(lighthearted music) >> Hey all. Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Kubecon North America '22 CloudNativeCon. We're in Detroit. We've been here all day covering day one of the event from our perspective. Three days of coverage coming at you. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, a lot of buzz today. A lot of talk about the maturation of Kubernetes with different services that vendors are offering. We talked a little bit about security earlier today. One of the things that is a hot topic is national security. >> Yeah, this is a huge segment we got coming up. It really takes that all that nerd talk about Kubernetes and puts it into action. We actually see demonstrable results. This is about advanced artificial intelligence for tactical decision making at the edge to support our military operations because a lot of the deaths are because of bad technology. And this has been talked about. We've been covering Silicon Angle, we wrote a story there now on this topic. This should be a really exciting segment so I'm really looking forward to it. >> Excellent, so am I. Please welcome back one of our alumni, Nick Barcet senior director, customer led open innovation at Red Hat. Great to have you back. Greg Forrest joins us as well from Lockheed Martin Director of AI Foundations. Guys, great to have you on the program. Nick, what's been your perception before we dig into the news and break that open of KubeCon 2022? >> So, KubeCon is always a wonderful event because we can see people working with us in the community developing new stuff, people that we see virtually all year. But it's the time at which we can really establish human contact and that's wonderful. And it's also the moments where we can make big topic move forward and the topics have been plenty at this KubeCon from MicroShift to KCP, to AI, to all domains have been covered. >> Greg, you're the director of AI foundations at Lockheed Martin. Obviously well known, contractors to the military lot of intellectual property, storied history. >> Greg: Sure. >> Talk about this announcement with Red Hat 'cause I think this is really indicative of what's happening at the edge. Data, compute, industrial equipment, and people, in this case lives are in danger or to preserve peace. This is a killer story in terms of understanding what this all means. What's your take on this relationship with Red Hat? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, it's really important for us. So part of our 21st century security strategy as a company is to partner with companies like Red Hat and Big Tech and bring the best of the commercial world into the Department of Defense for our soldiers on the ground. And that's exactly what we announced today or Tuesday in our partnership. And so the ability to take commercial products and utilize them in theater is really important for saving lives on the ground. And so we can go through exactly what we did as part of this demonstration, but we took MicroShift at the edge and we were able to run our AI payloads on that. That provided us with the ability to do things like AI based RF sensing, so radio frequency sensing. And we were also able to do computer vision based technologies at the edge. So we went out, we had a small UAV that went out and searched for a target on the ground. It found a target using its radio frequency capabilities, the RF capabilities. Then once we're able to hone in on that target, what Red Hat device edge and MicroShift enables us to do is actually then switch sensing modalities. And then we're able to look at this target via the camera and use computer vision-based technologies to actually more accurately locate the target and then track that target in real time. So that's one of the keys to be able to actually switch modalities in real time on one platform is really important for our joint all domain operations construct. The idea of how do you actually connect all of these assets in the environment, in the battle space. >> Talk about the challenge and how hard it is to do this. The back haul, you'll go back to the central server, bring data back, connecting things. What if there's insecurity around connectivity? I mean there's a lot of things going, can you just scope the magnitude of how hard it's to actually deploy something at a tactical edge? >> It is. There's a lot of data that comes from all of these sensors, whether they're RF sensors or EO or IR. We're working across multiple domains, right? And so we want to take that data back and train on that and then redeploy to the edge. And so with MicroShift, we're able to do that in a way that's robust, that's repeatable, and that's automated. And that really instills trust in us and our customers that when we deploy new software capabilities to the edge over the air, like we did in this demonstration that they're going to run right on the target hardware. And so that's a huge advantage to what we're doing here that when we push software to the edge in real time we know it's going to run. >> And in realtime is absolutely critical. We talk about it in so many different industries. Oh, it's customers expect realtime access whether it's your banking app or whatnot. But here we're talking about literally life and death situations on the battlefield. So that realtime data access is literally life and death. >> It's paramount to what we're doing. In this case, the aircraft started with one role which was to go find a radio frequency admitter and then switch roles to then go get cameras and eyes on that. So where is that coming from? Are there people on the ground? Are there dangerous people on the ground? And it gives the end user on the ground complete situational awareness of what is actually happening. And that is key for enhanced decision making. Enhanced decision making is critical to what we're doing. And so that's really where we're advancing this technology and where we can save lives. >> I read a report from General Mattis when he was in service that a lot of the deaths are due to not having enough information really at the edge. >> Greg: Friendly fire. >> Friendly fire, a lot of stuff that goes on there. So this is really, really important. Nick, you're sitting there saying this is great. My customer's talking about the product. This is your innovation, Red Hat device edge in action. This is real. This is industrial- >> So it's more than real. Actually this type of use case is what convinced us to transform a technology we had been working on which is a small form factor of Kubernetes to transform it into a product. Because sometimes, US engineers have a tendency to invent stuff that are great on paper, but it's a solution trying to find a problem. And we need customers to work with us to make sure that do solution do solve a real problem. And Lockheed was great. Worked with us upstream on that project. Helped us prove out that the concept was actually worth it and we waited until Lockheed had tested the concept in the air. >> Okay, so Red Hat device edge and MicroShift, explain that, how that works real quick for the folks that don't know. So one of the thing we learned is that Kubernetes is great but it's only part of the journey. In order to get those workloads on those aircraft or in order to get those workloads in a factory, you also need to consider the full life cycle of the device itself. And you don't handle a device that is inside of a UAV or inside of a factory the same way you handle a server. You have to deal with those devices in a way that is much more akin to a setup box. So we had to modify how the OS was behaving to deal with devices and we reduced what we had built in real for each edge aspect and combined it with MicroShift and that's what became with that Red Hat device edge. >> We're in a low SWAP environment, space, weight and power, right? Or very limited, We're on a small UAS in this demonstration. So the ability to spool up and spool down containers and to save computing power and to do that on demand and orchestrate that with MicroShift is paramount to what we're doing. We wouldn't be able to do it without that capability. >> John: That's awesome. >> I want to get both of your opinions. Nick, we'll start with you and then Greg we'll go to you. In terms of MicroShift , what is its superpower? What differentiates it from other competing solutions in the market? >> So MicroShift is Kubernetes but reduced to the strict minimum of a runtime version of Kubernetes so that it takes a minimal footprint so that we maximize the space available for the workload in those very constraints environments. On a board where you have eight or 16 gig of RAM, if you use only two gig of that to run the infrastructure component, you leave the rest for the AI workload that you need on the drone. And that's what is really important. >> And these AI payloads, the inference that we're doing at the edge is very compute intensive. So again, the ability to manage that and orchestrate that is paramount to running on these very small board computers. These are small drones that don't have a lot of weight that don't allow a lot of space. >> John: Got to be efficient >> And be efficient with it. >> How were you guys involved? Talk about the relationship. So you guys were tightly involved. Talk about the roles you guys played together. Was it co-development? Was it customer/partner? Talk about the relationship. >> Yeah, so we started actually with satellite. So you can think of small cube sets in a very similar environment to a low powered UAV. And it started there. And then in the last, I would say year or so, Nick we have worked together to develop MicroShift. We work closely on Slack channels together like we're part of the same team. >> John: That's great. >> And hey Red Hat, this is what we need, this is what we're looking for. These are the constraints that we have. And this team has been amazing and just delivered on everything that we've asked for. >> I mean this is really an example of the innovation at the edge, industrial edge specifically. You got an operating system, you got form factor challenges, you got operating parameters. And just to having that flex, you can't just take this and put it over there. >> But it's what really is a community applied to an industrial context. So what happened there is we worked as part of the MicroShift community together with a real time communication channel, the same slack that anybody developing Kubernetes uses we've been using to identify where the problems were, how to solve them, bring new ideas and that's how we tackle these problems. >> Yeah, a true open source model I mean the Red Hat and the Lockheed teams were in it together on a daily basis communicating like we were part of the same company. And and that's really how you move these things forward. >> Yeah, and of course open source is great but also you got to lock down the security. How did you guys handle that? What's going on with the security? 'Cause you got to make sure no take over the devices. >> So the funny thing is that even though what we produce is highly inclusive of security concern, our development model is completely open. So it's not security biopurification, it's security because we apply the best practices. >> John: You see everything. >> Absolutely. >> Yes. >> And then you harden it in the joint development, there it is. >> Yeah, but what we support, what we offer as a product is the same for Lockheed or for any other customer because there is no domain where security is not important. When you control the recognition on a drone or where you control the behavior of a robot in a factory, security is paramount because you can't immobilize a country by infecting a robot the same way you could immobilize a military operation- >> Greg: That's right. >> By infecting a UAV. >> Not to change the subject, but I got to go on a tangent here cause it pops in my head. You mentioned cube set, not related to theCUBE of course. Where theCube for the video. Cube sets are very powerful. People can launch space right now very inexpensively. So it's a highly contested and congested environment. Any space activity going on around the corner with you guys? 'Cause remember the world's not around, it's edge is now in space. Mars is the edge. >> That's right. >> Our first prototype for MicroShift was actually a cube set. >> Greg: That's where it started. >> And IBM project, the project called Endurance. That's the first time we actually put MicroShift into use. And that was a very interesting project, very early version of MicroShift . And now we have talks with many other people on reproducing that at more industrial level this was more like a cool high school project. >> But to your point, the scalability across different platforms is there. If we're running on top of MicroShift on this common OS, it just eases the development. Behind the scenes, we have a whole AI factory at Lockheed Martin where we have a common ecosystem for how we actually develop and deploy these algorithms to the edge. And now we've got a common ecosystem at the edge. And so it helps that whole process to be able to do that in automated ways, repeatable ways so we can instill trust in our DRD customer that the validation of verification of this is a really important aspect. >> John: Must be a fun place to work. >> It is, it's exciting. There's endless opportunities. >> You must get a lot of young kids applying for those jobs. They're barely into the whole. I mean, AI's a hot feel and people want to get their hands on real applications. I was serious about space. Is there space activity going on with you guys or is it just now military edge, not yet military space? Or is that classified? >> Yeah, so we're working across multiple fronts, absolutely. >> That's awesome. >> What excite, oh, sorry John. What excites you most, never a dull moment with what you're doing, but just the potential to enable a safer, a more secure world, what excites you most about this partnership and the direction and the we'll say the trajectory it's going on? >> Yeah, I think, for me, the safer insecure world is paramount to what we're doing. We're here for national defense and for our allies and that's really critical to what we're doing. That's what motivates me. That's what gets me up in the morning to know that there is a soldier on the ground who will be using this technology and we will give be giving that person the situational awareness to make the right decisions at the right time. So we can go from small UAVs to larger aircraft or we can do it in a small confined edge device like a stalker UAV. We can scale this up to different products different platforms and they don't even have to be Lockheed Martin >> John: And more devices that are going to be imagined. >> More devices that we haven't even imagined yet. >> Right, that aren't even on the frontier yet. Nick, what's next from your perspective? >> In the domain we are in, next is always plenty of things. Sustainability is a huge domain right now on which we're working. We have lots of things going on in the AI space, stuff going on with Lockheed Martin. We have things going on in the radio network domain. We've been very heavily involved in telecommunication and this is constantly evolving. There is not one domain that, in terms of infrastructure Red Hat is not touching >> Well, this is the first of multiple demonstrations. The scenarios will get more complex with multiple aircraft and in the future, we're also looking at bringing a lot of the 5G work. Lockheed has put a large focus on 5G.mil for military applications and running some of those workloads on top of MicroShift as well is things to come in the future that we are already planning and looking at. >> Yeah, and it's needed in theater to have connectivity. Got to have your own connectivity. >> It's paramount, absolutely. >> Absolutely, it's paramount. It's game-changing. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCube talking about how Red Hat and Lockheed Martin are working together to leverage AI to really improve decision making and save more lives. It was a wonderful conversation. We're going to have to have you back 'cause we got to follow this. >> Yeah, of course. >> This was great, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Lisa: Our pleasure, thank you. >> Greg: Really appreciate it. >> Excellent. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from KubeCon CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit. Stick around. Next guest is going to join John and Savannah in just a minute. (lighthearted music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami, Miami Beach. Specifically, not a bad location to have a conference. Lisa Martin here with the Cube live at IFS Unleashed. We're gonna be having a great conversation next about Ization moments of Service Rules. Royces here, as is the C of IFS for aerospace and defense. Scott Camani. Nick Ward joins us as well, the VP of Digital Systems at Roll Royce. Guys, excited to have you on the program and welcome back. >>Thank you very much. Nice to be back. It's >>Been three years since the last IFS show. I love How's Scott? I was talking with Darren Roots earlier today and I said, Well, didn't it used to be IFS world? And he said, Yes. And I said, I love the name. I would love to, to unpack that with your cheek marketing officer because it, there's a lot of, of, of power behind Unleash. A lot of companies do such and such world or accelerate, but we're talking about unleashing the power of the technology to help customers deliver those moments of service. Yes. Love it. So Scott, start us off here. Talk about ization. That's a relatively new term to me. Sure. Help me understand what it means, because IFS is a pioneer in this sense. >>We are. So one of the things that IFS is always trying to do is to try to find a way to help our customers to realize a moment of service. And that moment of service is really when they found the ability to delight their customers. And when we look at the way in which we're trying to drive those business outcomes for our customers, ization seems to be at the core of it. So whether it's the ability for a company to use a product, a service, or an outcome, they're driving ization in a way where they're shaping their business. They're orchestrating their customers and their people and their assets behind a val value chain that helps them to provide a delightful experience for their customers. And with IFS being focused on Lifecycle asset management, we no longer have customers that have to choose from best of suite or best of breed. They can actually have both with ifs. And that's something we're really excited to provide to our customers and more excited for our customers to realize that value with their customers, their partners. Along the way. >>You, you mentioned customer delight and it's a term that we, we all use it, right? But there's so much power and, and capabilities and metrics behind that phrase, customer delight, which will unpack Nick bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about what your role is at Rolls Royce. My first thought when I saw you was, oh, the fancy cars, but we're talking about aerospace and the fence, so give us a little bit of a history. >>Okay. So yes, we don't make cars is the first point. So we are, we are power, we do power as a service. So we are most well known, I guess for large aircraft airliners. You know, if you've, if you've flown here to Miami, there's probably a 50 50 chance you've flown on a Rod Roy powered aircraft. Our market segment is what we call wide bodied aircraft where you go on, there's two aisles. So the larger section of the market, and we, we provide power, so we provide the engines, but more importantly, we've been a ization company, a service company for at least two decades. We, we have a, a service relationship we call total care. And the whole idea of total care is, yes, I have my engine, it's on my aircraft, but I take care of it. I make sure it's available to fly when you need to fly it. And all of the things that have to come together to make that happen, it's a service company. >>Service company. Talk to me a little bit about, and I wanna get got your perspective as well, but the relationship that Roll Royce and IFS have this is a little bit unique. >>Well, I can start, but I I think Nick's gonna be better served to tell us about that as our customer. Nick and I actually started this journey about four years ago, and what we did was, is we were working closely with our perspective customer Rolls-Royce identified what they were looking for as a desired business outcome. And then we found a way through the technology and the software that we provide to all of our enterprise customers globally to find a solution that actually helped to provide a, an outcome not only to Rolls-Royce, but also to our collective downstream customers, commercial operators around the globe. So that's where we started the journey and we're continuing our discussions around other solutions, but that's how we started and it's been an incredible partnership. We're so happy and proud to have Nick as a customer and a advocate of all things ifs and I'll let him kind of continue from his point of view how he sees the partnership in the relationship. >>No, thank you Scott. I think we've, we've always, we've valued the kind of relationship that we have because I think IFS has always got Rolls Royce in terms of strategic direction. What do we try to do? I said, we're a service company. You know, we, we are, we have to have a service relationship with our, our customers, our airlines. To have a service relationship, you have to be able to connect to your service customer. And ifs is a big part of how we connect for data. That's how do we understand what the airline is doing with the engines, but it's also how we return data back into the airline. So we are, we're get a very close integrated relation between us, our airlines, through a bridge that, that ifs create through the maintenance product. Got it. So it works really well. >>I I think I'd make one other point. One of the things that we've always focused on is quantifiable business value. The only way a partnership like this could possibly work is if we have a desired business outcome, but if we're providing value, So the value work that we did in conjunction with Rolls Royce and really identifying that helped to support the business case that allowed this partnership to really begin and flourish. So I I, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that business value element that's really core to everything we do and all the, the conversations that Nick and I have. >>Well, it's all about outcomes. Absolutely. It's all about outcomes. It >>Is, it has to be about, it's about moments of service, right? That's why we're here, right? So perhaps a moment of service for Robs Royce is every time you're a passenger, you're going through the terminal. You expect your aircraft to be there, ready, waiting for you to get on and depart on time. And our moment of service is every aircraft takes off on time, every time we live. When we die by the quality of that statement, how well we live up to that statement, I think I checked this morning, there's something alike, 600 aircraft in the sky right now with Rolls Royce power carrying passengers. All of those passengers have relied on that moment. Service happening regularly like clockwork. Every single time you don't get any forgiveness for a delay, you get very little forgiveness for a cancellation that has to happen. And then so many things have to come together for that to happen. >>Those 600 aircraft, that's maybe 200,000 people right now in the sky, Wow. Those 200,000 people are trying to connect, They're trying to connect with friends, they're trying to connect with loved ones, family, colleagues, whatever the purpose is of that trip. It's really important to them. And we just have to make sure that that happens for us. We've had something like a million flights so far this year, 300 million people relying on that moment of so is happening. So I really resonate with, with the language that Scott users about the importance of sort of that focal point on when does it all come together? It comes together when as a passenger, I get on the plane and it goes and I get no issues. >>Right. Well people don't tolerate fragmented experiences anymore. No, no. I think one of the things that was in short supply during the pandemic was patience and tolerance. Sure. Not sure how much of that's gonna come back, right? But those integrated connected experiences, as you described so eloquently, Nick, those are table stakes for the customers, but also the brands behind them because of customers are unhappy, the churn rates go way up. And you see that reflected in obviously the success of the business and what you guys are doing together is seems to be quite powerful. Now then when you were on the cube with us three years ago in Boston at IFS back then you first introduced the intelligent engine and the Blue Data thread. Let's talk about the intelligent engine. Just give our audience a refresher of what that actually entails. >>So perhaps if we just step one one step back for that, just to understand how this fits in. So Roro is a service organization. We talked about that. What that means is we take a lot of the, the risk and the uncertainty away from our airline customers on the availability, the costs and maintenance effort associated with having a, having a chat engine. These are incredibly complicated and complex and sophisticated pieces of equipment. The most expensive, most sophisticated pieces of an aircraft. Managing that is, is difficult. And every airline does not want to have to focus on that. They wanna focus on being able to get the passenger on the air after, fly it, look after the airframe. So our role in that is to take that risk away, is to manage those engines, look after their health, look after their life, make sure they're available to fly whenever they need to fly. >>So for us to understand that, we then have to have data, we have to understand the state of every engine, where it is, the health of the engine, the life of that engine, what do we need to do next to that engine? And we can't do that unless we have data and that data flows into a digital platform. The intelligent engine, which is our cloud based ai, big data, all of the iot, all of the big buzzwords are there, right? So the data flows into that, that lets us run the models. It lets us understand, I can see something maybe it's a, it's a small issue, but if I leave it alone, it become a bigger issue. And maybe that will cause disruption further down the line. So we need to understand that we need to preempt it. So preemptive predictive maintenance is a, is a big part of the intelligent engine, but it's more than just that. >>It's also, we can understand how that engine is being flown. We can understand is it having a really intense flight? Is it having a more benign, gentle flight? Wow. That change time after the flight, typically after the flight. But what that means is we can then understand, actually we can keep that engine on the wing longer then you might otherwise have to do, If you have no data, you have to be conservative, safety rules, everything. Sure. So data allows you to say, actually I'm being overly conservative in this space. I can get more flying bios, flying hours from my product by extending the interval between maintenance and the intelligent engine has a large part to play in us justifying that we're able to do that. And then the final part that it does is eventually the engine is gonna have to come off from maintenance. >>These things fly 5 million miles between overhauls. You imagine you try to do that in your family car. It's, it doesn't happen. It's incredibly sophisticated thing can fly 5 million miles and then we take it off for a major overhaul. But there are thousands of these engines in the fleet. We have to understand which engine is going to come off when for what reason, and prepare our maintenance network to then receive the engine and deal with it and get it back to the customer. So the intelligent engine has a massive part to play in understanding the maintenance demand that the flying fleet is then creating. >>Wow, that's fascinating. And so you talked about that three years ago. What's next for that? I imagine there's only more evolution that's gonna happen. >>It keeps growing. It keeps growing. It's driven by the data. The more data we have, the more that we can do with that. I think as well that, you know, one of the big places that we've we've gone is you can do as much predictive analytics as you, like, there's a lot of people we'll talk about doing predictive analytics, but if you don't do the hard yards of turning predictive analytics into outcome Yeah. Then what did you get? You, you got a bit of smart advice. So we, we take that maintenance demand, we then have to understand how that drives the orchestration and the management of all the parts, the people, the work scope definition, the allocating an engine into a maintenance slot, exactly when it's gonna go. And what are we gonna do to, how do we control and manage our inventory to make sure that engine is gonna go through. >>How do we then actually execute the work inside our, our our overall shops? How do we get that engine back and and integrate our logistics process. So the intelligent engine is, if you like, the shiny front end of a process, it's all the buzzwords, but actually the hard yards behind the scene is just as if not more important to get right. And again, this is why I really like the moment of service concept. Because without that, the moment of service doesn't happen. The engine's not there, the part wasn't there. The field service maintenance guy wasn't there to go fix it. >>And brands are affected >>An, an aircraft on the ground earns no revenue for anybody. No. It's, it's a cost. It's it's a big sink of cost. It >>Is, it is. Absolutely. >>And you're helping aircraft only earn engines only earn when they fly. Yeah, >>Yeah. Absolutely. And what a fascinating, the intelligent engine. Scott, talk a little bit about, we talking about power, we can't not talk about sustainability. Yes, I understand that IFS has a new inaugural awards program that Rolls Roys was a recipient of the Change for Good sustainability awards. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And to Scott, talk to me a little bit about the Change for Good program sustainability program. What types of organizations across the industries of expertise are you looking for and why does Rules ROY really highlight what a winner embodies? >>So since Darren has joined IFS as the ceo, he's had a lot of intentional areas that we focused on. And sustainability has been one that's at the top of the list. IFS has a US ambassador Lewis Pew, who's our Chief Sustainability officer, and he helps us to provide worldwide coverage of the efforts around sustainability. So it's not just about ifss ability to become a more sustainable organization, but it's the solutions that IFS is putting together in the five verticals that we focus on that can help those organizations achieve a level of sustainability for their, for their downstream customers, their partners, and for their enterprises themselves. So when we look at, you know, the social ability for us to be more conscientious about leaving the world a better place or trying to do our best to leave the world not as bad as we came into it, sustainability is a real focus for us. And, you know, the way in which we can support an organization like Rolls Royce and Nickel obviously share those areas of focus from Rolls Royce. It's a perfect fit. And congratulations again for the award. Thank you. We're, we're, we're so excited to, to have shared that with you. We have some other customers that have achieved it across different categories, but it's an area of current and continuous focus for ifs. >>Nick, talk to us, take us out here as our last question is the, the focus on sustainability at Rolls Royce. Talk to us a little bit about that and what some of the major efforts are that you've got underway. >>I think, you know, very similar as, as, as Scott taught there, the focus within Rolls Royce as a strategic group level is really high aviation particularly, I mean we're a, we're an engineering company. We're a power company. Power inherently consumes natural resources. It tends to generate climate affecting outcomes. But at the same time, we are an innovative organization and if anybody's gonna help solve climate challenges, it's gonna be organizations like Rolls Royce who are able to bring different technologies into the market. So we have a responsibility to manage and, and optimize the behavior of our, our existing product suite. But we also have a, a vested interest in trying to move aviation on into the next, the next phase. We talk about sustainable aviation. Aviation has to earn the right to exist. People have choices. We've come out of covid, people are used to doing zoom and not flying. >>People are used to doing things when they don't necessarily get on an aircraft and do something. The aviation business always has to earn the right from the public to exist. And increasingly people will make choices about how they fly when they fly, how far they fly based on the sustainability footprint. So it's really important to us to help both our customers operate the aircraft in as sustainable and climate friendly way as we can. It's really important to find those, those balance points between the cost of an operation and it's the impact of an operation. If you go all over and say, I am going to be net, well, not even net to, but zero carbon by almost inference, that means I'm not gonna operate. You have to operate to get to an outcome. But how do I do that? Why I manage my cost, I manage the, the profitability, the organization doing it, right? >>So it has to be financially sustainable, it has to be sustainable for the people operating within it. It has to be sustainable for the planet, right? So we do that in lots of different ways in small places and, and in big places. So small things we do is we help the operator understand if you change your flight profile, you'll generate fewer emissions. You may avoid controls if you flying a different way, maybe you create trails, you'll lose, you'll lose less fuel while you're doing that. So it's cost effective for you. There was always a balance point there between the wear and tear on the engine versus the, the, the environmental impact. And you find that optimum place. One of the first things we started doing with, with Scott is we have a, a way that we life our engine components. And one of the very simple outcomes of that is using that data, the blue data for connection to the customer. >>If we can see, effectively see inside the engine about how well it's wearing and we can extend those maintenance intervals as we talked about, what that eventually does is it reduces the need to take the engine off, ship it around the world. Probably on a great big 7, 4 7 or maybe year or two ago on an Anson off four big engines flying a long distance trek, shipping our engine to an overhaul facility. We're avoiding something like 200 of those shop visit overhauls a year. So every year that's 200 flights there and back again, which don't happen, right? Collectively that's around about 15,000 automobile equivalent emissions just don't happen. So simple things we can do just starts to have accumulative effect, >>Right? Simple things that you're doing that, that have a huge impact. We could talk for so much longer on stability, I'm sure we're out of time, but I can see why Roll Royce was, was the winner of the Inocular award. Congratulations. Well deserved. Well >>Deserved. I well >>Deserved. So interesting to hear about the intelligent engine. So you're gonna have to come back. Hopefully we'll be here next year and we can hear more of the evolution. Cuz I have a feeling there's never a dual moment in what you're doing. >>It's never a dull moment. There's never an end point. >>No. >>Okay, >>Going Scott, Nick, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have you talk through what's going on at ifx and the partnership with Rolls Royce. We >>Appreciate, and again, Nick, Nick, thank you for your continued support in the partnership. >>I thank you, Scott. We appreciate it. Likewise, thank >>You. Kudos all around. All right, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a Cube live from Miami. We're at IFS unleashed. We'll be back shortly after a break with our next guests. So stick around.

