we have allows customers to have that ability to provision in a real secure fashion a device that we can kind of deliver and manage the right phone systems that we can also deliver and manage all tied into a really secure Network and it can be anywhere they want it can be you know private cloud hybrid cloud or hosted cloud is how we deliver it today yeah there's the cloud discussion that's going on right now I was at Enterprise Connect earlier this year and you know everything seemed to be you know cloud enable an AI infused underneath from a customer standpoint you know that they can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of the jargon that's get gets thrown out there so help explain a little bit you know what solutions what is nwn build you know how does it fit in with kind of you know big tech companies that they probably have relationships with and debut and has been part of the channel for many of these products there to talk a little bit about that mix overall we're gonna deliver a solution for the customer in those areas right so in a unified communications area or a network area security so and the solutions going to be required you know some hardware you know a lot of services which is our people and then most importantly this management platform which is going to be the management capability the business analytics the knowledge center that kind of pull off from everybody right so our focus is really delivering the solution delivering it you know kind of a solution as a service so the customer has the ability that it's not outsourcing it's not managed services but we're gonna be running the service but they have the ability to self provision interact with pulling all their own analytics all their own data on their own environment so it's a much more interactive relationship than kind of the old-school managed services of the past you know I I like that term solutions as a service because we've learned the the failings of just pure outsourcing it was like oh can I get my mess for Less well no no you don't want your mess what customers need is they need to be able to deploy something today and as the business changes adjust that and you can't have something that you have to throw over the wall and say oh hey can you do this oh yeah we'll get back to you in six months maybe and here's your new bill and how that changes in the cloud era I need to be able to deploy something today and stay flexible to be able to take advantage of new technologies new innovations as they come along how do your offerings help customers stay current and you know drive that innovation adoption right so a huge part of we talk about this in a lot of industries particularly our old kind of infrastructure of days and that everything becoming more software-defined is is really everywhere or cloud offerings really everywhere and with software these changes are happening so fast so the customer gets an environment that's stable and secure deployed and managed by us but as changes happen our team and our kind of best practices capabilities allows to interact with their end users so you kind of drive the adoption which a lot of time it's more getting and training and making sure the new practices sort of happened because the efficiencies gained are huge that's sort of one and then two is is it's beginning to get adopted you're beginning to kind of roll that out across the entire enterprise so the customer gets that end user experience which it helps with employee retention you know really helps with business ROI and ultimately the investments they made are now being used and they're getting what they want so it might be excellent you know lying quality with great business analytics in a secure environment but it goes back down to you know is the network being utilized all the software capabilities being deployed and managed and really what's the business outcome for the customer so these this world is very much less speeds and feeds or technology or all of that versus okay where's the customer stand today and where do they want to bring the business to and what business outcomes they looking to drive the adoption services you know ensures that they get the business outcomes all right Jim you know what what industries what geographies gives a little bit of kind of the scope and breadth of your team right so it's 1,300 customers more than half the customers are really large enterprises you know companies like eversource the other half of the business is sled state local education so Yale University really big customer state of California we manage over 200,000 endpoints over 400 agencies so really some huge scale but it really maps to a great balance in the business of sled and enterprise accounts okay and you talked about cloud you have some of your own data centers how do you play with some of the public cloud and customer environments what's right what's kind of that mix and what are you yeah so so today customers want to have like I don't think they quite care but they want to have fast deployments really agile environments consistent costs really effective and so for us we able to provide that because we can provide private cloud on-premise we can service any public cloud for these deployments and we also have three data centers where we can provide a cloud solution for them or hybrid clouds lifts and really mapping particularly the enterprise accounts as we know they're beginning to learn like all public clouds little scary you know but if you get into a fireman where you can have really a shop that has you know private clouds that delivers a hybrid cloud environment for them much more flexible much more agile for them it's been a perfect scenario where the predominance of our customers are deployed in a cloud scenario managed by us but in their data centers in our cloud as well yeah right I think a really good point their customers are still sorting out where everything goes and you've got to have flexibility to say okay it's not one or the other it's usually more