hybrid work is the new reality according to the most recent survey data from enterprise technology research cios expect that 65 of their employees will work either as fully remote or in a hybrid model splitting time between remote and in office remote of course can be anywhere it could be home it could be at the beach overseas literally anywhere there's internet so it's no surprise that these same technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics which round out the top four in the etr survey now as we've reported securing endpoints was important prior to the pandemic but the explosion in the past two plus years of remote work and corollary device usage has made the problem even more acute and let's face it managing sprawling i.t assets has always been a pain patch management for example has been a nagging concern for practitioners and with ransomware attacks on the rise it's critical that security teams harden it assets throughout their life cycle staying current and constantly staying on top of vulnerabilities within the threat surface welcome to this special program on the cube enable and secure the everywhere workplace brought to you by ivanti in this program we highlight key partnerships between avanti and its ecosystem to address critical problems faced by technology and security teams in our first segment we explore a collaboration between avanti and sentinel one where the two companies are teaming to simplify patch management my name is dave vellante and i'll be your host today and with me are nayaki nayar who's the president and chief product officer at avanti and nick warner president and security of the security group at sentinel one welcome naki and nick and hackie good to have you back in the cube great to see you guys thank you thank you dave uh really good to be back on cube uh i'm a veteran of cube so thank you for having us and um look forward to a great discussion today yeah you better thanks okay hey good nick nick good to have you on as well what do we need to know about this partnership please so uh if you look at uh we are super excited about this partnership nick thank you for joining us on this session today um when you look at ivanti ivanti has been a leader in two big segments uh we are a leader in unified endpoint management with the acquisition of mobileye now we have a holistic end-to-end management of all devices be it windows linux mac ios you name it right so we have that seamless single pane of glass to manage all devices but in addition to that we are also a leader in risk-based patch management um dave that's what we are very excited about this partnership with the with central one where now we can combine the strength we have in the risk-based patch management with central one's xdr platform and truly help address what i call the need of the hour with our customers for them to be able to detect uh vulnerabilities and being able to remediate them proactively remediate them right so that's what we are super excited about this partnership and nick would love to hand it over to you to talk about uh the partnership and the journey ahead of us thanks and you know from center one's perspective we see autonomous vulnerability assessment and remediation as really necessary given the evolution uh in the sophistication the volume and the ferocity of threats out there and what's really key is being able to remediate risks and machine speed and also identify vulnerability exposure in real time and you know if you look traditionally at uh vulnerability scanning and patch management they've really always been two separate things and when things are separate they take time between the two coordination communication what we're looking to do with our singularity xdr platform is holistically deliver one unified solution that can identify threats identify vulnerabilities and automatically and autonomously leverage patch management to much better protect our customers so maybe maybe that's why patch management is such a challenge for many organizations because as you described nick it's sort of a siloed from security and those worlds are coming together but maybe you guys could address the specific problems that you're trying to solve with this collaboration yeah so if you look at uh just in a holistic level uh dave today cyber crime is at catastrophic heights right and this is not just a cio or a cso issue this is a board issue every organization every enterprise is addressing this at the board level and when you double click on it one of the challenges that we have heard from our customers over and over again is the complexity and the manual processes that are in place for remediation or patching all their operating systems their applications their third party apps and that is where it's very very time consuming very complex very cumbersome and the question is how do we help them automate it right how do we help them remove those manual processes and autonomously intermediate right so which is where this partnership between ivanti and central one helps organizations to bring this autonomous nature to bring those proactive predictive capabilities to detect an issue prioritize that issue based on risk-based prioritization is what we call it and autonomously remediate that issue right so that's where uh this partnership really really uh helps our customers address the the top concerns they have in cyber crime or cyber security got it so prioritization automation nick maybe you could address what are the keys i mean you got to map vulnerabilities to software updates how do you make sure that your the patches there's not a big lag between your patch and and the known vulnerabilities and you've got this diverse set of you know i.t portfolio assets how do you manage all that it's a great question and i and i think really the number one uh issue around this topic is that security teams and it teams are facing a really daunting task of identifying all the time every day all the vulnerabilities in their ecosystem and the biggest problem with this is how do they get context and priority and i think what people have come to realize through the years of dealing with with patch management uh and vulnerability scanning is that patching without the context of what the possible impact or priority of that risk is really comes down to busy work and i think what's so important in a totally interconnected world with attacks happening at machine speed is being able to take that precious asset that we call time and make sure you properly prioritize that how we're doing it from sentinel one singularity xdr perspective is by leveraging autonomous threat information and being able to layer that against vulnerability information to properly view through that lens the highest priority threats and vulnerabilities that you need to patch and then using our single agent technology be able to autonomously remediate and patch those vulnerabilities whether or not it's on a mac a pc server a cloud workload and the beauty of our solution is it gives you proper clarity so you can see the impact of vulnerabilities each and every day in your environment and know that you're doing the right thing in the right order got it okay so the context gives you the risks profile allows you to prioritize and then of course you can you know remediate what else should we know about this this joint solution uh in terms of you know what it is how i engage any other detail on how it addresses the the problem specifically yeah so it's all about race against the time um uh dave when it's how we help our customers uh detect the vulnerability prioritize it and remediate it the attackers are able to weaponize those vulnerabilities and and have an attack right so it's really it's how we help our customers be a lot more proactive and predictive address those vulnerabilities versus um before the attackers really get access to it right so that's where our joint solution in fact i always say whatever edr with this edr or mdr or xdr the r portion of that r is very one he comes in our neurons for patch management or what we call neurons but risk based patch management combined with um central ones xdr is where we truly uh bring the combined solutions to to to life right so the r is where ivanti really plays a big part in uh in the joint solution yeah absolutely the response i mean people i think all agree you're going to get infiltrated that's how you respond to it you know the thing about this topic is when you make a business case a lot of times you'll go to the cfo and say hey if we don't do this we're going to be in big trouble and so it's this fear factor and i get that it's super important but but are there other measurements of success that that you you can share in other words how are customers going to determine the value of this joint solution so it's a mean time to repair let me go nick and then i'm sure you have your uh metrics and how you're measuring the success it's about how we can detect an issue and repair that issue it's reducing that mean time to repair as much as possible and making it as real-time as possible for our customers right that's where the true outcome through success and the metric that customers can track measure and continuously improve on nick you want to add to that for sure yeah you know you make some great great points niaki and what what i would add is um what sentinel one singularity platform is known for is automated and autonomous detection prevention and response and remediation across threats and if you look traditionally at patch management or vulnerability assessment they're typically deployed and run in point-of-time solutions what i mean by that is that they're scans and re-scans the way that advanced edr solutions and xdr solutions such as single one singularity platform work is we're constantly recording everything that's happening on all of your systems in real time and so what we do is literally eliminate the window of opportunity between a patch being uh needed a vulnerability being discovered and you knowing that you have that need for that vulnerability to be patched in your environment you don't have to wait for that 12 or 24-hour window to scan for vulnerabilities you will immediately know it in your network you'll also know the security implications of that vulnerability so you know when and how to prioritize and then furthermore you can take autonomous hatching measures against that so at the end of the day the name of the game in security is time and it's about reducing that window of opportunity for the adversaries for the threat actors and this is a epic leap forward in in doing that for our customers and that capability nick is a function of your powerful agent or is it architecture where's that come from that's a great question it's it's a combination of a couple of things the first is our agent technology which performs constant monitoring on every system every behavior every process running on all your systems live and in real time so this is not a batch process that that kicks up once a day this is always running in the background so the moment a new application is installed the moment a new application version is deployed we know about it we record it instantaneously so if you think about that and layer against getting best in class vulnerability information from a partner like avanti and then also being able to deploy patch management against that you can start to see how you're applying that in real time in your environment and the last thing i i'd like to add is because we're watching everything and then layering it against thread intel and context using our proprietary machine learning technology that that idea of being able to prioritize and escalate is critical because if you talk to security providers there's a couple different uh challenges that they're facing and i would say the top two are alert fatigue and then also human human power limitations and so no security team has enough people on their team and no security teams have an absence of alerts and so the fact that we can prioritize alerts surface the ones that are the most important give context to that and also save them precious hours of their personnel's time by being able to do this autonomously and automatically we're really killing two birds with one stone that's great there's the business case right there you just laid out some other things that we can measure right it all comes back to the data doesn't it we got to go but i'll give you the last word yeah i mean we are super excited about this partnership uh like nick said uh we believe in how we can help our customers discover all the assets we have they have um manage those assets but a big chunk of it is how we help them secure it right secure uh their devices the applications the data that's on those devices the end points and being able to provide an experience a service experience at the end of the day so that end users don't have to worry about securing you don't have to think about security it should be embedded it should be autonomous and it should be contactually personalized right so uh that's the journey we are on and uh thank you nick for this great partnership and look forward to a great journey ahead of us thank you yeah thanks to both of you nick appreciate it okay keep it right there after this quick break we're gonna be back to look at how ivanti is working with other partners to simplify and harden the anywhere workplace you're watching the cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage [Music] you

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, your host. And we're continuing the conversations around ecosystem cloud native, 7,500 people here, 170 plus show for sponsors. It is for open source conference, I think the destination. I might even premise that this may be, this may eventually roll to the biggest tech conference in the industry, maybe outside of AWS re:Invent. My next guest is Nick van Wiggeren. >> Wiggeren. >> VP engineering of PlanetScale. Nick, I'm going to start off the conversation right off the bat PlanetScale cloud native database, why do we need another database? >> Well, why don't you need another database? I mean, are you happy with yours? Is anyone happy with theirs? >> That's a good question. I don't think anyone is quite happy with, I don't know, I've never seen a excited database user, except for guys with really (murmurs) guys with great beards. >> Yeah. >> Keith: Or guys with gray hair maybe. >> Yeah. Outside of the dungeon I think... >> Keith: Right. >> No one is really is happy with their database, and that's what we're here to change. We're not just building the database, we're actually building the whole kind of start to finish experience, so that people can get more done. >> So what do you mean by getting more done? Because MySQL has been the underpinnings of like massive cloud database deployments. >> 100% >> It has been the de-facto standard. >> Nick: Yep. >> For cloud databases. >> Nick: Yep. >> What is PlanetScale doing in enabling us to do that I can't do with something like a MySQL or a SQL server? >> Great question. So we are MySQL compatible. So under the hood it's a lot of the MySQL you know and love. But on top of that we've layered workflows, we've layered scalability, we've layered serverless. So that you can get all of the the parts of the MySQL, that dependability, the thing that people have used for 20, 30 years, right? People don't even know a world before MySQL. But then you also get this ability to make schema changes faster. So you can kind of do your work quicker get to the business objectives faster. You can scale farther. So when you get to your MySQL and you say, well, can we handle adding this one feature on top? Can we handle the user growth we've got? You don't have to worry about that either. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. We've got one foot in history and we've got one foot in the new kind of cloud native database world. We want to give everyone the best of both. >> So when I think of serverless because that's the buzzy world. >> Yeah. >> But when I think of serverless I think about developers being able to write code. >> Yep. >> Deploy the code, not worry about VM sizes. >> Yep. >> Amount of disk space. >> Yep. >> CPU, et cetera. But we're talking about databases. >> Yep. >> I got to describe what type of disk I want to use. I got to describe the performance levels. >> Yep. >> I got all the descriptive stuff that I have to do about infrastructures. Databases are not... >> Yep. >> Keith: Serverless. >> Yep. >> They're the furthest thing from it. >> So despite what the name may say, I can guarantee you PlanetScale, your PlanetScale database does run on at least one server, usually more than one. But the idea is exactly what you said. So especially when you're starting off, when you're first beginning your, let's say database journey. That's a word I use a lot. The furthest thing from your mind is, how many CPUs do I need? How many disk iOS do I need? How much memory do I need? What we want you to be able to do is get started on focusing on shipping your code, right? The same way that Lambda, the same way that Kubernetes, and all of these other cloud native technologies just help people get done what they want to get done. PlanetScale is the same way, you want a database, you sign up, you click two buttons, you've got a database. We'll handle scaling the disk as you grow, we'll handle giving you more resources. And when you get to a spot where you're really starting to think about, my database has got hundreds of gigabytes or petabytes, terabytes, that's when we'll start to talk to you a little bit more about, hey, you know it really does run on a server, we ain't got to help you with the capacity planning, but there's no reason people should have to do that up front. I mean, that stinks. When you want to use a database you want to use a database. You don't want to use, 747 with 27 different knobs. You just want to get going. >> So, also when I think of serverless and cloud native, I think of stateless. >> Yep. >> Now there's stateless with databases, help me reconcile like, when you say it's cloud native. >> Nick: Yep. >> How is it cloud native when I think of cloud native as stateless? >> Yeah. So it's cloud native because it exists where you want it in the cloud, right? No matter where you've deployed your application on your own cloud, on a public cloud, or something like that, our job is to meet you and match the same level of velocity and the same level of change that you've got on your kind of cloud native setup. So there's a lot of state, right? We are your state and that's a big responsibility. And so what we want to do is, we want to let you experiment with the rest of the stateless workloads, and be right there next to you so that you can kind of get done what you need to get done. >> All right. So this concept of clicking two buttons... >> Nick: Yeah. >> And deploying, it's a database. >> Nick: Yep. >> It has to run somewhere. So let's say that I'm in AWS. >> Nick: Yep. >> And I have AWS VPC. What does it look like from a developer's perspective to consume the service? >> Yeah. So we've got a couple of different offerings, and AWS is a great example. So at the very kind of the most basic database unit you click, you get an endpoint, a host name, a password, and the username. You feed that right into your application and it's TLS secure and stuff like that, goes right into the database no problem. As you grow larger and larger, we can use things like AWS PrivateLink and stuff like that, to actually start to integrate more with your AWS environment, all the way over to what we call PlanetScale Managed. Which is where we actually deploy your data plan in your AWS account. So you give us some permissions and we kind of create a sub-account and stuff like that. And we can actually start sending pods, and hold clusters and stuff like that into your AWS account, give you a PrivateLink, so that everything looks like it's kind of wrapped up in your ownership but you still get the same kind of PlanetScale cloud experience, cloud native experience. >> So how do I make calls to the database? I mean, do I have to install a new... >> Nick: Great question. >> Like agent, or do some weird SQL configuration on my end? Or like what's the experience? >> Nope, we just need MySQL. Same way you'd go, install MySQL if you're on a Mac or app store to install MySQL on analytics PC, you just username, password, database name, and stuff like that, you feed that into your app and it just works. >> All right. So databases are typically security. >> Nick: Yep. >> When my security person. >> Nick: Yep. >> Sees a new database. >> Nick: Yep. >> Oh, they get excited. They're like, oh my job... >> Nick: I bet they do. >> My job just got real easy. I can find like eight or nine different findings. >> Right. >> How do you help me with compliance? >> Yeah. >> And answering these tough security questions from security? >> Great question. So security's at the core of what we do, right? We've got security people ourselves. We do the same thing for all the new vendors that we onboard. So we invest a lot. For example, the only way you can connect to a PlanetScale database even if you're using PrivateLink, even if you're not touching the public internet at all, is over TLS secured endpoint, right? From the very first day, the very first beta that we had we knew not a single byte goes over the internet that's not encrypted. It's encrypted at rest, we have audit logging, we do a ton internally as well to make sure that, what's happening to your database is something you can find out. The favorite thing that I think though is all your schema changes are tracked on PlanetScale, because we provide an entire workflow for your schema changes. We actually have like a GitHub Polar Request style thing, your security folks can actually look and say, what changes were made to the database day in and day out. They can go back and there's a full history of that log. So you actually have, I think better security than a lot of other databases where you've got to build all these tools and stuff like that, it's all built into PlanetScale. >> So, we started out the conversation with two clicks but I'm a developer. >> Nick: Yeah. >> And I'm developing a service at scale. >> Yep. >> I want to have a SaaS offering. How do I automate the deployment of the database and the management of the database across multiple customers? >> Yeah, so everything is API driven. We've got an API that you can use supervision databases to make schema changes, to make whatever changes you want to that database. We have an API that powers our website, the same API that customers can use to kind of automate any part of the workflow that they want. There's actually someone who did talk earlier using, I think, wwww.crossplane.io, or they can use Kubernetes custom resource definitions to provision PlanetScale databases completely automatically. So you can even do it as part of your standard deployment workflow. Just create a PlanetScale database, create a password, inject it in your app, all automatically. >> So Nick, as I'm thinking about scale. >> Yep. >> I'm thinking about multiple customers. >> Nick: Yep. >> I have a successful product. >> Nick: Yep. >> And now these customers are coming to me with different requirements. One customer wants to upgrade once every 1/4, another one, it's like, you know what? Just bring it on. Like bring the schema changes on. >> Yep. >> I want the latest features, et cetera. >> Nick: Right. >> How do I manage that with PlanetScale? When I'm thinking about MySQL it's a little, that can be a little difficult. >> Nick: Yeah. >> But how does PlanetScale help me solve that problem? >> Yeah. So, again I think it's that same workflow engine that we've built. So every database has its own kind of deploy queue, its own migration system. So you can automate all these processes and say, on this database, I want to change this schema this way, on this database I'm going to hold off. You can use our API to drive a view into like, well, what's the schema on this database? What's schema on this database? What version am I running on this database? And you can actually bring all that in. And if you were really successful you'd have this single plane of glass where you can see what's the status of all my databases and how are they doing, all powered by kind of the PlanetScale API. >> So we can't talk about databases without talking about backup. >> Nick: Yep. >> And recovery. >> Yep. >> How do I back this thing up and make sure that I can fall back? If someone deleted a table. >> Nick: Yep. >> It happens all the time in production. >> Nick: Yeah, 100%. >> How do I recover from it? >> So there's two pieces to this, and I'm going to talk about two different ways that we can help you solve this problem. One of them is, every PlanetScale database comes with backups built in and we test them fairly often, right? We use these backups. We actually give you a free daily backup on every database 'cause it's important to us as well. We want to be able to restore from backup, we want to be able to do failovers and stuff like that, all that is handled automatically. The other thing though is this feature that we launched in March called the PlanetScale Rewind. And what Rewind is, is actually a schema migration undo button. So let's say, you're a developer you're dropping a table or a column, you mean to drop this, but you drop the other one on accident, or you thought this column was unused but it wasn't. You know when you do something wrong, you cause an incident and you get that sick feeling in your stomach. >> Oh, I'm sorry. I've pulled a drive that was written not ready file and it was horrible. >> Exactly. And you kind of start to go, oh man, what am I going to do next? Everyone watching this right now is probably squirming in their seat a bit, you know the feeling. >> Yeah, I know the feeling >> Well, PlanetScale gives you an undo button. So you can click, undo migration, for 30 minutes after you do the migration and we'll revert your schema with all the data in it back to what your database looked like before you did that migration. Drop a column on accident, drop a table on accident, click the Rewind button, there's all the data there. And, the new rights that you've taken while that's happened are there as well. So it's not just a restore to a point in time backup. It's actually that we've replicated your rights sent them to both the old and the new schema, and we can get you right back to where you started, downtime solved. >> Both: So. >> Nick: Go ahead. >> DBAs are DBAs, whether they've become now reformed DBAs that are cloud architects, but they're DBAs. So there's a couple of things that they're going to want to know, one, how do I get my zero back up in my hands? >> Yeah. >> I want my, it's MySQL data. >> Nick: Yeah. >> I want my MySQL backup. >> Yeah. So you can just take backups off the database yourself the same way that you're doing today, right? MySQL dump, MySQL backup, and all those kinds of things. If you don't trust PlanetScale, and look, I'm all about backups, right? You want them in two different data centers on different mediums, you can just add on your own backup tools that you have right now and also use that. I'd like you to trust that PlanetScale has the backups as well. But if you want to keep doing that and run your own system, we're totally cool with that as well. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, I recommend it. You never have too many backups. >> So in a moment we're going to run Kube clock. So get your... >> Okay, all right. >> You know, stand tall. >> All right. >> I'll get ready. I'm going to... >> Nick: I'm tall, I'm tall. >> We're both tall. The last question before Kube clock. >> Nick: Yeah. >> It is, let's talk a little nerve knobs. >> Nick: Okay. >> The reform DBA. >> Nick: Yeah. >> They want, they're like, oh, this query ran a little bit slow. I know I can squeeze a little bit more out of that. >> Nick: Yeah. >> Who do they talk to? >> Yeah. So that's a great question. So we provide you some insights on the product itself, right? So you can take a look and see how are my queries performing and stuff like that. Our goal, our job is to surface to you all the metrics that you need to make that decision. 'Cause at the end of the day, a reform DBA or not it is still a skill to analyze the performance of a MySQL query, run and explain, kind of figure all that out. We can't do all of that for you. So we want to give you the information you need either knowledge or you know, stuff to learn whatever it is because some of it does have to come back to, what's my schema? What's my query? And how can I optimize it? I'm missing an index and stuff like that. >> All right. So, you're early adopter of the Kube clock. >> Okay. >> I have to, people say they're ready. >> Nick: Ooh, okay. >> All the time people say they're ready. >> Nick: Woo. >> But I'm not quite sure that they're ready. >> Nick: Well, now I'm nervous. >> So are you ready? >> Do I have any other choice? >> No, you don't. >> Nick: Then I am. >> But are you ready? >> Sure, let's go. >> All right. Start the Kube clock. (upbeat music) >> Nick: All right, what do you want me to do? >> Go. >> All right. >> You said you were ready. >> I'm ready, all right, I'm ready. All right. >> Okay, I'll reset. I'll give you, I'll give, see people say they're ready. >> All right. You're right. You're right. >> Start the Kube clock, go. >> Okay. Are you happy with how your database works? Are you happy with the velocity? Are you happy with what your engineers and what your teams can do with their database? >> Follow the dream not the... Well, follow the green... >> You got to be. >> Not the dream. >> You got to be able to deliver. At the end of the day you got to deliver what the business wants. It's not about performance. >> You got to crawl before you go. You got to crawl, you got to crawl. >> It's not just about is my query fast, it's not just about is my query right, it's about, are my customers getting what they want? >> You're here, you deserve a seat at the table. >> And that's what PlanetScale provides, right? PlanetScale... >> Keith: Ten more seconds. >> PlanetScale is a tool for getting done what you need to get done as a business. That's what we're here for. Ultimately, we want to be the best database for developing software. >> Keith: Two, one. >> That's it. End it there. >> Nick, you took a shot, I'm buying it. Great job. You know, this is fun. Our jobs are complex. >> Yep. >> Databases are hard. >> Yep. >> It is the, where your organization keeps the most valuable assets that you have. >> Nick: A 100%. >> And we are having these tough conversations. >> Nick: Yep. >> Here in Valencia, you're talking to the leader in tech coverage. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(soft bright music) (logo swooshing) (crowd murmuring) >> Hey everyone, welcome to Las Vegas! Lisa Martin here on the ground with theCUBE about Coupa Inspire 2022. And can you hear the buzz behind me? It is so great to be in person. Nick Banich joins me, the Chief Revenue Officer and Global Partnership Manager for the Coupa Alliance at Miebach Consulting. Nick, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. First time here at Inspire and it's exciting. >> Is it exciting? It's great to see this room packed. >> It is! It feels, like, the pandemic is finally- >> It does. >> Maybe behind us. >> Right, fingers crossed. (Nick chuckles) So talk to us a little bit about Miebach Consulting and a little bit about the Coupa Partnership, so the audience gets that understanding of what you guys do. >> Yeah, guess, we're kind of new to the Coupa ecosystem. You could say, we came as part of the acquisition of LLamasoft. So Miebach is a supply chain focus, advisory, consultancy, engineering firm. So we have three different business lines. Supply chain strategy, where we do things like supply chain design and the Coupa platform, planning, inventory, engineering, automation studies, and distribution centers, with the labor crunch that we're facing right now. As well as we have a digital transformation group that works on getting the decision-making as a supply chain industry into the digital realm and away from Microsoft Excel. >> Let's talk about the digitization of the supply chain. You know, one of the things that we've seen in the last couple of years is this massive acceleration to digital because businesses in every industry had no choice. But where are, what are the current trends from a digital supply chain perspective? >> You know, I think the, kind of the integration of the compression of the decision-making cycle has really gotten companies to not look at strategic decisions then operational decisions and tactical decisions in execution. That all has to be compressed now with the volatility we've all been exposed to. I mean, basically, for the past 20 years, we took the supply chain and turned it into a Swiss watch. It was very long, very well orchestrated. But with the volatility, with labor issues, with the land war in Europe, this volatility and change is requiring companies to be much more adaptive. And they've had to compress that decision cycle down and the Coupa platform, certainly, from a supply chain standpoint, absolutely helps infuse that process to shorten time from question to answer and allow you to address strategic and tactical topics in parallel to one another and not kind of waterfall down over the decision making product. >> That's important, 'cause these days, there is no time for waterfalls. So let's unpack the Coupa supply chain design platform. Talk to me about it, what it does and how it is helping that acceleration? >> Yeah, so it's incredibly powerful. And what it allows you to do is create that digital representation. We can take a three dimensional world and put it into a two dimensional linear program. And within the same platform we can optimize strategically and take a look at end to end type of supply chain decisions, nearshoring, onshoring, supplier diversification, and risk aspects. We can look at it more operationally. We're actually looking at which manufacturing plans should make what? What distribution centers should serve what customers? How do I segment my products? How do I segment my customers? Then within the same modules, you can use and go to your inventory optimization, not only optimize inventory, but also simulate it, which gives you phenomenal power in a world where there is so much uncertainty. You can apply risk in those questions of what if, so you're ready. So that way, when the thing happens, you're not that scrambling to have analysts crunch Excel files to see what do you do to normalize inventory levels or normalize your supplier base. You're able to be more proactive with the predictive and prescriptive analytics that the full suite provides for you. >> That is essential. If that's one of the lessons we've learned in the last couple of years, not if, but when. >> Nick: Yes. >> Talk to me about customers that are using the platform. What are some of the, using it well. What are some of the things that they have in common? >> You know, I think the organizations that are implementing it well, look for it. They view it as a real platform. You know, historically, supply chain design, network optimization, was seen as a tool, and companies implement it as a tool. You purchase licenses, you assign a couple of people to work on it from your analytical department and you just went with it. This is a very powerful platform to completely revolutionize how you make decisions within your supply chain. And you need to approach it the same way you approach a new warehouse management system, a new planning platform, a new labor management system, the change management aspects, the organizational aspects, the education of stakeholders on what is this, demystifying it. So it's not a black box and everybody knows what it can and should do and how best to utilize it. So those organizations that view it as more than a distribution network tool, "Hey, where do I put my new warehouse? Hey, this lease is coming up in Central Europe. It's coming up in Ohio. Do I extend the lease? Do I need to move?" That's, like, a level zero maturity on our maturity graph. The very mature companies are using it and infusing it both strategically, operational, technically, and are using it for distribution decisions, transportation decisions around mode selection, production footprint decisions. You have the capability to have a digital twin. And by having, the other thing companies struggle with is, they just build one model. >> Uh-hmm. >> I start out, I buy the product. You know, I get it built in, I move everything to the cloud and then I do a distribution solve for the U.S. And then the European group says, "Hey, that was great. That was insightful. Can we do the same thing in Europe?" And you take that model and then you add Europe into it. And then the production group says, "Hey, you know, we're thinking about changing some of our make-buy decisions. Can you model what the effect would be on total cost if we did do some nearshoring?" And all of a sudden, you turn your one model that you had built for a specific purpose into this Christmas tree where everybody's hanging their ornaments. And what you really need to do is having a modeling strategy. What type, you should have a volume, a portfolio of models you can pull from and say, "Hey, here's our strategic end to end model. Hey, here's our tactical Asian production models. Hey, here's our total landed cost for top 15% of our customers." And having that set of models, so you have right models, the right questions. >> Uh-hmm. >> That's what the companies that are really scaling this and really excelling. And you'll notice a pattern. The companies that are excelling that have the Coupa platform, typically, you'll find them on list, like, Gartner's Top 25 and things along those lines. Because it is a very powerful platform when you unlock the art of the possible with it. >> Sounds, like, those are companies that are very innovative. But where does the company, that maybe isn't there yet? How do they start? 'Cause it sounds, like, there's a tremendous wealth of potential and opportunities that the technology can deliver. Do they have to start with executive buy-in? What do you see as kind of, like, some of those early steps? >> This is a change management exercise from the very beginning. So creating that sense of urgency, creating your powerful coalition. You have to start with that. If you view this as, "Hey, we're going to have a tool, we're going to use this once, and then our supply chain's fixed for the next 10 years." I mean, I think most leaders are realizing that those days are long gone. That supply chain design has to be a continual topic at the top levels. You know, supply chain is on the lips of every politician and every (chuckles) board member right now. So this is a wonderful moment for those supply chain leaders that have wanted to infuse a greater level of digital decision-making. This is the perfect opportunity. You can get buy-in, like, you never had before. Your CFO is probably analyzing labor inflation, fuel inflation rates, disruptions on supply base, and you're probably having to deal with more pressure out of the CFO and its department than you ever had to in the past. We see it with our clients. The pressure is on with those leaders. And this allows you to very quickly be much more holistic in that decision-making. You're not relying on how good was the analyst, that made this Excel file that told you to open up this plan, move this distribution center, serve this customer base in this way. It's not based on how that data looks and how good that analyst was, you're infusing an entire practice into your organization. >> That's critical, because every company these days is a data company. If they're not, they're not going to be around. It's about the ability to have visibility extract the value from the data to make those data-driven decisions, because we don't have time. We heard a lot about that from a real-time perspective and the keynote this morning that's table stakes run any organization. >> Yeah, and with the move of the platform to the cloud, as part of the Coupa ecosystem, with the DDM, with the rapid model builder, and all those things that come along with it, it will significantly squash the amount out of time you have from question to answer. Because the first time you do this, it probably takes four months. And of that four months to ask that question, and get an answer, build your model, you know, replicate the 3D world in that 2D environment. Over half of that time is spent on cleaning data, building the baseline model, aligning with finance, they peanut butter spread certain aspects of cost onto the onto SKUs and really getting correct cost allocations for A, B, and C SKUs. You spend half your time just playing around with your data to get the model to work right now. Once you add that model, next time, question and answer infinitely quicker. But you have to have a good data strategy. You have to have the right data architecture. If you don't have that specific to supply chain, leaders really need to get on that. Because what we see a lot of times is organizations will have an enterprise data strategy. >> Uh-hmm. >> And they're going to build a data warehouse or a data lake, you know, whatever, I'm a consultant, so I'm also guilty of the buzz words. But, we kind of call it the supply chain data plan. You don't need to wait for the whole enterprise to get ready to have all of your data sorted out in a single instance, homogenize. Start collecting that supply chain data, have a data strategy around it. So that way, you can start replicating these things then you can feed it back into the enterprise data strategy. But you have to get your data right. It's the old adage garbage in garbage out. >> Right. >> It's still true to this day. No matter how powerful the analytical tools are, we're infusing machine learning, artificial intelligence into some of the solves in the platform. But if you don't have that good data, you're going to struggle. So that's a key piece to it, getting that executive buy-in and having that right data strategy will set you on a much smoother path to success than if you don't do those things. >> Right, the data strategy is critical. If not, one of the biggest competitive differentiators these days. Where is the chief data officer, the chief digital officer, the chief information officer, in these conversations that Miebach is having with customers? >> Too often, not at the forefront enough. >> Lisa: Really? >> Those clients that have that group, have that organization, and they have influencing power, those programs go much quicker, much simpler. The rate of adoption, the scalability of the program. All of a sudden, you're not thinking about, "What am I going to do with one or two analysts interacting with the product?" You're now developing apps. You have your planners interfacing with it. You have capacity managers interacting with the digital model. Those that don't have that, do have much more impetus, because it's always the adage of, "Oh, IT, what do we do? And our data's a mess. We have this data program and our IT resources are super constrained." So you have to bring those people to the table. You have to have them part of the conversation, 'cause they can be an incredible enabler if you bring them and get them bought in. >> That's a great point of those enablers. And especially, given the fact that nobody has extra time to waste here. This is a, everything is so fast moving. You mentioned supply chain being on the lips of every politician. Everybody's lips, everybody's expecting some delivery that is delayed for whatever reason. >> I mean, 12 years ago when I started with the firm, and people, "Oh, what does the firm do?" I'm like, "Oh we're a global supply chain consultancy." And they're like, "What?" >> Yeah. (laughs) >> You know, now everybody knows. And they're like, "Oh, yeah!" It's amazing that the revolution, I mean, the pandemic has been incredibly unfortunate with all the hardships and deaths and everything and still dealing with hotspots and things. I think it did bring supply chain, supply chain was struggling for a while to get a seat at the table. Organizations started having chief supply chain officers. You know, that was a new thing not that long ago. This has brought table stakes to the supply chain organization. My challenge back to us is what do we do with this now? >> Right. >> For years, as an industry, we've asked to be at the table, we're here now, spotlight's on us. It's time for us to deliver. Things like the Coupa platform are an incredible enabler of that. But you got to get it right when you roll it out. >> The spotlight's on you, but there's also a skill shortage. Talk to me about that. I just saw you do a big sigh. How can Miebach and Coupa with this platform help to mitigate some of the supply chain skills gap that organizations in every industry are facing? >> You know, it really comes down to the human element and when people talk a lot about sustainability, they talk about environmental conditions. There's a human sustainability topic we have to cover. Nobody likes being assigned to be a data analyst on a transformational project. And you're crunching Excel spreadsheets and running it sequel coding. No, no, that's not an enjoyable fulfilling task for many people. >> Lisa: No. >> There are special people that it is, and God bless (chuckles) them. So with things, like, the apps, with things, like, building out, so that way, we can take the people that you do have and have them making decisions, driving discussions around the insights the platform's giving versus just crunching numbers and building models. This is where you're going to have a much higher retainment. People are going to be excited about the job. They're going to have fun at the job because you do see a turnover of organizations that don't get the data strategy right, that people don't like being in a supply chain center of excellence in perpetuity. Again, there are certain people that are, but a lot of times, once the people get this analytical insight to how strategically the design of the company is set up, business units will grab them and give them a significant role. And then you're continually churning and replacing your COE talent. So having a talent strategy for your COE and having a strategy of how you're going to leverage, you know, we're in a world where my first grader's are learning coding, right? Like, you need to have a data strategy. So that way, that becomes your people strategy as well. And too many times, people think, "Hey, I buy the platform. I need a project strategy. What are the projects we're going to do?" And not often enough, do they talk about the people element of it to really make this work. And it absolutely has to be part of the discussion as you're setting up your center of excellence, it's people, it's processes and it's technology. >> Absolutely! >> You got to bring those three together or you real struggle a bit. >> You do. And then change management is not an easy thing to do for anybody. But one of the things you talked about, this is the pandemic as an accelerator of getting the supply chain folks to the table, being able to accelerate, getting data into the hands of people that can actually take in clean insights and make decisions based on that. So if you look into a crystal ball, what's the future of supply chain design? Where is it going? >> I believe we're going to see a lot more of movement towards applications and infusing of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's there. It's ready to go. What a lot of companies are lacking and it goes back to what we already talked about is the data piece of it. I mean, we have been developing algorithms in a machine learning environment for three, four years now. It goes back to garbage in, and garbage out. So I think it's going to be a big element of supply chain talent, securing that, figuring out with robotic product process automation and things like that. How do you take non-value added work so you can take the talent you do have and give them more fulfilling work? I think companies are going to need to have data strategies and all that unlocks applications and things. So you can democratize, right? You have this digital twin in the cloud. How many people within the organization cross-functionally have questions about the supply chain? >> Right. >> What if this happens? What if that happens? Hey, if we do this, what does it effect upstream downstream? >> Right. >> So once you build that cloud, develop the applications that allow the entire enterprise to interface with this digital representation to play around and see what the effect is to then make better, more informed, more holistic decisions, drive more conversational, cross functionally amongst leaders, and even below the top leadership level. I think this is really where we're going to go and the companies that don't just survive, but thrive in this new normal, whatever that's going to be, is going to be the companies that get that right. >> They have to embrace that. There's no doubt. >> Nick: Have to embrace it. >> Nick, it's been great having you on the program, talking about supply chain, what's going on there, the accelerators, but also the opportunities. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. >> I appreciate the opportunity. So it's been a great conversation. I look forward to the rest of the event! >> I agree. For Nick Banich, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas at Coupa Inspire 2022. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest shortly. (bright music)

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Welcome to this Kube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson. And today we have a very special guest from Red Hat, Nick Barcet. Nick is the Senior Director of Technology, Technology Strategy at Red Hat. Nick, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be visiting you here virtually. >> It's fantastic to have you here. I see a new office surroundings at Red Hat. Have they taken a kind of a nautical theme at the office there? Where are you joining us from? >> I'm joining from my boat now, I've been living on my boat for the past few years, and that's where you'll find me most of the time. >> So would you consider your boat to be on the Edge? >> It's certainly one form of Edge. You know, there are multiple forms of Edge and a boat is one of those forms. >> Let's talk about Edge now. We're having this conversation in anticipation of KubeCon CloudNativeCon that's coming up North America 2021, coming up in Los Angeles. Let's talk about specifically the Edge, where the Edge, Edge computing and Kubernetes come together from a Red Hat perspective. Walk us through that, talk about some of the challenges that people are having at the Edge, why Kubernetes is something that would be considered at the edge. Walk us through that. >> Let's start from the premises that people have been doing stuff at the Edge for ages. I mean, nobody has been waiting for Kubernetes or any other technology to start implementing some form of computing that is happening in their stores, in their factories, wherever. What's really new today is when we talk about Edge computing, it's reusing the same technology we've been using to deploy inside of the data center and expand that all the way to the Edge. And that's what, from my perspective, constituents, Edge computing or the revolution it bring. So that means that the same GitOps, DevSecOps methodology that we were using into that center are now expandable all the way to those devices that leaves in where locations and that we can reuse the same methodology, the same tooling, and that includes Kubernetes. And all the efforts we've been doing over the past couple of years has been to make Kubernetes even more accessible for the various Edge typologies that we are encountering when discussing with our customer that have Edge projects. >> So typically when we think of a Kubernetes environment, you're talking about containers that are contained in pods, that live on physical clusters, despite all of the talk of a no-code and serverless, we still live in a world where applications and microservices run on physical servers. Are there practical limitations in terms of just how small you can scale Kubernetes? How far, how close to the Edge can you get with the Kubernetes deployment? >> So in theory, there is really no limit. As the smallest devices are always bigger than Kubernetes itself. But the reality is you never use just Kubernetes, you use Kubernetes with a series of other projects that makes it complete, or for example, stuff that is going to be reporting telemetry, components that are going to help you automatically scale, et cetera. And the further you go into the Edge, the less of these competence you can afford. So you have to make trade-offs when you reduce the size of the device. Today, what Red Hat offers, is really concentrated to where we can deliver a full OpenShift experience. So the smallest environments on which we would recommend to run OpenShift at the Edge is a single node is roughly 24 gigabytes of RAM, which is you could buy it, sorry, which is already a relatively big Edge device. And when you go a step lower then, that's where we would recommend using a standard rail for Edge configuration or something similar. Not Kubernetes anymore. >> So you said single node, are you let's double click on that for a second. Is that a single physical node that is abstracted in a way to create some level of logical redundancy? When you say single node, walk us through that. We've got containers that are in pods, so what are we talking about? >> You have, based on your requirements, you can have different