of an and right in helping customers you know move through what I do in there and for us most of these environments are you know really mission-critical applications that are gonna be rolled out whether it's the voice systems which really kind of backing and the underpinning the whole the whole customer experience it might be device as a service so when we kind of talk about end user experience it starts with really the voice that devices it's got to be really secure which is becomes a kind of a compliance issue and a lot of this is all tied together into the network so the the big differentiator for it end WN is the ability that we can have the management portal that really manages all these five environments together into one seamless into one seamless platform that they can pull the data from okay so talked about you've got team you've got technology you've got really important you've got a lot of good customers seems like you have a good relationship nwn is going through a bit of a transformation here since you've been on board just a few months now I've had a chance to look at the website and the biggest thing for me is I'll tell you from the old one to the new one the new one is simpler I really kind of grasped much faster what any of the wnd does so maybe speak a little bit to you know what nwn of today how that's different from how we might have thought of nwn in the past sure nwn been around 10 years as nwn but they've been acquiring companies and really had has incredible employees great customers really loyal customers and big accounts that were strategic too but as we really went through kind of the assessment of what's really resonating with customers we were able to really focus all the offerings down to these five core offerings that we've been talking about and then really have the right investments around all the IP that we've developed and really wanted to put against those five offerings and then have the customer success teams be able to be organized around that so the company has really focused on where 95% of the business was the ability to really put all the wood behind the arrow you know for those environments and for our customers to really focus and that's about a 50 billion dollar market in the u.s. right so that focus area is a big space big opportunity for growth and a lot of it was in the predominance of our 1,300 customers they buy one or two of these offerings from us and now the ability to really expand that but so many of these customers are so happy we're gonna kind of take it in those industries we're in probably about five core industries to really kind of take it to their peer their peer companies and really expanded in that account-based marketing sort of kind of program okay so five specific offerings we've talked about a couple of them already unified communications as a service of course we talked about contact center we touched on device as a service you talked about some of the devices security and advanced technology solutions maybe start with security you know I think one of the you know you know most important topic being discussed I looking back at my career and you know 10 or 15 years ago security was what I would call top of mind bottom of budget all right and today it is often a board level discussion there are lots of dollars lots of investment lots of concern around security so what piece is the security market does nwn playing you know what we're what's good you know what what do you what are you creating and what are you working with the ecosystem and where do we need to go sure enough space so for unified communications for the 80s you know practice around the supporting network and device as a service our security offerings are for the environment right and a lot of it is where there's a lot of tools deployed but customers you know are really okay once something happens an incident happens they have a tool that identifies something that happens but a lot of the security will be really really mapping those environments that they have a secure platform but Incident Response is really where we're gonna really be doubling down on so something's happened in one of those environments what happened and then how do you respond to that that's going to be the big focus of what nwn it's been doing and kind of what will invest more in its really Incident Response okay great advanced technology solutions talk to us a little bit about that so a lot of the core the core expertise in the company for years has been around the network but then that really expanded with doing you know full you hosted unified communication so the company today can deploy any type of networking solutions for customers along with all the connectivity so the bandwidth you know any type of a next generation networks like 5g so all of that really tied together that you have the network you know the right connectivity to kind of get to the the right performance and then mapping it to the SL A's that have to go with the the offerings of unified communications and devices of service because everything's going to be inter intertwined and you think about any like collaboration technologies I mean how many times have we been in a meeting where a collaboration technologies not really working but the performance is not really there it's not that software it's something that was tied beneath that so nwn can really bridge the two together to have that the right networking capability the right connectivity so you're getting the fast connectivity right away of what really matters to the end user experience which is that collaboration system yeah you know we talked a little bit about innovation you know where where are your customers what's exciting you that's helping your customers move forward and you know where are those areas that were still struggling a little bit you know III think back you know I worked in the you know Telecom Unified Communication space you know back in the late 90s and you know by now we were supposed to have the flying cars