way of addressing your compute need at the Edge. You can have those smallest of clusters. And this would be three nodes that are delivered, with is the control plane and the worker nodes integrated into one. When you want to go a step further, you could use worker nodes that are controlled remotely via a central control plane that is at a central site. And when you want to go, even one step further deploy Kubernetes on a very small machine, but that remains fully functional even if disconnected that's when you would use the thing that is not anymore a cluster, which is a single note, Kubernetes where you still have access to the full Kubernetes API, regardless of the connectivity of your site, whether it's active or not, whether you're at sea or in the air or not. And that's where we still offer some form of software high vulnerability, because Kubernetes, even on a single node, it'll still detect if a container dies and restarted and provide similar functionality like this, but it won't provide hardware availability since we are a single node. >> And that makes sense. Yeah, that makes, yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I would suggest that we refer to that as a single node cluster, just because we like to mix it up with terminology in our business and sometimes confuse people with it. >> Technically, that was the choice we made, actually. You like to call it a cluster because it's not a cluster >> Exactly. No, I appreciate that. Absolutely. So what's be explicit about what the trade-offs are there. Let's say that I'm thinking of deploying something at the Edge, and I'm going use Kubernetes to orchestrate my container environment and pretend for a moment that space and cost aren't huge limiting factors. I could put a three node cluster in, but the idea of putting in a single node is very, it's attractive. Where does, where's the line drawn in terms of what you would recommend from, you know, what are the trade offs? What am I losing, going to the single node cluster? See I just called that. >> Well, in a nutshell, you're losing hardware high availability. Meaning if one of your server fails since you only have one server, you lose everything. And there is no way around that. That's the biggest trade-off. Then you have also a trade-off on the memory used by the control plane, which you won't be able to use to do something else. So if I have a site with excellent connectivity and the biggest loss of connectivity might be counted in hours, maybe a remote worker use a better solution because this way, I have a single central-side that carries my control plane, and I can use all the RAM and all the CPU's on my local site to deploy my workloads, not to carries a control plane. To give you an example of these trade-off in the telco space, for example, if you're deploying an antenna in a city, you have plenty of antennas covering that city. And therefore, the loss of one antenna is not a big deal. So in that case, you will be tempted to use a remote worker because you will be maximizing your use of the RAM on the sites for the workload, which is let's have people establish communication using their phones. But now, we take another antenna that we are getting to locate in a very remote location. There, if this antenna fail, everybody fails. There's nobody that is able to make calls, even emergency vehicles cannot discuss together very often. So in that case, it's a lot better to have an autonomous deployment, something where the control plane and the workload itself are being run in one box. And this one box in fact can be duplicated. There could be a another box that is either seating in a truck in case of emergency or off, but on the antenna site, so that in case of a major failure, you have a possibility to re to restore it. So it really depends on what's your sets of constraints in terms of availability in SIM of efficiency of your RAM use is going to be that it's going to make you choose between one or the other of the deployment models. >> No, that's a great example. And so it sounds like it's not a one size fits all world, obviously. Now, from the perspective of the marketplace, looking in at Red Hat, participating in this business, some think of Red Hat as the company that deployed Linux 20 years ago. Help us make that connection between Red Hat today and what you've been doing for the last 20 years and this topic of Edge computing, 'cause some people don't automatically think of Red Hat an Edge computing. I do, I think they should, (chuckles) but help us understand that. >> Yeah, obviously a lot of people consider that Red Hat is Red Hat, Linux, and that's it. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what we've been known since our beginnings 25 years ago, and what has made our early success. But we consider ourselves more of an infrastructure company. We have been offering for the past 20 years, the various component that you need to deploy server, run and manage your workloads across data centers and make sure that you can store your data, and that you can automate your operations on top of this infrastructure. So we really consider ourselves much more of a company that offers everything that enables you to run your servers and run your workloads on top of your server. And that includes a tool to do virtualization, that includes tool to do continuous deployment of containers. And that's where Kubernetes entered in play about 10 years ago. Well, first it was OPAs that then became Kubernetes and the OpenShift offering that we have today. >> Yeah. Thanks for that. So I have, I've got a final question for you. It's a little bit off topic, but it's related, this is in the category of Nick predicts. So when does Nick predict that we will get to a point where we tip beyond the 50/50 point cloud versus on-premises IT spending, if you accept today that we're still in the neighborhood of 75 to 80% on-premises. When will we hit the 50/50 mark? I'm not asking you for the hundred percent cloud date, but give us a date, you give us a month and a year for 50/50. >> Given the progression of cloud, if there was no Edge, we could said two to three years from now, we would be at this 50/50 mark. But the funny thing is that at the same time, as the cloud progresses, people start realizing that they have needs that needs to be solved locally. And this is why we are deploying Edge-based solution, solution which reliably can provide answers, regardless of the connectivity to the cloud, regardless of the bandwidth. There are things that I would never want to do, like feeding a size on feeds from 4K cameras, into my cloud environment that won't scale, I won't have the bandwidth to do so. And therefore, maybe the answer to your question is, it's going to be asymptotic, and it's almost impossible to predict. >> So that is a much better answer than giving me an exact date and time, because (chuckles) because it reveals exactly the reality that we're living in. Again, there is, you know, it's fit for function. It's not cloud for cloud's sake, compute resources, data, resources have a place that they naturally belong oftentimes. And oftentimes that is on the Edge, whether it's on the edge of the edge of the world in a sailboat or out in a single server, not node, or I keep wanting to single node cluster, it's killing me. I dunno why, I think it's so funny, but a single node implementation of OpenShift where you can run Kubernetes on the Edge, it's a fascinating subject. Anything else that you want to share with us that we didn't get? >> I think one aspect that we never talk enough is how do you manage at the scale of Edge? Because even though each Edge site is very small, you can have thousands, even hundreds of thousands of these single node something that are running all over the place. And I think that what you're seeing in advent cluster management for Kubernetes, and particularly the 2.4 version that we are going to be announcing this week and actually releasing in November is I think a pretty good answer to that problem on how do I deploy with zero touch these devices? How do I update them, upgrade them? How do I deploy the workloads on top of that? How do I ensure to have the right tooling to deploy that at the scale? And we've done the testing now of ACM with up to 2,000 clusters, connected to a single ACMs. And in the future, we are planning on building federation of those, which really gives us the possibility to provide the tooling needed to manage at its scale. >> Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. That's whenever we start talking about anything in the realm of containerization and Kubernetes scale starts to become an issue. It's no longer a question of a human being managing 10 servers and 50 applications. We start talking about tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of instances where it's beyond human scale. So that's obviously something that's very, very important. Well, Nick, I want to thank you for becoming a Kube veteran once again. Thanks for joining this Kube Conversation from Dave Nicholson, this has been a Kube Conversation in anticipation of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2021. Thanks for tuning in. (bright music)

>>Oh, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. I'm John is the Cuba, David Nicholson, our cloud host analyst, and it's exciting to be back in person in event. So we're back. It's been two years with the cube con and Linux foundation. So scrape, it was a hybrid event and we have a great guest here, Cuban London, Nick Dirk, and CT field CTO of harness and harness.io. The URL love the.io. Good to see you. >>Thank you guys for having me on. I genuinely appreciate >>It. Thanks for coming on. You were a part of our AWS startup showcase, which you guys were featured as a fast growing mature company, uh, as cloud scales, you guys have been doing extremely well. So congratulations. But now we're in reality now, right? So, okay. Cloud native has kind of like, okay, we don't have to sell it anymore. People buying into it. Um, and now operationalizing it with cloud operations, which means you're running stuff, applications and infrastructure is code and it costs money. Yeah. Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, repatriated from the cloud. So there's a lot of, there's some cost conversations starting to happen. This is what you guys are in the middle of. >>Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is when you think about it today, we want to shift left. When you want to empower all the engineers, we want to empower people. We're not giving them the data they need, right. They get a call from the CFO 30 days later, as opposed to actually being able to look at what change I did and how it actually affected. And this is what we're bringing in. Allowing people to have is now really empowering. So throughout the whole software delivery life cycle from CGI continuous integration, continuous delivery feature flagging, and even bringing cost modeling and in cloud cost management. And even then being able to shut down, shut down the services that you're not using, how much of that is waste. We talk about it. Every single cloud conference it's how much is waste. And so being able to actually turn those on, use those accordingly and then take advantage of even the cheapest instances when you should. That's really what >>It's so funny. People almost trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the cloud business because they're so focused on innovation that they think, okay, we've got to just innovate at all costs, but at some point you can make it productive for the developers in process in the pipeline to actually manage that. >>That's exactly it. I mean, if you think about it to me in order to breach state continuous delivery, we have to automate everything. Right. But that doesn't mean stop at just delivering, you know, to production. That means to customer, which means we've got to make them happy, but then ultimately all of those resources in dev and QA and staging and UAT, we've sticker those as well. And if we're not being mindful of it, the costs are astronomical, right. And we've seen it time and time again with every company you see, you've seen every article about how they've blown through all their budgets. So bring it to the people that can affect change. That's really the difference, making it visible, looking at it. In-depth not just at the cloud level and all the spend there, but also even at the, uh, thinking about it, the Kubernetes level down to the containers, the pods and understanding where are the resources even inside of the clusters and bringing that as an aggregate, not just for visibility and, and giving recommendations, but now more importantly, because part of a pipeline start taking action. That's where it's interesting. It's not just about being able to see it and understand it and hope, right? Hope is not a strategy acting upon it is what makes it valuable. And that's part of the automate everything. >>Yeah. We'll let that at the Dawn of the age of DevOps, uh, there was a huge incentive for a developer just to get their job done, to seize control of infrastructure, the idea of infrastructure as code, you know, and it's, it's, you know, w when it was being born, it's a fantastic, I've always wondered though, you know, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of that responsibility? So we've got responsibility from a compliance and security perspective and of course cost. So, so where do we, where do we go from here, I guess is the question. Yeah. So >>When we look at building this all together, I think when we think about software delivery, everybody wants to go fast. We start with velocity, right? Everybody says, that's where I want to go. And to your point with governance compliance, the next roadblock to hit is weight. In order to go fast, I have to do it appropriately. I've got governing bodies that tell me how this has to work. And that becomes a challenge. >>It slows it down too. It doesn't, I mean, basically people are getting pissed off, right? This is, this general sentiment is, is that developers are moving fast with their code. And then they have to stop. Compliance has to give the green light sometimes days, correct? Uh, it used to be weeks now. It's days, it's still unacceptable. So there's like this always been that tension to the security groups or say it, or finance was like slow down and they actually want to go faster. So that has to be policy-based something. Yep. This is the future. What is your take on that? >>Take on, this is pretty simple. When everybody talks about people, process and technology, it's kind of bogus, right? It's all about confidence. If you're confident that your developers can deploy appropriately and they're not going to do something wrong, you'll let them to play all the time. Well, that requires process. But if you have tooling that literally guarantees your governance, make sure that at no point in time, can any of your developers actually do something wrong. Now you have, >>That's the key. That's the key. That's the key because you're giving them a policy-based guardrails to execute in their programs >>And that's it. So now you can free up all those pieces. So all those bottlenecks, all those waiting all those time, and this is how all of our customers, they move from, you know, change advisory boards that approve deployments. >>Can you give us some, give us some, give us some, uh, customer anecdotal examples of this inaction and kind of the love letters you get, or, or the customer you take us through a use case of how it all. >>So this is one of my favorites. So NCR national cash register. If you slide a credit card at like a Chick-fil-A or a Safeway, right? Um, traditional technology. But what was interesting is they went from doing PCI audit, which would take seven days to go to a PCI audit right now with harness, because, >>And by the way, when you and the seventh, six day, the things that you did on day one change. >>Exactly, exactly. And so now, because of using harness and everything's audited, and all the changes are, are controlled to make sure that developers again, can only do what they're allowed. They only get to broadcast two per production. If they've met all their security requirements, all their compliance, permits, all their quality checks. Now, because of that, they literally gave a re read only view of harness to their auditor. And in three hours it was over. And it's because now we're that evidence file from code commit through to production. Yeah. It's there for point of sale compliant. >>So what is the benefits to them? What's the result saves them time, saves the money. What's the good, the free up more times. I'll see the chops it down. That's the key. >>Yeah. It's actually something we didn't build in like our ROI calculators, which was, we talked to their engineers and we gave them their nights and their weekends back, which I thought was amazing. But Thursday night, when we're doing that deploy, they don't have to be up. Harness is actually managing and understanding, using machine learning to understand what normal looks like. So they don't have to, they don't have to sit and look at the knock or sit in the war room and eat the free pizza. Yeah. Right. And then when those things break, same concept rates aren't as good. So >>I got to ask you, I got you here. You know, as the software development delivery lifecycle is radically being overhauled right now, which people generally agree that that's the case, the old models are, are different. How do you see your vision around AI and automation playing into this? Because you could say, okay, we're going to have different kinds of coding styles. This batch has got an AI block here. It's very Lego block. Like yep. Okay. Services and higher level services in the cloud. What's your reaction to how this impacts automation and >>Sure. So throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job as Guinea dev ops person. If they love babysitting deployments, they don't harness handles that for them, ask your engineers that they love sitting there waiting for their tests to run. Every time they build, they go get coffee, right. Because we're waiting for all of our tests to run. Y yeah. Right. The reality >>Is sometimes they have to wait days and >>That's it. But like, if I change the gas cap on, uh, on your car, would you expect me to check every light switch and every electronic piece? No. Well, why do we do that with code? And so our AI, our ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's not to remove people's jobs. It's actually to make their jobs much better. >>How do you guys feed the data? What's the training algorithm for that? How does that work? Yeah, >>Actually, it's interesting. A lot of people think it's going to take a ton of time to figure this out. The good news is we start seeing this on the second deployment. On the second bill, we have to have a baseline of what good looks like, and that's where it starts. And it goes from there. And by the way, this isn't a lot of people say AI, and this AML, I teach a class on this because ML is not standard deviation. It's not some checks. So we use a massive amount of machine learning, but we have neural networks to think about things like engineers do. Like if we looked at a log and I saw the same log with two different user IDs, you and I would know, well, it's the same thing. It's just different users, but machine learning models. Don't so we've got to build neural networks to actually think like humans. So that, >>So that's the whole expectation maximization kind of concept of people talk about, >>Well, and that's it because at the end of the day, we're like I said, I'm not trying to take people's jobs. I want to meet. >>Yeah. You want to do the crap work out of the way. And I had to do other redundant, heavy lifting that they have to do every single time we use the cloud way. We've >>Built mechanical muscle in, in the early 19 hundreds. Right. And it made everyone's jobs easier, allowed them to do more with their time. That's exactly what we're doing here. >>I mean, we've seen the big old guys in the industry trying to evolve. You got the hot startups coming out. So you got, you know, adapt or die as classic thing. We've been saying for many years, David on the cube, you know that. So it's like, this is a moment of truth. We're going to see who comes out the other side. How do you, Nick, what would you be your, your kind of guess of when that other side is, when are we gonna know the winners and the losers truly in the sense of where we are now? >>So I think what I've found is that in this space specifically, there's a constant shift and this is something with software. And the problem is, is that we see them come in ebbs and flows, right. And very few times are there businesses that actually carry the model? And what you find is that when they focus on one specific problem, it solves it. Now, if I was working on VMs a few years ago, great, but now we're, we're here at coop con, right? And that's because it's eaten, uh, that side of the world. And so I think it's the companies that can actually grow the test of time and continue to expand to where the problems are. Right. And that's one of the things that I traditionally think about harness and we've done it. We cover our customers where they were, I think the old mainframes, if you had to, where they were, where they are at their traditional, their VM. >>I mean, if you think about it, Nick, it's one of those things where it's like, that's such a common sense way to look at it evolves with a problem. So I ride the right with tech ways. But if you think about the high order bit, here is just applications. We ended the day. Companies have applications that they want to write modern. The applications of their business is going to be codified so that you just work backwards from there. Then you say, okay, what is the infrastructure as code working for me? That's an ethos of dev ops. And that's where we're at. So that's why I think that the cloud need is kind of one already, but we still have the edge devices, more complexity. This is a huge next level conversation at one point is that we just put a hard and top on the complexity. When is that coming? Because the developers are clear. They want to go fast. They want to go shift left and have all that data, get the right analytics, the telemetry and the AI. But it's too complicated still. That is a big problem. >>It's too complicated. You ask for a full-stack developer to also know infrastructure, to also know edge computing. Like it's impossible, right? And this is where tooling helps, right? Because if you can actually parameterize that and make it to the engineers and have to care, they can do what they're best at. Hey, I'm great at turning code in artifact, let them do that and have tooling take care of the rest. This is where our goal is. Again, allow people >>We'll do what they love. And this is kind of the new roles that are changing. What SRE has done. Everyone talks about the SRE and some states just as he had dev ops guy, but it's not just that there's also, uh, different roles emerging. It's, it's an architectural game. At this point, we would say, >>I'd say a hundred percent. And this is where the decisions that you make on are architecturally. If you don't know how to then roll them out, this is what we've seen. Time and time again, you go to these large companies, I've got these great architectures on planning four years later, we haven't reached it because to that point process, >>The process killed them four >>Different new tools throughout the process. Well, yeah. >>So when do we hit peak Kubernetes peak >>Kubernetes? I think we have a bit to go in and I'm excited about the networking space and really what we're doing there and, and bringing that holistic portion of the network, like when Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things, uh, to truly come to it. And I think there's a vast space in networking. Um, and, and so I think in the next few years, we're going to see this, you know, turn into that a hundred percent utilized across the board. This will be that where everyone's workloads continue to exist. Um, somewhat like VMs we're in >>And, and, and no, no fear of developers as code in the very near future. You're talking about automating the mundane. Correct. Uh, there have been stories recently about the three-day workweek, you know, as a, as a fan of, um, utopian science fiction, myself, as opposed to dystopian. Absolutely. I think that, you know, technology does have the opportunity to lift all boats and, uh, and it's, it's not nothing to be afraid of. You know, the fact that I put my dishes in the dishwasher and they run by themselves for three hours. It's a good thing. It's a great thing. >>I don't need to deal with that. Yeah, I agree. No, I think that's, and that's what I said in the beginning. Right. That's really where we can start empowering people. So allow them to do what they're good at and do what they're best at. And if you look at why do people quit? We don't have to go so hard to find. Yeah. Why? Because they're secondary to babysit and implement and they're told everywhere they go, they're not going to have to >>That's the line. And that's all right. We got a break, but it's great insight to have you on the Q one final question for you. Um, I got to ask about the whole data as code something that I've been riffing on for a bunch of years now. And as infrastructures could we get that, but data is now the resource everyone needs, and everyone's trying to, okay, I have the control plane for this and that, but ultimately data cannot be siloed. This is a critical architectural element. How does that get resolved in the land of the competitive advantage and lock in and whatnot? What's your take on that? >>So data's an interesting one because it has, it has gravity and this is the problem. And as we move, as I think you guys know, as you move to the edge as remove, move it places there's insights to be taken at the edge there's insights to be taken as it moves through. And I think what you'll see honestly, going forward is you'll see compute done differently to your point. It needs to be aggregated. It needs to be able to be used together, but I think you'll see people computing it on its way through it. So now even in transport, you'll start seeing insights gained in real time before you can have the larger insights. And I see that happening more and more. Um, and I think ultimately we just want to empower that >>Nick, great to have you on CTO of field CTO of harness and harness.io is a URL. Check it out. Thanks for the insight. Thank you so much. Great comments. Appreciate it. Natural cube analysts right here, Nick, of course, we've got our, our analysts right here, David Nicholson. You're good on your own. I'm John for a, you know, we have the host. Thanks for watching. Stay with two more days of coverage. We'll be back after this short break.

>> Viewers of our breaking analysis series know that we've been following the developments in cybersecurity for a number of years and of course, throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the permanent shifts that we see in cyber from remote work, distributed computing and technology advancements. We've reported how the adversaries are highly capable they're well-funded and they're motivated. And how they're constantly upping their game on defenders, island hopping, stealthily living off the land, planting self forming malware at various points in the digital supply chain, offering advanced ransomware as a service of the dark web to any disreputable individual with or without a high school diploma that may have access to a server and is brazen enough to steal from their company. We've also shared this chart from Optiv many, many times, it's a taxonomy of the cybersecurity landscape, and it is meant to make your eyes bleed, ask any CSO and they'll tell you they're drowning in fragmented tooling, technical debt, and their number one challenge is lack of talent. Not that their people aren't capable, they are, but CSOs just don't have enough of them. They can't hire fast enough or they can't retain qualified people with the talent war that's going on. Or they can't train people fast enough, or they just don't have the budget. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video exclusive with Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, Nick, so good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> That's our pleasure. So Arctic Wolf networks, let's talk about the company, the problem, you heard my little narrative upfront. What are you guys all about? >> Yeah, so at its core, we're a cybersecurity technology company. You know, it's our belief that we've really pioneered the first full scale cloud native security operations platform and at its core, what we're trying to do as a business is make security operations something that's fast, easy and economical for really a company of any size and scale to implement with really two key components, one we're agnostic to the technology and the landscape of the technology that they have already implemented within their environment, and two, we can feather into really any organization, regardless of the skill set they have from a cybersecurity standpoint in house. And really the problem that we're setting out to solve, I think you illustrated well at the beginning of the show here is that it's our belief that the cybersecurity industry in a sense has failed the end user or failed the customer by throwing, you know, a myriad of different tools at them. And it's really, you know, our mission here as a company to end cyber risk. And it's our belief that through the cloud native platform that we've bought in the cybersecurity security operations cloud that we've built, that we can deliver the outcomes that have been promised over time to these customers, which at the end of the day, is really just to be safe and have their customer and have their business protected. >> So you guys are the experts. You can kind of provide a white glove service that essentially plugs in to my business. Is that right? And how easy is that to do, what do I have to do to, to set it up? How complicated is that for me, the customer? >> Yeah, so it's, it's very straightforward. We can implement our security operations platform, you know, in as short as a week and generally speaking, you know, about a month and we plug in really to the infrastructure that the customer has in place. And for some of our customers, that's very little and for some of our customers, most of our customers, that's quite a bit of technology. And the beauty of the way that we've built the platform is that we're really agnostic to that tech. So, we can take feeds from kind of any technology that are in place, that helps to augment the platform that we've built. And then we feather in kind of the technologies that we've built within the platform, into their existing infrastructure. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is give the customer visibility, you know, into the tools that they have, the gaps that they might have as a result of the tools, you know, in some cases, the duplication of efforts that they have, you know, between these tools and then deliver a security outcome or a protection that maybe they haven't otherwise felt as a business. And then outside of kind of the technology platform, we add what we call our concierge security team as a layer to the deliverable that we give to the customer. And why that's important is that not all customers are created equal and with regard to the skillset that they have in house, in that that concierge security platform allows us to kind of work with a customer at any kind of, you know, point along their security journey, regardless of the in-house technology talent that they have. >> Now, so I got to ask you, our largest footprint for the cube is in the heart of Silicon Valley. We love the valley, but I also love stories of high growth companies that are outside of Silicon Valley. You guys are in the Midwest in Minnesota, it's got some Compellent DNA in there. And I remember my, so my business friends, Phil Soren, and Larry Yasmin, you know them, Phil used to tell me, Dave, this is actually an advantage for us to be in the middle of the part of the country. There's a talent war going on, which back then was a lot less than it is today, even. So how do you see that? Are there advantages to you and being in that part of the country, or does it not matter because you're so distributed around the world? >> Yeah, I mean, I would follow a similar tune to Phil, right. I, you know, obviously worked at Compellent early and, you know, historically I've worked at other Minneapolis based technology companies and the reality is there's a really strong technology ecosystem in Minneapolis. And a lot of the, of the talent, you know, is not just in sales and marketing or just on the technical side, but it's in building high growth technology companies kind of from the ground up into, you know, large scale. And now we've seen not only the fortune 500 kind of base that we have here in Minneapolis, but also a growing contingency of larger technology companies using Minneapolis as at least, you know, one of the spokes against their hub, if not the hub themselves. And clearly my pedigree in history was out of Minneapolis based tech, you know, and I've moved to other locations throughout the country, but as we started to build out, you know, Arctic Wolf and what we wanted Artic Wolf's culture to look like, and as we started to lay out the foundation for what we wanted our growth to look like, it became very clear to myself, you know, our chairman and co-founder Brian Nesmith, that Minneapolis would be a great home for us as Arctic Wolf. And then we would continue to invest in some of the locations that we have, you know, both across the country and now across the globe. >> So there are a lot of companies that are doing managed security services, but if I got it right, you guys specifically target smaller and midsize companies, is that correct? And why is that? >> Yeah, so I would say that that would be correct as of a few years ago, the dynamic has changed quite a bit. And I think it's a result of the dynamic of the market. First and foremost, we are a technology company. We have this concierge layer on top, which is really what the customers are looking for, but it's all powered by the platform. So the platform kind of allows us to do what we've done as a business, into both small organizations, which is, you know, where we probably got our start, but over the last few years, we've seen tremendous growth up market, you know, so for example, we as a business have grown, you know, over a hundred percent now for eight years in a row and now on a much larger denominator, but our upmarket business is growing at four to 500%. And I think that's a result of really two things. I think, A, customers of that size and scale have realized that cyber security and cybersecurity operations as a problem is something that's really hard to accomplish in-house regardless of your size and complexity. And then two, I think what happened over the past year, year and a half is that we saw a lot of organizations move from a centralized I.T or a centralized, you know, security function where they could all operate within an office and all operate in a centralized environment, all of a sudden becoming very disparate in their geography. And that led to a lot more interest in what we did with larger customers, because we could deploy a security operation effectively, remotely in a really short amount of time. And we could do it more effectively and economically than, than they could do on their own. And then we also solve for a component of the human aspect of what a security operation means, right. And what I mean by that is these larger organizations can take their highly skilled cybersecurity talent and focus them on the strategic initiatives within the company. Whereas a lot of the security work or risk is in kind of the day to day, right? The dieting that takes place within an organization. And that's where a lot of the breaches take place is in making sure that you're actually paying attention to, you know, the alerts that you're getting and paying attention to the telemetry and the tools that you've made investments in. And we augment that portion of a cybersecurity operation really, really well for larger organizations and for smaller organizations, we are that security operation. So it's kind of dependent on the way in which they're set up. >> Okay. So it's a mix of both well augmenting, and basically you take the whole thing and so, so your ideal customer profile, your ICP is anybody with a security problem. I mean, that's everybody, well, maybe you could describe paint a picture of your perfect customer, if you would. >> Yeah, so, and you, I know you said that somewhat jokingly, but it, but it is true. We have customers of all sizes, you know, so I, I bet our smallest customer is under 10 employees. Our largest customer is over 50,000 employees. We have customers in every vertical of the market, you know, mostly centralized in healthcare, financial organizations, manufacturing, but, you know, the largest swath of customers by industry would probably not top 10%. So, we service really any account that's looking to develop and invest in a security operation and has the support of their organization and the support of their board and their leadership teams to make that investment. And then where we, where we fall within the account is really dependent on the way in which their current operation is set up. And certainly, you know, the massive organizations that have, you know, 50 people within their cybersecurity team, and they have a hundred different tools. They're probably not the best target for us, but if they have security awareness, if they have a security as a top need or a top priority within their business, and they're looking for a way to build out a true security operation within their account, whether that be wholesale through a third-party or in part through a third-party, we're a perfect fit for all those accounts, which makes our addressable market massive. >> Yeah, so what's unique about you guys, I mean, this may be not the right analogy, but you're kind of like the easy button for cyber. I mean, there's nothing easy about cyber., I get that, but you, you do make it easy, especially for companies that don't have any cyber expertise to engage and get up to speed fast, and certainly be more protected. That's one aspect of your uniqueness. The other is, I think, is your tech stack. I'm hearing, you've got a platform. I know you're focused on network detection and fast response. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what's unique about Arctic Wolf. >> Yeah, so the platform itself is really what we founded the company on. So we spent the first few years of our organization in really building out this cloud scale, multitenant cloud, native platform, understanding that the volume of data and the amount of sophistication that we would need to deliver the security operation in the long run was going to be massive. So the platforms really kind of, you know, set on a few different founding principles. One, the platform needs to work for any organization regardless of their size, regardless of their underlying tech and regardless of the skill set within their account. And that's really important. A lot of the tools in the market today require certain things of the, of the customer. And it's our premise, regardless of the customer that we won't require anything from the customers themselves. It's up to them to tell us which portions of the experience they want to own, verse Artic Wolf owning. The second would be that we need to be able to ingest a vast amount of data, and we need to be able to make intelligent decisions with that data, in a short amount of time. And as we've built out our machine learning and our AR algorithms, what we've been able to do is leverage a tool set that allows us to ingest. I think we're up to now 1.5 approaching 2 trillion observations a week, right. Which might equate to a few hundred alerts within our SOC on a per customer basis. But we're only bringing one or two things to a customer on a weekly basis that really need attention. And that's all about the platform kind of curating, cultivating the vast amount of data that we've brought into it. And then, how do we explain and how do we sell that platform with this concierge later into the customer base is also important. And we've done that through what we call modules. So we kind of founded the company on MDR managed detection and response, but we are not a managed detection and response company. It's one of our modules. We've then added manage risk, which competes kind of in the vulnerability management space. We've added a SAS and IAS monitoring, which is really cloud security. We've added what we call log search, which is really our first foray into collaboration. And then we just recently launched a quarter ago, what we call managed security awareness training, which is, you know, training the human aspect of the company on the threats of cybersecurity. And we actually just announced another acquisition in the managed security space today with habituate, which is going to give us, you know, kind of a Hollywood style approach to content within managed awareness training. But tying all those together is very unique in the market. So generally speaking, you'll see a company focused on a specific attack surface, or a specific threat. And what we're trying to say is, look, you're not a hundred percent protected as a business, or you don't have a robust security operation unless you're bringing together all aspects of cybersecurity under one umbrella. And that's really our goal as a company. >> Okay. So you got all these different modules and you may not want to go here cause you're in the cyber business and you're, you're prudently secretive, but, but I'm interested in kind of what's underneath. I presume you're using best of breed tooling underneath, but unlike, you know, the hosting company of the past or those, you know, a big, you know, integrator who could do this, but they've got one of everything and it's sort of, kind of a mess. You're building a scalable business, but you're not, you're not developing, you know, best of breed, identity access products for the marketplace. You're I presume you're buying those in integrating them and working through whatever APIs and making it all work across your stack. Can you talk a little bit about your tech stack? >> Yeah, so the technology stack has been built from the ground up by Arctic Wolf. So certainly we're using, you know, various technologies or open source technologies from within the ecosystem, but the technology and the platform itself is Arctic Wolf. So we're not beholden to any third parties for what we deliver to the customer. And that makes us very nimble in a few areas. One, it makes us very nimble in the way that we price the solution to the customer, which for us is a very predictable model. And then two, it allows us to be nimble with customer needs as to what they want from us, both of the existing modules that we have, but also additional modules or, you know, additional solutions that we might bring to the market. So a lot of vendors that have historically kind of lived within the MDR space and certainly vendors that have lived in the managed, you know, the MSSP or MSP space, which we are certainly not, they're generally leveraging third-party technologies. They're generally buying and implementing or white labeling third-party technologies. And then they're layering kind of a services component on top. And we are not doing that. We've built the technology ourselves and don't get me wrong. That was a massive investment in both time and resources. But I think in the end, what it'll allow us to do is be very nimble with the market and most importantly, be very nimble with the customer's requirements and requests. >> Right. Okay. So let's talk about your market opportunity. I mean, the cyberspace, I mean, I got it well over a hundred billion, I don't know, maybe it's 110, 120 billion. That's kind of your tan, you may be not serving that entire market today. Although you said you started in small and mid-size, you're targeting now your enterprise, your higher end businesses growing, you talked about, I think you said a hundred percent growth, like eight quarters in a row. And so there's no shortage of opportunity for you. How do you think about your total available market? Maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's been eight years of a hundred percent growth. >> Eight years, not eight quarter, I apologize. >> It's been going really well for us. And it's a reflection on the market itself and the approach we're taking. So in our view, security operations is really the opportunity to unify all these disparate markets in cybersecurity. And, when I walk into a customer account, if I had to use two words to describe how they're feeling, one would be confused, the other would be frustrated. Sometimes they're both. Sometimes they're only one, but generally speaking, one of those two words comes out of their mouth. And the reason for it is at the end of the day, they just want to be protected. They want the outcome. And all of these disparate markets are promising the same outcome, but they're just promising it on the endpoint or just on the network or just in cloud or just an IOT or just an OT, or just in fill in the blank. And it's our view that it's our opportunity as a company to really fill that void for the customer, which is to unify all of these different technologies and spaces into one security operation. And sometimes that means that we're delivering our own end point. And sometimes that means that we're leveraging an end point or an end point solution that the customer has in house. And we're ingesting that data into our platform and we're making sense of it to the end user. But when you put that market together, you know, it's a hundred, I think Gartner's recent numbers there are 150 plus billion dollar market. And in 2021, I think it's growing at, you know, 12 to 15%. And it's our view that we can service the majority of that market, you know, I think on a conservative measure, you know, 90 to a hundred billion is the, is the Tam that we're addressing. And we're now starting to go, not only scaling out from the number of products for the markets that we service, and you can see that through managed security awareness training, but also the geographies we service, the segments of the market we service, specialization within verticals. And, for us, that is the opportunity at the end here. >> I wonder if you could help us squint through some of the data you hear in the industry, some of the trends you see in the press, certainly this came up in the, in the solar winds hack. We were seeing, I mentioned upfront, the adversaries are very capable. They're able to get in, live off the land, live stealthily, they're island hopping into the supply chain. You know, oftentimes you don't know, more than often, you don't know they're there, I've heard stats like, and we look at the solar winds hack, we saw that it was, you know, 300 days or over a year that they were inside the company. And you've heard, you know, average statistics from, you know, whatever that it's hundreds of days are those, are you able to compress those? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of where you see your customers and how you're helping them, you know, respond? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is really about limiting the volume of incidents within a customer account and then limiting the impact. And what you're talking about is the impact. And the impact as these threat actors have become, you know, more sophisticated is larger as they're in the environment for a longer period of time. So the faster you can get to an attack or the faster you can detect an attack, the better off you'll be as a business. And that is the core of what we do as a company. And, and certainly, you know, managed detection response or MDR, our first offering was all about that. It's all about detecting early and responding early to a threat so that you can get anything that has gotten through your perimeter defenses out of your systems, as fast as humanly possible. And then we feathered in, you know, manage risk, which is more about the front end. So how do we make sure that we have everything configured properly? How do we make sure that we, you know, fill any holes that are in the current environment so that we don't even get to a point where we have to manage the time with which an attack has had to live within your environment? So, it's all about kind of those two things, reduce the frequency and reduce the impact. And we're, we're focused on both, both the, kind of the proactive measures, which would be more on the front end and then the reactive measures, which is what do you do and how can you act as quickly as possible within your environment to ensure that, you know, they're not getting into the crown jewels of the business. >> We've seen lately where the, the attackers have. I mean, it's really insidious, right Nick, they, they will exfiltrate, they'll get in they'll exfiltrate stealthily and they'll be ready to attack from a ransomware standpoint. And then they, you know, maybe they're hitting the bank and they're scouring to see what the Chief Information Officer is going to invest in. And they're actually making trades ahead of that. They're making more money, you know, snooping than from the ransomware. And then when the company realizes and they respond, then they get them in a headlock and say, okay, now, now that you're going to stop us from making all this money through exfiltration, we're going to hit you with ransomware. So it's just, it's a really awful situation. So my point being that, or we've said, organizations have to be stealthy in their response. Have you seen that as a trend? Am I overstating that? >> No, no. I mean, customers are, you know, good news, bad news customers are very aware of the threats in particular ransomware, data exfiltration and all the other trends in the market. And I think they become more sophisticated in the way in which they respond. And I think as a result, we've seen both changes in the way customers kind of set up their environment technologically, but we've also seen a pretty dramatic shift recently with the way in which they view insurance and the way in which, you know, carriers, view insurance, and how that plays a role in, you know, cybersecurity in their cybersecurity operation. And for a lot of customers, I think recent trends are that the carriers are struggling to, you know, make money on their cyber books. And the reason for that is because they need to make sure that the customer's environment is truly secure, or they're kind of flying blind on what their book looks like. And we've started to see that both on the end-user side, we've seen that through the carriers themselves, and that also has played an integral role in the way in which the customer views risk. And I think that dynamics changing. And I think what the result of that will be is that customers are going to be looking more and more towards how they solve this problem by alleviating risk in-house, as opposed to transferring some of that risk to an insurance carrier or a third party. And what I hope that means for customers is that they'll have the proper investment. They'll have the proper tooling, they'll have the proper operations around how to react and how to respond in the quickest possible manner, which at the end of the day, the faster you can react to an incident, the smaller the impact will be and the smaller of a financial burden it will be. And they'll do that through vendors like Arctic Wolf, you know, tools that are best of breed within their infrastructure. And then a really well thought out plan about how to respond to anything that, that you know, happens within their environment. >> Yeah. I mean, if I'm an insurance company, I give a discount to somebody who's got an alarm in their house and they use it. Maybe I'll give a discount if they're working with a company like Arctic Wolf. >> Exactly. >> What percent, do you have a census to what percent of enterprises actually have a SOC? >> Yeah, we actually did a, some homework here and there's kind of two stats that jump out. And these are through a few different surveys through very well-known organizations in the cybersecurity market. But one is that last year, which would have been, you know, 2020, about 60% of organizations said that they suffered some semblance of a breach, 60%, you know, think about how many tools and how much money these organizations are investing in protecting their businesses. And over half are suffering some semblance of a breach. When those same customers are asked whether or not they felt like they have a security operation, over 99% answered no. >> Wow. >> Right. So they have a bunch of tools they're investing a ton of money, but at the end of the day, when asked, hey, do you feel like you have an operation that can protect your business? Their answer is no. And that's really the void we're trying to. >> And you and I both know that 60%, okay. But then the other 40%, they've been hacked. They just don't know it. So, all right. Let's wrap with the sub stats on the company. I think you've raised nearly half a million, half a billion dollars to date $500 million to date. So that's, I can infer from that some pretty lofty numbers, but where are you in funding with that kind of growth? I got to believe IPO is and you and your future. What can you tell, what metrics can you share? What can you tell us about where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few metrics on the platform and a few metrics on the company. So the platform itself, you know, we're observing over 1.5 trillion observations a week, we have 10,000 plus sensors in the field. You know, we're ingesting coming from a, you know, Compellent infrastructure guy. You know, we're in ingesting over a petabyte and a half a data week. I would have loved to have been that sales guy in the glory days, you know, but the platforms, you know, operating at massive scale, we've grown the business eight years in a row, over a hundred percent. We've talked about that. Our subscription gross margins are very software-like. We have over 2000 customers. You know, our customers are really happy with an NPS score, you know, approaching 70, you know, over a million licensed users. So we're, we're doing very, very well as a business. And as a result, we've raised money to invest in that growth, which is to the tune of about a half a billion dollars and our path here, and we've stated this publicly now is that, you know, next summer give or take a quarter is really the timeframe that we're marching towards for an IPO. If I'm being honest, given the metrics that we have as a business, we could be a publicly traded company today, especially with the way the market's operating in the valuations of some of the businesses that have gone out. There might be some, even some pressure to do so, but we want to make sure that we are ready to go from a systems and an operation standpoint to not just be, you know, a flashing the pan awesome IPO, but a company that's really kind of the backbone of cybersecurity for years to come. >> Well, obviously a hot space. What we've been covering for a couple of years now, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, we've seen what's happened in the action in the market there. I mean, what are your comps? I mean, I know, I think dark trace is getting ready to go. I don't think they've gone yet. I know Sentinel One went out. How should we think about you? You're not an Okta or I don't think well, CrowdStrike, but you know, those are pure play product companies. How should we think about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean, companies that were on a similar trajectory as us at our size, Sentinel One's a very good example. And you can kind of look across all the core business metrics on that. And clearly those will all be public here in under a year. CrowdStrike's a great example. If you go, you know, reel back the tape to when they were, you know, our size we're right in line with them Zscaler, Okta, you know, I joke with our board and investors and our CFO, that the number of companies that we benchmark ourselves against is starting to become a very small number, given you know, our growth at the scale that we're at. >> Well, that's an awesome story, Nick. We're really excited that you could make some time to come on the Cube and we want to follow your progress. Welcome you back anytime. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah. Great. Thanks for having me, Dave, and looking forward to continuing the conversation at some point. >> Excellent and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube and we'll see you next time.