with the ubiquitous video everywhere and well FaceTime you know and some some things have us there a little bit sure I use my you know my webcam way more than I did five or ten years ago but yeah maybe speak a little bit where were having success and where if we still need to go number one thing for me that I learned of one of the most unique assets that NW and has is the business analytics and data capability right so a lot of these environments have been deployed we've got all these multiple different vironment but what I learned of the nwn capability is we have every piece of data of all those different environments in every customer in every customer environment so we have the ability now with our portal and they've had the ability to do this it's really any type of function that the customer wants to learn more about in kind of an automated fashion that they can self provision this data themselves we have the data so it could be billing capabilities of really what what groups are being built it could be any type of compliance so what type of calls are being made and who's doing calls any type of productivity for call centers of what capabilities we have so I think the the the biggest thing to answer your question is one the nwn capability is all the business data that we have that maps across multiple industries to deliver best practices but people have been to plot deploying networks deploying devices deploying phone systems but never really having the intelligence of what you're gonna do with that data to drive the business forward and so one it's like got to have the end user experience be like that's like table stakes where the end user experience is great but now how the business use the data of how all those systems are working together to really bring forward like okay what business decisions do we make to move forward in terms of what's working what's not working and comes back to driving the right business outcomes alright so a lot a lot of effort in the last few months yeah focus and execution doing the relaunch here let's look forward a little bit Jim as you know six or twelve months from now as we look back what are some of the key KP at KP is how for those of us the outside do we know that nwn is executing and meeting you know where you want the company to go its 100% about customer satisfaction right so it's the as we continue to expand the offerings inside customers and then add new customers will be you know solely how we're going to manage the business and that's really where it's as customers do upgrades with us the the predominance of our customers is long-term contracts so as customers continue to do renewals and add new offerings and kind of new capabilities that we bring to the table and as they tell their peer companies which is people are really excited about being references for us then we'll continue to add more companies into the mix and more more customers and grow the 1302 mm great and you know for for potential customers out there there any of the kind of key things that you would call out that they said oh I've got this issue or I'm looking to do this kind of project I want to make sure to have nwn on my short list I see a couple areas right it's it's everyone is it's a 50 billion dollar market so everyone is dealing with unified communications issues right in terms of what decisions are gonna make were an expert in that space the device is a service you know really like we manage two hundred thousand endpoints with the state of California so that's a device of the service is really a space that not a lot of people are in a lot of people doing devices but really as an end end service not really you know strong you know kind of capability and then the security requirements are for everybody so I think for these solutions than to have the right service people the right network expertise so that that five areas is kind of the core space and I think the biggest thing that I would say to customers is everything's intertwined right so it's like you can have you know one person to talk about one if you don't really tie it all together that's where the challenges and the problems usually kind of come from and we're also really sizable Ike the companies you know you know a lot a lot of large customers but the companies hundreds of millions of dollars with a lot of forty's over the last 10 years yeah so Jim last thing talk about the team in the culture you know talk about what you you want to build on what NW always has and you know are you doing some hiring either here locally in the Boston area or you know in other geographic areas sure so companies Nate you know national company so we'll be hiring sales reps solution engineers nationally and really kind of continue to scale that out the service desk function that we have and really the customer success team is continuing to expand and really supporting the growth of the business and really kind of driving it so those are really the key areas the rest of the company that people are the people and the and the culture of the company are amazing the passion commitment to customer success people have been here a long time and so they have a lot of experience and a lot of kind of patch with the company so a lot of the changes we made all came from within side right so everyone really rallied to be like hey here the things were good at then we want to get great at and that sort of been kind of the big focus and we have really strong presence in in in the Carolinas all over the Northeast California Texas and so we're gonna really look to kind of connect all those geographies together to have one national you know kind of powerhouse player across the country all right Jim Sullivan thank you so much for the updates congratulations on the progress and look forward to watching the continued growth of NW thank great to be here all right and lots more coverage here as always on the cube net on to minimun and thank you for watching the Q

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)