>> Welcome to The Cube Startup Showcase made possible by AWS. In this session, we're going to dig into how organizations can improve governance and use AI to increase confidence and trust in their software delivery process. My name is Dave Vellante and joining me is Nick Durkin, who's the field CTO of Harness IO. Nick, thanks for joining. >> Thank you so much for having having me on here. I appreciate it. >> Give us the overview of the company, let's, let's start with what you guys are all about. >> Yeah, I think when you look at Harness specifically, it started as continuous delivery as a service. And we really have grown from that and become a true modern software delivery platform. And with everything that we deliver, we do this with artificial intelligence and machine learning in mind, to remove all of the tasks that we hate. No one wants to babysit deployments. No one wants to sit there and watch tests run that we don't need to run. And so really taking an artificial intelligence approach to software delivery. >> Great. Let's talk about software delivery and maybe we can dig in to some of the trends that you're seeing, maybe the drivers that are leading people to new approaches, you know, some of the challenges that customers face which are also opportunities. >> Absolutely. You know, it's interesting. We look at everyone on their journey for software delivery and traditionally velocity is actually what brings people into to either deploying faster or we need to get and modernize our platforms quicker. And so velocity is the driver traditionally to bringing new tools and new technology. And what's interesting is that governance while equally, if not more important, that's often second fiddle. And so what we find is that customers go on a journey where they use their CI tool and they expand it. They use their open source offerings that they have from modern technologies to create velocity and go fast. But then what they quickly find out is they have to govern this. And whether that's for regulatory purposes or whether that's for just internal processes, right? This becomes the hard part. And a lot of people have to script it. And if someone's actually able to achieve say velocity and governance, this is where now we're reaching, you know, speeds now that we actually wanted. So we're now deploying end times end faster, our monoliths are turning into microservices and we're actually deploying infinitely quicker. And now this becomes a problem because we don't know what broke what. And so if you can achieve velocity in governance, the next problem that people have is traditionally quality. >> Yeah, so you know, that lack of governance, that's a real challenge because you're now seeing even more stress as data becomes prone to those same processes, DevOps for data, if you will. So now you got the whole privacy and governance slamming together, and people want to automate it as fast as they possibly can. So this puts even more stress on developers. And I think your point is they've got to go faster, but that's antithetical to quality. So therein lies the conundrum, but the answer is automation, machine intelligence. Maybe you could double click on that. >> Yeah, sure. No, that's exactly it. If you think about it, there's not enough people at these companies to sit there and look at the knock and understand what normal looks like. There's not enough people to look at every line of log to understand what's going on and what broke. And this is where you can start leveraging artificial intelligence to understand what does normal look like. And when you think about it, they are traditionally opposing forces, velocity and governance. But the reality is when we talk about software delivery, oftentimes people will say and bring in tools, people, processes, and tools are people process and technology. And the reality is it's all entirely about confidence in your people. And whether it's a tool or whether it's a process that provides that confidence, if that's what they're looking for is confidence that their developers can deploy when they want to as needed. And if something goes wrong, it will be taken care of. And so back to your point, Dave, specifically, when we think about software delivery, we think about continuous delivery we really mean automate everything. Right? From start to finish. And that means with all of the guard rails and all the rules that you need for governance, so that you can meet those security requirements, you meet those regulatory requirements while still empowering developers. >> You know one of the other things that obviously has changed in the last 10 years is cloud and cloud adoption, and cloud costs, everybody looks at their bill at the end of the month. They go, okay, I love it because of driving new business models, but hey, can we figure out how to control these costs a little bit? What is the role of developers in terms of controlling cloud costs? How can they impact that? >> Sure. No. If you think about this whole shift left paradigm, and we're now empowering developers to do more and more, what we're not giving them is the inputs that they need to effectively do their job. If you want engineers to care about costs, it's something they need visibility to. If you want, if you want the administrators to function out of, you know, a cost mindset, it needs to be something that's part of their daily information that they have. And today that's not how it works. Today a CFO will call down and say, hey, we're spending way too much money. You know, I just got one. We spent over $35,000 on some test clusters and I got a phone call from our CFO. Just like everyone else does. And then we had to go fix it. Instead of giving people who honestly would do no wrong if they had the information in front of them, giving them that information. So if you solve velocity with governance and now even solve for quality, the next thing that you have coming is cost. You're now going to be deploying infinitely faster to the cloud with so many changes that you can't keep, can't keep track of it. And you need that same auditability that you'd have with a governance platform to show you what you're changing in cost. So now what you want to do is empower the same engineers to know what changed they made, what it modified, how it affected it, but also how it affected costs. And if you give that to the engineers and the people that can affect change, it's amazing what happens. >> I want to come back to this notion of data challenges, because applications are increasingly more data centric. You put your data in the cloud, great, but then people realize, oh, the clouds expanding is going out to the edge. And so data by its very nature is, is distributed. People want more control of the data, the lines of business, the domain experts that it's self service that creates a new problem around governance. And when I talk to practitioners, what I'm hearing is as they embark on this journey, because everything used to be, you know, shoved in one place, a big monolith, and that's a limiter to scale. What they'll do is they'll phase it. They'll say, okay, phase zero, we're kind of process builders. We've got to figure out, okay, how is governance is going to work? And then as fast as they possibly can, they'll codify that so that they can automate it. Do you see that evolution in, in governance? How is it playing out in your world? >> Absolutely, I think, you know, you made mention of data and really data has gravity. But to your point, what we find is that people want choice. Right? What drives where they place their data, where they place their applications. It's on choice, it's on a lot of different things. And one of the things that we found is that to that point, if you can't define those processes, those policies, those procedures, to meet your governance in any of the clouds, this becomes now a burden on your employees. If they only have it for one specific location, whether it be on premise or whether it be in the cloud. Now you have to move to another cloud, or to another place. Now it's just all that much more rework. And the reality is the tooling that you have should allow you, or allow your engineers to deploy wherever is needed, whether it's on Amazon or Azure or, or, you know, primarily when we think about it all over the different Amazon and pieces, when we want to go and I want to deploy to say Amazon EKS or EKS anywhere, and I want to have them physically on the data center, or if I want to have them, you know, up in the cloud, this shouldn't be something that our engineers have to care about. Whether I'm putting on an ECS or on, on EC2 instances. Those are things that our engineers shouldn't have to care about, and the governance should allow you to do it to the appropriate locations when required. So what should happen, ultimately, if you, if you craft this accordingly, this should be designed so that at any point in time, your engineers can't make that mistake. They can't put data in the wrong place. They can't put applications in the wrong place because the governance will hold them to it. And you'll know why, so that you can fix it. And if you create that type of behavior, then there are no mistakes, right? Allow people the freedom to deploy. And as long as they do it within the rules, it'll work. >> I wonder if we could bring up that previous slide again and talk about the velocity of the governance, the quality and efficiency, which, which is most important when you talk to customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think depending on where they're at in the journey, velocity might be the thing that's hurting them right now. We have to solve for it. In which case let's go grab a whole bunch of open source tools and let's go grab all the things that we have and start scripting things. And what we find is that oftentimes customers come to us when they realize I've got all this, but now I need to make sure it's governed. And this is where it's hard. And that's where people will actually, you know, if you will, phone a friend, and look for some help, because this is complex and it's not something you want to do on your own, especially if you've been doing it for the last nine years, you don't want to do it again for a new technology or a new space. And then when we think about it, if you've actually achieved governance, which a lot of say, like regulatory, you know, based customers have, quality becomes their part, where they need help. And so really it depends on where the customer's at in their journey, but I can guarantee you, everyone's looking for one of these four pieces and that's, what's their bottleneck right now. And it's really being able to provide the resolution to any of those bottlenecks out of the gate. Right? You want to make sure that if you have that coming, you're, you're prepared for it. And you have a tool that can help you as you're going to progress in those phases. >> If I understand it, your strategies, that will help customers optimize wherever they are in that journey. You know, they might be in a cloud migration. It's like, hey, we got to go fast, let's go. And then their attention is going to shift to governance. And then eventually as they get more mature, it's going to be okay, hey, we've got this down. Now we're going to lower our cost and be more efficient. So let's talk about how you do this, here's a graphic that really speaks to your platform. Nick, why don't you walk us through this? >> Yeah, sure. I think when you think about software delivery, we traditionally will think about CI and CD. And so I think that's where we can start, but there's a lot more to software delivery. And so that's what we'll offer different pieces. One of the benefits of the Harness Platform, it is not, you're not locked into every single part and piece. You already have different technologies that you want to use by all means, use them, but we do offer you those technologies if they can help. And every one of these is designed around that idea and understanding of AI and machine learning at its core. So if you think about it, we started life as continuous delivery as a service. So taking what we would consider artifact to customer. And that's really what we think about when you think about continuous delivery. And in there, we want to think about all of the things that happen after delivery, the same way your best engineers would. So we're going to look at your performance metrics and the business metrics that you have. And we're going to think about them the same way, your best engineers would, but we're also going to look at those logs and understand exactly the same way that yep, that's fine, that's fine. Hey, what's, what's that over there? And this is where we use AI and ML not to do what people love doing, but to do what people hate doing, which is babysitting deployments. When you think about CI, we traditionally think about code two artifacts. So that's the first part and there, Harness, we acquired Drone, the most loved open source CI tool on the planet. And I can't make that up because, you know, you can go to GitHub and actually look it up. So people comment on this and we decided to invest in it, quadruple the team, and then add all of those security governance quality pieces to it. And then even one step further, add some more of that artificial intelligence. Dave, I'll ask you a direct question. If you were to change to the gas cap on your car, would you, after you change that, would you go check every single electrical device and electrical switch on your car to make sure it works? >> I hope not. (laughter) >> You hope not, right? But the funny thing, and the interesting thing is that when we do tests today in our CI tools today, if you make one change, our customers, or actually every customer, is testing everything every single time, instead of being more intelligent about it and only testing those things that matter. And so again, bringing those costs down, bringing that effort down and bringing that toil down across the board, this stands true for feature flags. If you want to get into more granular things and say complex deployments, you want to do this with feature flagging, to allow different customers, to be able to turn on and off different features for different regions or different reasons. Now, this is built into the same tooling where you can apply it to a pipeline and then have that verification after. So you really get that opportunity and that ability to use AI, to do what people are manually calling customers and determining whether it looks okay or are waiting and looking at, you know, output on a screen, now you can have machine learning, handle it for you. And really this is where it's designed to, as you move through that and any type of change that you wanted to do, whether it be in databases or in different network topology and using that same machine learning and verification. And then last thing that cost piece, a lot of people will say that a cloud cost tool does not belong in software delivery. And if you believe in shift left and you believe in giving people all the inputs, and I think you'd probably disagree, you'd actually fight yourself on that and say, it does probably live here. And that's what we want to bring that data, and not only visibility, we want to bring recommendations on how to fix it and bring actionability. So actually start taking action right away to bring costs down. >> Yeah but see you're not just making software delivery better. You're rethinking the approach. You're not just paving the cow path, sometimes I say, you're not doing that. You're reinventing, you know, to use an AWS term. >> Well, we actually did that specifically. When we said we wanted to build continuous delivery. We wanted to do it in a way and in a shape that wasn't copying the way that other CI tools had done it with expanding CI. We said, you shouldn't have to know what, how to write complex deployments. You shouldn't have to care whether you're on an EKS cluster, that's on premise or, or up in the cloud, your engineers shouldn't have to care and we should extract that from them. Right? And that's what we did there. And so to your point with all of these pieces, yes, we're rethinking them. We're not going ahead and just taking and paving that same path, like you said, we're truly trying to make it usable and viable for those that can use it. >> What do people buy from you? Is this a subscription? Is it a consumption-based model? How does that all work? >> Yeah, great question. So it is, it's a subscription and ultimately we're a software delivery company, but we're continuous delivery company. So unlike other people that will talk to you about, you know, updates and new versions and new pieces, we deploy a new version of our software at least once a day, we practice what we preach. And if you're going to continue to deliver software with somebody who doesn't do it themselves, you should probably ask yourself how, if they can't trust themselves to do it, are you going to? But the reality is depending on what you need, you only have to pay for what you need. So it's not like other platforms where you have pay for everything and only only use a part and piece of it. So for every aspect that you want and, or need, you're more than welcome to use it. And, I'll say something that my sales people probably don't like, but you know, we've never lost a deal on cost, right? We're here to show you value and ultimately make sure that it can help you and your customers, and that's what we do. >> Well this is clearly the trend in software pricing. We're seeing it's true cloud pricing, it's consumption pricing, it's you, you seem to have got it right in a, in a hot area that's why the investors are getting behind you. Nick Durkin of Harness IO. Excellent, thanks so much for your time, thanks for your insights. Really appreciate it. >> I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dave. Thank you for having me on. >> You're welcome. Okay you're watching The Cube's Startup Showcase made possible by AWS, new breakthroughs in dev ops data analytics and cloud management tools. Keep it right there. (soft music)

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here, in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. We're here, remotely, with Nick Halsey who's the CEO of OKERA, hot startup doing amazing work in cloud, cloud data, cloud security, policy governance as the intersection of cloud and data comes into real stable operations. That's the number one problem. People are figuring out, right now, is how to make sure that data's addressable and also secure and can be highly governed. So Nick, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, John, thank you. >> So you guys have a really hot company going on, here, and you guys are in an intersection, an interesting spot as the market kind of connects together as cloud is going full, kind of, whatever, 3.0, 4.0. You got the edge of the network developing with 5G, you've got space, you've got more connection points, you have more data flowing around. And the enterprises and the customers are trying to figure out, like, okay, how do I architect this thing. And oh, by the way, I got a, like all these compliance issues, too. So this is kind of what you could do. Take a minute to explain what your company's doing. >> Yeah, I'm happy to do that, John. So we're introduced a new category of software that we call universal data authorization or UDA which is really starting to gain some momentum in the market. And there're really two critical reasons why that happening. People are really struggling with how do I enable my digital transformation, my cloud migration while at the same time making sure that my data is secure and that I'm respecting the privacy of my customers, and complying with all of these emerging regulations around data privacy like GDPR, CCPA, and that alphabet soup of regulations that we're all starting to become aware of. >> I want to ask about the market opportunity because, you know, one of the things we see and the cloud covers normal conversations like, "Hey, modern applications are developing." We're starting to see cloud-native. You're starting to see these new use cases so you're starting to see new expectations from users and companies which creates new experiences. And this is throwing off all kinds of new, kinds of data approaches. And a lot of people are scratching their head and they feel like do they slow it down, they speed it up? Do I get a hold of the compliance side first? Do I innovate? So it's like a real kind of conflict between the two. >> Yeah, there's a real tension in most organizations. They're trying to transform, be agile, and use data to drive that transformation. But there's this explosion of the volume, velocity, and variety of data, we've all heard about the three Ds, we'll say there're five Ds. You know, it's really complicated. So you've got the people on the business side of the house and the Chief Data Officer who want to enable many more uses of all of these great data assets. But of course, you've got your security teams and your regulatory and compliance teams that want to make sure they're doing that in the right way. And so you've got to build a zero-trust infrastructure that allows you to be agile and be secure at the same time. And that's why you need universal data authorization because the old manual ways of trying to securely deliver data to people just don't scale in today's demanding environments. >> Well I think that's a really awesome approach, having horizontally scalable data. Like infrastructure would be a great benefit. Take me through what this means. I'd like to get you to define, if you don't mind, what is universal data authorization. What is the definition? What does that mean? >> Exactly and people are like, "I don't understand security. "I do data over here and privacy, "well I do that over here." But the reality is you really need to have the right security platform in order to express your privacy policies, right. And so in the old days, we used to just build it into the database, or we'd build it into the analytic tools. But now, we have too much data in too many platforms in too many locations being accessed by too many, you know, BI applications and A-I-M-L data apps and so you need to centralize the policy definition and policy enforcement so that it can be applied everywhere in the organization. And the example I like to give, John, is we are just like identity access management. Why do I need Okta or Sale Point, or one of those tools? Can't I just log in individually to, you know, SalesForce or to GitHub or? Sure, you can but once you have 30 or 40 systems and thousands of users, it's impossible to manage your employee onboarding and off-boarding policy in a safe and secure way. So you abstract it and then you centralize it and then you can manage and scale it. And that's the same thing you do with OKERA. We do all of the security policy enforcement for all of your data platforms via all of your analytic tools. Anything from Tableau to Databricks to Snowflake, you name it, we support those environments. And then as we're applying the security which says, "Oh, John is allowed access to this data in this format "at this time," we can also make sure that the privacy is governed so that we only show the last four digits of your social security number, or we obfuscate your home address. And we certainly don't show them your bank balance, right? So you need to enable the use of the data without violating the security and privacy rights that you need to enforce. But you can do both, with our customers are doing at incredible scale, then you have sort of digital transformation nirvana resulting from that. >> Yeah, I mean I love what you're saying with the scale piece, that's huge. At AWS's Reinforce Virtual Conference that they had to run because the event was canceled due to the Delta COVID surge, Stephen Schmidt gave a great keynote, I called it a master class, but he mainly focused on cyber security threats. But you're kind of bringing that same architectural thinking to the data privacy, data security piece. 'Cause it's not so much you're vulnerable for hacking, it's still a zero-trust infrastructure for access and management, but-- >> Well you mean you need security for many reasons. You do want to be able to protect external hacks. I mean, every week there's another T-Mobile, you know, you name it, so that's... But 30% of data breaches are by internal trusted users who have rights. So what you needed to make sure is that you're managing those rights and that you're not creating any long tails of data access privilege that can be abused, right? And you also need, one of the great benefits of using a platform like OKERA, is we have a centralized log of what everybody is doing and when, so I could see that you, John, tried to get into the salary database 37 times in the last hour and maybe we don't want to let you do that. So we have really strong stakeholder constituencies in the security and regulatory side of the house because, you know, they can integrate us with Splunk and have a single pane of glass on, weird things are happening in the network and there's, people are trying to hit these secure databases. I can really do event correlation and analysis, I can see who's touching what PII when and whether it's authorized. So people start out by using us to do the enforcement but then they get great value after they've been using us for a while, using that data, usage data, to be able to better manage their environments. >> It's interesting, you know, you bring up the compliance piece as a real added value and I wasn't trying to overlook it but it brings up a good point which is you have, you have multiple benefits when you have a platform like this. So, so take me through like, who's using the product. You must have a lot of customers kicking the tires and adopting it because architecturally, it makes a lot of sense. Take me through a deployment of what it's like in the customer environment. How are they using it? What is some of the first mover types using this approach? And what are some of the benefits they might be realizing? >> Yeah, as you would imagine, our early adopters have been primarily very large organizations that have massive amounts of data. And they tend also to be in more regulated industries like financial services, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals, retail with tons of, you know, consumer information, those are very important. So let me give you an example. We work with one of the very largest global sports retailers in the world, I can't use their name publicly, and we're managing all of their privacy rights management, GDPR, CCPA, worldwide. It's a massive undertaking. Their warehouse is over 65 petabytes in AWS. They have many thousands of users in applications. On a typical day, an average day OKERA is processing and governing six trillion rows of data every single day. On Black Friday, it peaked over 10 trillion rows of data a day, so this is scale that most people really will never get to. But one of the benefits of our architecture is that we are designed to be elastically scalable to sort of, we actually have a capability we call N scale because we can scale to the Nth degree. We really can go as far as you need to in terms of that. And it lets them do extraordinary things in terms of merchandising and profitability and market basket analysis because their teams can work with that data. And even though it's governed and redacted and obfuscated to maintain the individuals' privacy rights, we still let them see the totality of the data and do the kind of analytics that drive the business. >> So large scale, big, big customer base that wants scale, some, I'll say data's huge. What are some of the largest data lakes that you guys have been working with? 'Cause sometimes you hear people saying our data lakes got zettabytes and petabytes of content. What are some of the, give us a taste of the order of magnitude of some of the size of the data lakes and environments that your customers were able to accomplish. >> I want to emphasize that this is really important no matter what size because some of our customers are smaller tech-savvy businesses that aren't necessarily processing huge volumes of data, but it's the way that they are using the data that drives the need for us. But having said that, we're working with one major financial regulator who has a data warehouse with over 200 petabytes of data that we are responsible for providing the governance for. And one thing about that kind of scale that's really important, you know, when you want to have everybody in your organization using data at that scale, which people think of as democratizing your data, you can't just democratize the data, you also have to democratize the governance of the date, right? You can't centralize policy management in IT because then everybody who wants access to the data still has to go back to IT. So you have to make it really easy to write policy and you have to make it very easy to delegate policy management down to the departments. So I need to be able to say this person in HR is going to manage these 50 datasets for those 200 people. And I'm going to delegate the responsibility to them but I'm going to have centralized reporting and auditing so I can trust but verify, right? I can see everything they're doing and I can see how they are applying policy. And I also need to be able to set policy at the macro level at the corporate level that they inherit so I might just say I don't care who you are, nobody gets to see anything but the last four digits of your social security number. And they can do further rules beyond that but they can't change some of the master rules that you're creating. So you need to be able to do this at scale but you need to be able to do it easily with a graphical policy builder that lets you see policy in plain English. >> Okay, so you're saying scale, and then the more smaller use cases are more refined or is it more sensitive data? Regulated data? Or more just levels of granularity? Is that the use case? >> You know, I think there's two things that are really moving the market right now. So the move to remote work with COVID really changed everybody's ideas about how do you do security because you're no longer in a data center, you no longer have a firewall. The Maginot Line of security is gone away and so in a zero-trust world, you know, you have to secure four endpoints: the data, the device, the user, and the application. And so this pretty radical rethinking of security is causing everybody to think about this, big, small, or indifferent. Like, Gartner just came out with a study that said by 2025 75% of all user data in the world is going to be governed by privacy policy. So literally, everybody has to do this. And so we're seeing a lot more tech companies that manage data on behalf of other users, companies that use data as a commodity, they're transacting data. Really, really understand the needs for this and when you're doing data exchange between companies that is really delicate process that have to be highly governed. >> Yeah, I love the security redo. We asked Pat Gelsinger many, many years ago when he was a CEO of VMware what we thought about security and Dave Allante, my co-host at theCUBE said is it a do-over? He said absolutely it's a do-over. I think it was 2013. He mused around that time frame. It's kind of a do-over and you guys are hitting it. This is a key thing. Now he's actually the CEO of Intel and he's still driving forward. Love Pat's vision on this early, but this brings up the question okay, if it's a do-over and these new paradigms are existing and you guys are building a category, okay, it's a new thing. So I have to ask you, I'm sure your customers would say, "Hey, I already got that in another platform." So how do you address that because when you're new you have to convince the customer that this is a new thing. Like, I don't-- >> So, so look, if somebody is still running on Teradata and they have all their security in place and they have a single source of the truth and that's working for them, that's great. We see a lot of our adoption happening as people go on their cloud transformation journey. Because I'm lifting and shifting a lot of data up into the cloud and I'm usually also starting to acquire data from other sources as I'm doing that, and I may be now streaming it in. So when I lift and shift the data, unfortunately, all of the security infrastructure you've built gets left behind. And so a lot of times, that's the forcing function that gets people to realize that they have to make a change here, as well. And we also find other characteristics like, people who are getting proactive in their data transformation initiatives, they'll often hire a CDO, they'll start to use modern data cataloging tools and identity access management tools. And when we see people adopting those things, we understand that they are on a journey that we can help them with. And so we partner very closely with the catalog vendors, with the identity access vendors, you know, with many other parts of the data lake infrastructure because we're just part of the stack, right? But we are the last mile because we're the part of the stack that lets the user connect. >> Well I think you guys are on a wave that's massive and I think it's still, it's going to be bigger coming forward. Again, when you see categories being created it's usually at the beginning of a bigger wave. And I got to ask you because one thing's I've been really kind of harping on on theCUBE and pounding my fist on the table is these siloed approaches. And you're seeing 'em everywhere, I mean, even in the consumer world. LinkedIn's a silo. Facebook's a silo. So you have this siloed mentality. Certainly in the enterprise they're no stranger to silos. So if you want to be horizontally scalable with data you've got to have it free, you've got to break the silos. Are we going to get there? Is this the beginning? Are we breaking down the silos, Nick, or is this the time or what's your reaction to that? >> I'll tell you something, John. I have spent 30 years in the data and analytics business and I've been fortunate enough to help launch many great BI companies like Tableau and Brio Software, and Jaspersoft and Alphablocks we were talking about before the show. Every one of those companies would have been much more successful if they had OKERA because everybody wanted to spread those tools across the organization for better, more agile business analytics, but they were always held back by the security problem. And this was before privacy rights were even a thing. So now with UDA and I think hand-in-hand with identity access management, you truly have the ability to deliver analytic value at scale. And that's key, you need simplicity at scale and that is what lets you let all parts of your organization be agile with data and use it to transform the business. I think we can do that, now. Because if you run in the cloud, it's so easy, I can stand up things like Hadoop in, you know, like Databricks, like Snowflake. I could never do that in my on-prem data center but I can literally press a button and have a very sophisticated data platform, press a button, have OKERA, have enforcement. Really, almost any organization can now take advantage of what only the biggest and most sophisticated organizations use to be able to do it. >> I think Snowflake's an example for all companies that you could essentially build in the shadows of the big clouds and build your own franchise if you nail the security and privacy and that value proposition of scale and good product. So I got, I love this idea of security and privacy managed to a single platform. I'd love to get your final thought while I got you here, on programmability because I'm seeing a lot of regulators and people in the privacy world puttin' down all these rules. You got GDPR and I want to write we forgot and I got all these things... There's a trend towards programmability around extraction of data and managing data where just a simple query could be like okay, I want to know what's goin' on with my privacy and we're a media company and so we record a lot of data too, and we've got to comply with all these like, weird requests, like hey, can you, on June 10th, I want, can you take out my data? And so that's programmatic, that's not a policy thing. It's not like a lawyer with some privacy policy. That's got to be operationalized. So what's your reaction to that as this world starts to be programmable? >> Right, well that's key to our design. So we're an API first approach. We are designed to be a part of a very sophisticated mesh of technology and data so it's extremely simple to just call us to get the information that you need or to express a policy on the fly that might be created because of the current state-based things that are going on. And that's very, very important when you start to do real-time applications that require geo-fencing, you're doing 5G edge computing. It's a very dynamic environment and the policies need to change to reflect the conditions on the ground, so to speak. And so to be callable, programmable, and betable, that is an absolutely critical approach to implementing IUDA in the enterprise. >> Well this is super exciting, I feel you guys are on, again, a bigger wave than it appears. I mean security and privacy operating system, that's what you guys are. >> It is. >> It is what it is. Nick, great to chat with you. >> Couldn't have said it better. >> I love the category creation, love the mojo and I think you guys are on the right track. I love this vision merging data security policy in together into one to get some enablement and get some value creation for your customers and partners. Thanks for coming on to theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Now, it's my pleasure and I would just give one piece of advice to our listeners. You can use this everywhere in your organization but don't start with that. Don't boil the ocean, pick one use case like the right to be forgotten and let us help you implement that quickly so you can see the ROI and then we can go from there. >> Well I think you're going to have a customer in theCUBE. We will be calling you. We need this. We've done a lot of digital events now with the pandemic, so locked data that we didn't have to deal with before. But thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. OKERA, hot startup. >> My pleasure, John and thank you so much. >> So OKERA conversation, I'm John Furrier here, in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Speece the chief federal technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> Likewise, chief federal technologist, that's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. >> It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So chief federal technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. >> Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake big, biggest software IPO and software history your market cap right now is at 66 billion 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day 250 petabytes of data under management, a lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud, why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? >> Yeah, so great question and the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us and thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere, but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm going to run it on your stuff not mine, into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake. We can't reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there, the underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there, otherwise our customers get left in the dark and we can't can't have that. >> And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry the value of the data is in the insights the ability to extract that data in real time glean insights from it so that businesses can make data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms, right, that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for single source, for stuff like? >> Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is. And trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market, in every region undergoes. And how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud but the data cloud is where we're going. And what I mean by data cloud. If you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City you could go around with a clicker and count everyone, or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here. Going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration, to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enrich data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. >> Absolutely that's critical. That the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find. I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies maybe even just anonymously that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? >> Absolutely. We've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services, for example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for a certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we want to make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California, three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities, and not just trying to do audits but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19, getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. >> It is that's going to be absolutely critical but we're also seeing it, you know, everywhere else, such as for universities and education, suddenly this need, the last few months for real-time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies, you talked about enriching data sets so not just companies sources of data but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions, but from a historical real-time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. >> Yeah, sure. Right. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already use today and connecting it to a data source or platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a model view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot, that was not a promise, but trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question is 80% of these very valuable professionals time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today, we work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in data sets. >> What are some of the things that differentiates Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? >> Yeah. Great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud, we didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future, Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. And I know that sounds really nerdy and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value. If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago we'd have a spreadsheet that if I open that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you'd get locked out. You're told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform and Office 365, object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents. Multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention, that's the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object and give you that source of truth the truth that you absolutely need to make decisions. >> And that's critical these days as we know. We're in living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. You know, all these folks from home accessing corporate networks, you know, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? >> Absolutely. So I'll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage the EC Compute, all of the different entities and end points that AWS already secures Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we've also built and rolled this access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to, we recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter. So there's a lot of different capabilities built in, encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchial model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We got to be good at that which is why it's our top priority. >> I didn't, to ever talk about security as an inherited, I must be a dominant trait if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake, what's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? >> Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS, East commercial, so we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com, you can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. Our security is built into all of our regions although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use, but we always, always always protect our users' data, regardless of where it is. >> You make it sound easy, I got to say. (laughing) >> That's because it is. (laughing) Thank you cloud. >> That's good. And well, that's good and it should be, especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you. As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history, just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever, and our relatives ever witnessed, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? (laughing) >> Well, good vibes is our business model. You know, Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you can look for more functions, but really the evolution of the data cloud, our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. >> One more question I wanted to sneak in, how did you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? >> It's, a lot of it comes down to silos that the customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake there isn't such thing really as a data silo there's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified, you can do queries across databases, that's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an App Store for your phone but instead it's data sets and the data sets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier bringing in everything from housing evaluation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already use today along with weather and population counts, the main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more data sets are being published over every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. >> That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world re, you know, recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that, that there was the power of that behind that, and the smart folks like you chief federal technologists, helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> For next piece, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition of course. We're talking to practitioners, we're talking to contributors, we're talking to end users from around the globe where they are, and of course when we talk about the CNCF, it's not just Kubernetes, there's a lot of projects in there, and it's not just for building things in the cloud, one of the interesting use cases that we've been talking about the last year or two has been about how edge computing fits into this whole ecosystem. To help us dig in a little bit deeper into that conversation, welcome on board one of our CUBE alumni, Nick Barcet, he is a senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat. Nick, great to see you again, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for inviting me again. >> All right, so as I teed up, containerization and Kubernetes, a lot of times people think about it's the big public cloud that's my data center, but of course, cloud is not a destination, there's so much happening with the containerized world, and of course these lightweight environments, when we can make them lightweight, makes sense to go to the edge, so if you could, just tell us where we are with the state of containerization and the cloud-native ecosystem, and where does that fit with edge computing today? >> So what we're seeing currently is every ISV, every customer we talk with, are converting to developing their application with container as a target. This is making it so much simpler for them to be able to establish their application wherever they want. Of course, when we add, for example, the operator framework that we just got accepted into the CNCF, and normalize how you're going to do day one and day two of the life cycle of this container, this is making things a lot simpler. And this is allowing us to have the same principle reapplied for deployments happening in the cloud, on your private data center, and anywhere at the edge. And that's really the core of our strategy, whether in the open source community, or as a commercial company. It is to make all these different footprints absolutely equal when you are writing code, when you're deploying code, when you're managing it. >> Yeah, Nick, we talk about the edge from my standpoint, tend to think that it is going to need a lighter weight, smaller footprint than if I'm thinking about my data center or the environment, reminds me some ways of of course Red Hat, but CoreOS was how do we build something that can be updated faster and be a thinner operating system. When we think of Kubernetes, Kubernetes today isn't as simple, there's obviously a lot of managed services out there, of course with OpenShift you've got an industry leading solution out there, but is there something different I need to do to be able to do containerization and Kubernetes at the edge? How does that fit? >> As a developer, as a user, I hope you have nothing different to do. It's our job to make our platform suit the requirement that are very specific to the edge. For example, if you're going to put Kubernetes inside of a plane, you're not going to be able to use all the space you want. You're very space-constrained. Or if you put it in a train, or if you put it in a boat, you're going to have different types of constraints. And we need to be able to have a implementation of Kubernetes that fits the smallest requirement, but still has the components that enables you as a developer or you as the administrator to feel at home regardless of the implementation of it. And that's the real beauty of what we are trying to do, and that's why we are not rushing it. We are trying to do it upstream so that we have something that is as smooth as possible across different points. >> All right, when we talk about going to the edge, one of the considerations of course is the network to get there. So help us connect what the impact is of 5G, where we are with the rollout, and are there any industries maybe that are leading the pack when it comes to this discussion? >> Yeah, so when I talk about 5G, I like to distinguish two things. There is 5G as the network that the carriers are currently deploying to support all kinds of terminal endpoints. And it happens that in order to have an efficient 5G deployment, operators use edge technology to deploy computing power as close as possible to the tower. So that the latency between your device and what is connecting you to the internet, the time packets take to go across that last mile, is as short as possible. There is a second case, which is also very interesting in the edge part. Which is private 5G, because private 5G enables the customer to establish his, let's say his own antenna, his own local 5G network completely secure, that will enable connecting sensors or devices of all kinds, without having to run wire, and in a much more reliable way than if you're using Wi-Fi or similar kinds of connectivity. So these two aspects are crucial to edge, one because edge is enabling the deployment of it, the other one because it's enabling the growth of the number of sensors without multiplying the cost like crazy. In terms of deployments, well, you know our largest reference is Verizon, and Verizon is moving forward with its plan. This is going very well, I believe they have communicated around this so I will point you around what Verizon has stated on their deployment, but we have multiple other customers starting their journey and clearly, the fact that we have the ability to deploy the stack on the version of Kubernetes that is basically the same regardless of where you're deploying it. That has the ability to support both containers and VM for those applications that are not yet containerized, makes a huge difference in the simplicity of this transition. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you talk about the conversion between virtual machines and containers. One of the big use cases often talked about for edge computing is in industrial manufacturing, and there you've got the boundary between IT and OT, and OT traditionally doesn't want to even think about all those IT conversions and challenges that they've got their proprietary systems for the most part, so is that something, speak to what you're seeing in that segment. >> So, it's interesting, because we just released last week our first inclination about the industrial blueprint that we are proposing. And for us, the convergence between IT and OT comes at when you have automation in the interpretation of data provided by sensors. This automation generally takes the form of machine learning algorithms, that are deployed on the factory floors, that analyzes the sensor data in real time, and will be able to predict failure, or will be able to look at video feed to verify that employees are respecting safety measures, and many many other applications. So because of the value this brings to the operational people, this bridge is very easily closed once you've resolved the technical difficulty, and the technical difficulty are mostly what I call plumbing. Plumbing that takes the form of norms being widely different between the industrial world and the IT world so far. Difficulties because you don't speak the same language. Let's take an example. In the industrial world, CAN is the way you're synchronizing time resources. In the IT world, we have been using other protocol, and more recently, especially in the telco space, we're using PTP. But it seems that PTP is now crossing over to the industrial world, so things are slowly but very safely evolving with something that is enabling this next wave of revolution into the factories. >> Yeah, Nick, it's been fascinating always to watch when you have some of those silos, and when is the right time that things pull together. Curious, one of the big questions in 2020 of course is with the global pandemic going on, which projects get accelerated, and which ones might be pushed off a little bit, where does edge computing fall in the conversations you're having with customers, is that something mission-critical that they need to accelerate, or is it something that might take a little bit longer, possibly even a delay with the current pandemic? >> So it's quite hard to answer this question because we are in an up slope. Is the slope less up now than it would have been without the pandemic, I have no way to tell. What I'm seeing is a constant uptick of people moving forward with their projects, in fact some projects are made, for example for worker safety, are made even more urgent than they were before, because by just analyzing video feed, you can ensure that your processes prevents too close contact between coworkers, and making them vulnerable in this way. So it really depends on the industry, I imagine, but right now we see the demand growing regardless of the pandemic. >> All right, Nick, you mentioned earlier that when I think about the edge, it should be the same code, I hopefully shouldn't have to think about it differently no matter where it is. That begs the question, help connect OpenShift for us as to what is Red Hat offering when it comes to the edge solution with OpenShift? >> So, you have, what we say is the edge is like an onion, where you have different layers. And every time I look at the onion in the perspective of a given customer, the layers are very different. But what we are finding is, similar requirements in terms of security, in terms of power consumption, in terms of space allocated for the hardware, and in order to satisfy these requirements, we found out that we need to build three new ways of deploying OpenShift, so that we can match all of these potential layers. The first one that we have released and are announcing this week is OpenShift deployable on three nodes, that means that you have your supervisors, your controllers, and your workers, on the same three physical machines. That's not the smallest footprint that we need, but it's a pretty good footprint to solve the case of a factory. In this environment, with these three nodes, we have something that is capable of being fully connected or working disconnected with. The second footprint that we need to be able to satisfy for is what we call single node deployment. And single node deployment from our perspective need to come in two flavors. The easy way, the one we're going to be releasing next quarter, is what we call remote worker node. So you have your controllers in a central site, and you can have up to 2000 remote worker nodes spread across as many site as you want. The caveat with this is that you need to have full time connectivity. So in order to solve for this connected site, then we need something that is a standalone single node deployment, and that's something that a lot of people have prototypes so far, and we are currently working on delivering a version that we hope is going to be satisfying 99% of the requirement, and is going to be fully upstream. >> All right, last piece on this, Nick, how should I be thinking about managing my environment when it comes to the edge, seen a lot of course from Red Hat at Red Hat Summit and talked to some of your peers, some recent announcements, so how do we plug in what's happening at the edge and make sure we've got full visibility and management across all of my environments? >> So if I had one word to explain what we need to do, it's GitOps. Basically, you need immutable deployments, you need to be pulling configuration and all information from a central site and adapt it to the local site, without manual intervention. You need full automation. And you need a tool to manage your policies on top of it, and of course aggregate information on how things are going. What we don't want is to have to sit one administrator per site. What we do not want is to have to send people on each site at the time of deployment. So you need to be abiding by this completely automated model in order to be edge compliant. Does that make sense? >> It does, and I'm assuming the ACM solution, Advanced Cluster Management, is a piece of that overall offer. >> Absolutely, ACM is the way we present, we organize policies, the way we get reporting information, and the way we do our GitOps automation. >> All right, so Nick, final question for you, give us a little bit of a look forward, you just mentioned earlier one of the things that's getting worked on is that single node disconnected type of solution. What else should we be looking at in the maturity of edge solutions in this containerizing Kubernetes world? >> So it's not only about the architecture that we need to support. It's a lot more about the workloads that we are going to have running there. And in order to help our customer make their choice, in how they design the network, we need to provide them with what we call blueprints. And in our mind, a blueprint is more than just a piece of paper. It's actually a complete set of instruction, abiding with this GitOps model that I described, that you can pull from a Git repository, that enables automation of the deployment of something. So for example, the first blueprint we are going to be releasing is the one for industrial manufacturing using AIML, and this is going to be something that we are going to be maintaining over time, accepting contribution from outside, and is an end to end example of how to do it in a factory. We are going to follow up with that with other blueprints for 5G, for private 5G, for how do you deploy that in maybe a healthcare environment, et cetera, et cetera, the idea here is to exemplify and help people make the right choices and also ensuring that the stack we provide at one point in time remains compatible given the complexity of the components we have in there over time, and that's really the thing that we think we need to be providing to our customers. >> All right, well Nick, thank you so much for giving us the update, in regards to edge computing, really important and exciting segment of the market. >> Thank you very much, 'twas a pleasure being with you once again. >> All right, and stay with us, lots more coverage from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios on this kind of continuing leadership series that we've put together. Reaching out to the community for tips and tricks on kind of getting through what is, this kind of ongoing COVID crisis and situation as it continues to go weeks and weeks and weeks. And I'm really excited to have one of my favorite members of our community, is Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight. Had the real pleasure of interviewing him a couple times and had to get him on. So Nick, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy day to join us. >> Jeff, honored to be here, thank you. >> Pleasure, so let's just jump into it. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on, is that Gainsight has been a distributed company from the beginning, and so I think the COVID, suddenly everyone got this work from home order, there was no prep, there was no planning, it's like this light switch digital transformation moment. So love to hear from someone who's been doing it for awhile. What are some of the lessons? How should people think about running a distributed company? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, Jeff, 'cause we are just by happenstance, from the beginning, distributed where we have, our first two offices were St. Louis and Hyderabad, India. So two places you cannot get there through one flight. So, you have to figure out how to collaborate asynchronously and then over time, we have offices in the Bay Area. We have tons of people that work from home. And so we try to tell people we don't have a headquarters. The headquarters is wherever you are, wherever you live and wherever you want to work. And so we've always been super flexible about come in to the office if you want, don't come in, et cetera. So different than some companies in that respect. And because of that, pre-COVID, we always a very heavy video culture, lots of video conferencing. Even if some people were in an office, there's always somebody else dialing in. One benefit we got from that is you never had to miss your kids' stuff or your family things. I would go to my daughter's performance in the middle of the day and know I can just dial into a call on the way there. And so we always had that. But what's amazing is now we're all on a level playing field, there's nobody in our office. And I got to say, this is, in some ways, even better 'cause I feel like when you're the person dialed in, and a lot of people are in a room, you probably had that experience, and it feels like you're kind of not on the same playing field, right? Hard to hear the jokes or the comments and you might not feel like you're totally in crowd, so to speak, right? But now everyone's just at their computer, sitting there in a chair all day doing these Zooms and it does feel like it's equalizing a little bit. And what it's caused us to do is say, hey, what are ways we can all recreate that community from home? So as an example, every 7:45 a.m. every day, we have a Zoom call that's just pure joy and fun. Trivia, pets, kids. The employees' kids announce people's birthdays and the weather. And so these ways we've been able to integrate our home and our work that we never could before, it's really powerful. It's a tough situation overall, and we feel for all the people affected. But even in tough situations, there are silver linings, and we're finding 'em. >> Yeah, it's funny, we just had Darren Murph on the other day. I don't know if you know Darren. He is the head of Remote Work at GitLab, and he-- >> Oh, yeah. >> And he talked about kind of the social norms. And one of the instances that he brought up was, back in the day when you had some people in the office, some people joining via remote, that it is this kind of disharmony because they're very different situations. So one of his suggestions was have everybody join via their laptop, even if they're sitting at their desk, right? So, as you said, you get kind of this level playing field. And the other thing which dovetails off what you just said is he always wanted executives to have a forcing function to work from home for an extended period of time, so they got to understand what it's all about. And it's not only looking through a little laptop or this or that, but it's also the distractions of the kids and the dogs and whatever else is happening around the house. So it is wild how this forcing function has really driven it. And his kind of takeaway is, as we, like say, move from can we get it into cloud to cloud first? And does it work on mobile to mobile first? >> Now it's really-- >> Yeah. >> It's really remote first. And if you-- >> Remote first. >> A remote first attitude about it and kind of turn it on it's head, it's why shouldn't it be remote versus can it be remote? It really changes the conversation and the dynamic of the whole situation. >> I love that. And just, GitLab, by the way, has been a true inspiration 'cause they are the most remote, remote company. And they share so much, I love what you said. As just two examples of reacting to what you said, pre-COVID, we always wanted to keep a level playing field. So we actually moved our all-hands meetings to be instead of being broadcast from one room, and you're kind of seeing this small screen with all these people, we all just were at computers presenting. And so everyone's on a level playing field. So I thought what GitLab said is great. And then the other point, I think post-COVID we have learned is the kids and the dogs aren't distractions, they're part of our life. And so embracing those and saying, hey, I see that kid in the background, bring them onto the screen. Even during work meetings, even customer meetings, you know? And I'm seeing, I'm on a customer meeting and the customer's bringing their kids onto the screen and it's kind of breaking this artificial wall between who we are at home and who we are at work 'cause we're human beings all throughout. At Gainsight, we talk about a human first approach to business and we've never been more human as a world than we are right now. >> Love it, love it. So another, get your thoughts on, is this whole idea of measurement and productivity at home. And it's really, I have to say, disturbing to see some of the new product announcements that are coming out in terms of people basically snoopin' on people. Whether it's trackin' how many hours of Zoom calls they're on, or how often are they in the VPN, or having their camera flip on every so many minutes or something. We had Marten Mickos on, who's now the CEO of HackerOne. He was CEO at MySQL years ago before it went to Sun and he had the great line, he said, it's so easy to fake it at the office, but when you're at home and you're only output is your deliverable, it makes it a lot easier. So I wonder if you can share some of your thoughts in terms of kind of managing output, setting expectations, to get people to get their work done. And then, as you see some of these new tools for people that are just entering this thing, it's just not right (chuckles). >> Yeah, I agree with you and Marten. I'm a huge fan of Marten, as well, I totally agree with both of it. And I think there's an older approach to work, which is more like a factory. It's like you got to see how many widgets you're processing and you got to micromanage and you got to monitoring and inspecting. Look, I don't run a factory, so maybe there are places where that model makes sense. So I'm not going to speak for every leader, but I could say if you're in a world where your job is information, services, software, where the value is the people and their knowledge, managing them that way is a losing battle. I go back to, some folks probably know, this famous TED Talk by Dan Pink on basically what motivates people. And in these knowledge worker jobs, it's autonomy, mastery and purpose. So autonomy, we have the freedom to do what we want. Mastery, we feel like we're getting better at jobs. And purpose, which is I have a why behind what I do. And I think, take that time you spend on your micromanagement and your Zoom, analyzing the Zoom sessions, and spend it on inspiring your team, on the purpose. Spend it on enabling your team in terms of mastery. Spend it on taking away barriers so they have more autonomy. I think you'll get way more out of your team. >> Yeah, I agree. I think it's, as Darren said, again, he's like, well, would you trust your people if you're on the fourth floor and they're on the sixth? So just-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> If you don't trust your people, you got to bigger issue than worrying about how many hours they're on Zoom, which is not the most productive use of time. >> People waste so much time in the office, and getting to the office. And by the way, I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's fine too. But it's not like the office is just unfettered productivity all the time, that's a total myth. >> Yes, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about events. So, obviously, the CUBE's in the event business. We've had to flip completely 'cause all the events are, well, they're all going digital for sure, and/or postponing it or canceling. So we've had to flip and do all dial-ins and there's a whole lot of stuff about asynchronous. But for you, I think it's interesting because as a distributed company, you had Gainsight Pulse as that moment to bring people together physically. You're in the same boat as everybody else, physical is not an option this year. So how are you approaching Gainsight Pulse, both because it's a switch from what you've done in the past, but you at least had the benefit of being in a distributed world? So you probably have a lot of advantages over people that have never done this before. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, insightful observation. So just for a context, Pulse is an event we do every year to bring together the customer success community. 'Cause, as you observed, there is value in coming together. And so this is not just for our employees, this is for all the customer success people, and actually increasingly product management people out there, coming together around this common goal of driving success for your customers. And it started in 2013 with 300 people, and last year, we had 5,000 people at our event in San Francisco. We had similar events in London and Sydney. And so it's a big deal. And there's a lot of value to coming together physically. But obviously, that's not possible now, nor is it advisable. And we said, okay, how do we convert this and not lose what's special about Pulse? And leverage, like you said, Jeff, the fact that we're good at distributed stuff in general. And so we created what we call Pulse Everywhere. We didn't want to call it Pulse Virtual or something like that, Pulse Webinar, because we didn't want to set the bar as just like, oh, my virtual event, my webinar. This is something different. And we called it Everywhere, 'cause it's Pulse wherever you are. And we joke, it's in your house, it's in your backyard, it's on the peloton, it's walking the dog. You could be wherever you are and join Pulse this year, May 13th and 14th. And what's amazing is last year we had 5,000 people in person, this year we already have 13,000 people registered as of the end of April. And so we'll probably have more than three times the number of people at Pulse Everywhere. And we're really bringing that physical event concept into the virtual, literally with, instead of a puppy pit, where you're in a physical event, you'll bring puppies often, we have a puppy cam where you can see the puppies. We're not giving up on all of our silly music videos and jokes and we actually ship cameras and high-end equipment to all the speakers' houses. So they're going to have a very nice digital experience, our attendees are. It's not going to be like watching a video conference call. It's going to be like watching a TV show, one much like what you try to do here, right? And so we have this amazing experience for all of our presenters and then for the audience. And we're really trying to say how do we make it so it feels like you're in this really connected community? You just happen to not be able to shake people's hands. So it's coming up in a few weeks. It's a big experiment, but we're excited about it. >> There's so many conversations, and we jumped in right away, when this was all going down, what defines a digital event? And like you, I don't like the word virtual. There's nothing fake or virtual. To me, virtual's second to life. And kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Video game world. And like you, we did, it can't be a webinar, right? And so, if you really kind of get into the attributes of what is a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication for a significant portion of the allocated time and you kind of get your questions in and hopefully they take 'em, right? It's not a truly kind of engaged process. That said, as you said, to have the opportunity to separate creation, distribution and consumption of the content, now opens up all types of opportunity. And that's before you get into the benefits of the democratization, as you said, we're seeing that with a lot of the clients we work with. Their registration numbers are giant. >> Totally. >> Because-- >> You're not traveling to spend money, yeah. >> It'll be curious to see what the conversion is and I don't know we have a lot of data there. But, such a democratizing opportunity. And then, you have people that are trying to force, as Ben Nelson said on, you know Ben from Minerva, right? A car is not a mechanical horse, they're trying to force this new thing into this old paradigm and have people sit for, I saw one today, 24 hours, in front of their laptop. It's like a challenge. And it's like, no, no, no. Have your rally moment, have your fun stuff, have your kind of your one-to-many, but really there's so much opportunity for many-to-many. >> Many-to-many. >> Make all the content out there, yeah. >> We've created this concept in this Pulse Everywhere event called Tribes. And the idea is that when you go to an event, the goal is actually partially content, but a lot of times it's connection. And so in any given big event, there's lots of little communities out there and you want to meet people "like you". Might be people in a similar phase of their career, a similar type of company, in our case, it could be companies in certain industry. And so these Tribes in our kind of Pulse Everywhere experience, let people break out into their own tribes, and then kind of basically chat with each other throughout the event. And so it's not the exact same thing as having a drink with people, but at least a little bit more of that serendipitous conversation. >> Right, no, it's different and I think that's really the message, right? It's different, it's not the same. But there's a lot of stuff you can do that you can't do in the physical way, so quit focusing on what you can't do and embrace what you can. So that's great. And good luck on the event. Again, give the plug for it. >> Yeah, it's May 13th and 14th. If you go to gainsightpulse.com you can sign up, and it's basically anything related to driving better success for your customers, better retention, less churn, and better product experience. It's a great event to learn. >> Awesome, so I want to shift gears one more time and really talk about leadership. That's really kind of the focus of this series that we've been doing. And tough times call for great leadership. And it's really an opportunity for great leaders to show their stuff and let the rest of us learn. You have a really fantastic style. You know I'm a huge fan, we're social media buddies. But you're very personable and you're very, kind of human, I guess, is really the best word, in your communications. You've got ton of frequency, ton of variety. But really, most of it has kind of this human thread. I wonder if you can share kind of your philosophy behind social, 'cause I think a lot of leaders are afraid of it. I think they're afraid that there is reward for saying something stupid is not worth the benefit of saying okay things. And I think also a lot of leaders are afraid of showing some frailty, showing some emotion. Maybe you're a little bit scared, maybe we don't have all the answers. And yet you've really, you're not afraid at all. And I think it's really shines in the leadership activities and behaviors and things you do day in and day out. So how do you think about it? What's your strategy? >> Yeah, it's really interesting you ask, Jeff, because I'm in a group of CEOs that get together on a regular basis, and I'm going to be leading a session on social media for CEOs. And honestly, when I was putting it together, I was like, it's 2020, does that still need to exist? But somehow, there is this barrier. And I'll talk more about it, but I think the barrier isn't just about social media, it's just about how a CEO wants to present herself or himself into the world. And I think, to me, the three things to ask yourself are, first of all, why? Why do you want to be on social media? Why do you want to communicate to the outside? You should have a why. Hopefully you enjoy it, but also you're connecting from a business perspective with your customers. And for us, it's been a huge benefit to really be able to connect with our customers. And then, who are you targeting? So, I actually think an important thing to think about is it's okay to have a micro-audience. I don't have millions of Twitter followers like Lady Gaga, but within the world of SaaS and customer success and retention, I probably have a decent number. And that means I can really connect with my own specific audience. And then, what. So, the what is really interesting 'cause I think there's a lot of non-obvious things about, it's not just about your business. So I can tweet about customer success or retention and I do, but also the, what, about you as an individual, what's happening in your family? What's happening in the broader industry, in my case of SaaS? What's happening in the world of leading through COVID-19? All the questions you've asked, Jeff, are in this lens. And then that gets you to the final which is the, how. And I think the, how, is the most important. It's basically whether you can embrace the idea of being vulnerable. There's a famous TED Talk by Brene Brown. She talks about vulnerability is the greatest superpower for leaders. I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time on social media, is they have a hard time really being vulnerable. And just saying, look, I'm just a human being just like all of you. I'm a privileged human being. I have a lot of things that luckily kind of came my way, but I'm just a human being. I get scared, I get anxious, I get lonely, all those things. Just like all of you, you know. And really being able to take off your armor of, oh, I'm a CEO. And then when you do that, you are more human. And it's like, this goes back to this concept of human first business. There's no work persona and home persona, there's just you. And I think it's surprising when you start doing it, and I started maybe seven, eight, nine years ago, it's like, wow, the world wants more human leaders. They want you to just be yourself, to talk about your challenges. I had the kids, when we got to 13,000 registrations for Pulse Everywhere, they pied me in the face. And the world wants to see CEOs being pied in the face. Probably that one, for sure, that's a guaranteed crowd pleaser. CEOs being pied in the face. But they want to see what you're into outside of work and the pop culture you're into. And they want to see the silly things that you're doing. They want you to be human. And so I think if you're willing to be vulnerable, which takes some bravery, it can really, really pay off for your business, but I think also for you as a person. >> Yeah, yeah. I think it's so insightful. And I think people are afraid of it for the wrong reasons, 'cause it is actually going to help people, it's going to help your own employees, as well, get to know you better. >> Totally, they love it. >> And you touched on another concept that I think is so important that I think a lot of people miss as we go from kind of the old broadcast world to more narrow casting, which is touching your audience and developing your relationship with your audience. So we have a concept here at theCUBE that one is greater than 1% of 100. Why go with the old broadcast model and just spray and you hope you have these really ridiculously low conversion rates to get to that person that you're trying to get to, versus just identifying that person and reaching out directly to those people, and having a direct engagement and a relative conversation within the people that care. And it's not everybody, but, as you said, within the population that cares about it it's meaningful and they get some value out of it. So it's a really kind of different strategy. So-- >> I love that. >> You're always get a lot of stuff out, but you are super prolific. So you got a bunch of projects that are just hitting today. So as we're getting ready to sit down, I see you just have a book came out. So tell us a little bit about the book that just came out. >> Sure, yeah, it's funny. I need to get my physical copy too at my home. I've got so a few, just for context. Five years ago, we released this first book on "Customer Success" which you can kind of see here. It's surprising really, really popular in this world of SaaS and customer success and it ties, Jeff, to what you just said which is, you don't need to be the book that everyone in the world reads, you need to be the book that everyone in your world reads. And so this book turned out to be that. Thousands of company management teams and CEOs in software and SaaS read it. And so, originally when this came out, it was just kind of an introduction to what we call customer success. Basically, how do you retain your customers for the long-term? How do you get them more value? And how do you get them to use more of what they've bought and eventually spend more money with you? And that's a mega-trend that's happening. We decided that we needed an update. So this second book is called "Customer Success Economy." It just came out, literally today. And it's available on Amazon. And it's about the idea that customer success started in tech companies, but it's now gone into many, many industries, like healthcare, manufacturing, services. And it started with a specific team called the customer success management team. But now it's affecting how companies build products, how they sell, how they market. So it's sort of this book is kind of a handbook for management teams on how to apply customer success to your whole business and we call it "Customer Success Economy" 'cause we do think the future of the economy isn't about marketing and selling transactional products, but it's about making sure what your customers are buying is actually delivering value for them, right? That's better for the world, but it's also just necessary 'cause your customers have the power now. You and I have the power to decide how to transport ourselves, whether it's buying a car or rideshare, in the old world when we could leave our house. And we have the power to decide how we're going to stay in a city, whether it's a hotel or Airbnb or whatever. And so customers have the power now, and if you're not driving success, you're not going to be able to keep those customers. And so "Customer Success Economy" is all about that. >> Yeah, and for people that aren't familiar with Gainsight, obviously, there's lots of resources that they can go. They should go to the show in a couple weeks, but also, I think, the interview that we did at PagerDuty, I think you really laid out kind of a great definition of what customer success is. And it's not CRM, it has nothing to do with CRM. CRM is tracking leads and tracking ops. It's not customer success. So, people can also check that. But I want to shift gears again a little bit because one, you also have your blog, MehtaPhysical, that came out. And you just came out again recently with a new post. I don't know when you, you must have a army of helper writers, but you talk about something that is really top of mind right now. And everyone that we get on theCUBE, especially big companies that have the benefit of a balance sheet with a few bucks in it, say we want to help our customers, we want to help our people be safe, obviously, that's first. But we also want to help our customers. But nobody ever really says what exactly does that mean? And it's pretty interesting. You lay out a bunch of things that are happening in the SaaS world, but I jumped on, I think it's number 10 of your list, which is how to think about helping your customers. And you give some real specific kind of guidance and guidelines and definitions, if you will, of how do you help our customers through these tough times. >> Yeah, so I'll summarize for the folks listening. One of the things we observed is, in this terrible tough times right now, your customers are in very different situations. And for simplicity, we thought about three categories. So the companies that we call category one, which are unfortunately, adversely affected by this terrible crisis, but also by the shutdown itself, and that's hotels, restaurants, airlines, and you can put other folks in that example. What do those customers need? Well, they probably need some financial relief. And you have to figure out what you're going to do there and that's a hard decision. And they also just need empathy. It's not easy and the stress level they have is massive. Then you've got, on the other extremes, a small number of your customers might be doing great despite this crisis or maybe even because of it, because they make video conferencing technology or remote work technology, or they make stuff for virtual or telemedicine. And those folks actually are likely to be super busy because they're just trying to keep up with the demand. So what they need from you is time and help. And then you got the people in between. Most companies, right, where there may be a mix of some things going well, some don't. And so what we recommended is think about your strategy, not just inside out, what you want, but outside in, what those clients need. And so as an example, you might think about in that first category, financial relief. The second category, the companies in the middle, they may need, they may not be willing to spend more money, but they may want to do more stuff. So maybe you unlock your product, make it available, so they can use everything in your suite for a while. And maybe in that third category, they're wiling to spend money, but they're just really busy. So maybe you offer services for them or things to help them as they scale. >> Yeah, so before I let you go, I just want to get your reaction to one more great leader. And as you can tell, I love great leaders and studying great leaders. Back when I was in business school we had Dave Pottruck, who at that time was the CEO of Schwab, come and speak and he's a phenomenal speaker and if you ever get a chance to see him speak. And at that point in time, Schwab had to reinvent their business with online trading and basically kill their call-in brokerage for online brokerage, and I think that they had a fixed price of 19.99, whatever it was. This was back in the late 90s. But he was a phenomenal speaker. And we finished and he had a small dinner with a group of people, and we just said, David, you are a phenomenal speaker, why, how, why're you so good? And he goes, you know, it's really pretty simple. As a CEO, I have one job. It's to communicate. And I have three constituencies. I kind of have the street and the market, I have my internal people, and then I have my customers and my ecosystem. And so he said, I, and he's a wrestler, he said, you know I treated it like wrestling. I hired a coach, I practiced my moves, I did it over and over, and I embraced it as a skill and it just showed so brightly. And it's such a contrast to people that get wrapped around the axle with their ego, or whatever. And I think you're such a shiny example of someone who over communicates, arguably, in terms of getting the message out, getting people on board, and letting people know what you're all about, what the priorities are, and where you're going. And it's such a sheer, or such a bright contrast to the people that don't do that that I think is so refreshing. And you do it in a fun and novel and in your own personal way. >> That's awesome to hear that story. He's a inspirational leader, and I've studied him, for sure. But I hadn't heard this specific story, and I totally agree with you. Communication is not something you're born with. Honestly, you might know this, Jeff, or not, as a kid, I was super lonely. I didn't really have any friends and I was one of those kids who just didn't fit in. So I was not the one they would pick to be on stage in front of thousands of people or anything else. But you just do it over and over again and you try to get better and you find, I think a big thing is finding your own voice, your own style. I'm not a super formal style, I try to be very human and authentic. And so finding your style that works for you, I agree, it's completely learnable. >> Yeah, well, Nick, thank you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm sure you're super, super busy getting ready for the show in a couple weeks. But it's always great to catch up and really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and insights with us. >> Thank you, Jeff, it's an honor. >> All right, he's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft music)