(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome everyone to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome one of our alumni to the program. Rob Lee, the CTO of pure storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for, thanks for having me. >>Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations on your appointment as a CTO >>Now, thank you very much. Very excited, very excited to be taking the reins and uh, for all the, all the great stuff that's ahead of >>A lot of great stuff. I'm sure. I also saw that once again, cure has been named a leader in several Gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid, seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age? Are they looking to solve? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think all in all, I think, um, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their, uh, understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, uh, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their it tools and, and what that means is, you know, not just, um, looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, uh, but really being able to make use of, uh, and, and make the most use out of each, uh, you know, each of the services and, uh, capabilities in the environments that they're operating in. And, uh, so a lot of times that means, um, you know, commonality in, in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, uh, it means the flexibility, uh, that, that commonality allows them, uh, in, in terms of planning and optionality to move, uh, parts of their application or environments, uh, between premise and cloud. >>Um, you know, and, and I think overall, you know, we, we look at this as, um, you know, really a couple, uh, specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, um, you know, I think they're, they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to, uh, in the cloud, into their own data center. Uh, and at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge, um, more of how they operate, uh, the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today, uh, and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. Uh, and then lastly, I'd say that, um, you know, as customers, I think, um, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot, uh, largely planted in, uh, developing and building, uh, some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures, uh, driven by containers and Kubernetes, um, you know, a, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or, or increasingly hybrid is, um, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. >>And that's certainly an area that, uh, you've seen pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. Um, one is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud, uh, model, uh, into their data center. Uh, two is, uh, being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today. Uh, and then three is building their new stuff, uh, and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem cloud, and across clouds. >>Um, talk to me about where cure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just started regulated. And so, uh, this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model, uh, into customer's data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, um, you know, uh, automation, um, simplicity of management, uh, delivering infrastructure as code. A lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment in many ways, as you know, um, this is a natural evolution of where pure has been a long road. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer likes simplicity into our products and, uh, enterprise data centers. And now we're just kind of expanding that, uh, to bring more of the cloud simplicity. And, um, you know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our, um, uh, our public cloud partners, such as AWS in embracing, um, their management models. >>And so you saw, um, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS outposts. Um, and, and that activity is certainly continuing on. So, so customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs, or whether they want, whether they want to, uh, simply use cloud providers, management plans and extend those onto their premise, um, have both options, uh, to do that. Um, you know, we're also as, you know, um, you know, uh, very committed to helping customers, uh, be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from other data center into the public cloud environments, uh, through products like cloud block store. Uh, this is, uh, an area where we've helped, uh, numerous customers, um, you know, take the existing applications, uh, and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run, uh, that they're used to in their data center, um, production environments, rich those now into public cloud environments, and whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. >>Um, and then thirdly, uh, with port works, right, this is where, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, not just, uh, by providing them with the infrastructure, they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on. Uh, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, um, the data flow, um, operations such as backup tr migration, uh, that go along with that storage infrastructure, uh, as well as now application management capabilities, uh, which we recently announced, uh, during our launch event in September with quirks data services. Uh, so really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers, um, really, really looking, uh, to crack as they, um, I would say balance, uh, the cloud environments in their data center environments in this hybrid world. >>And I'm curious what you're seeing, you know, the focus being on data, >>Uh, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is, is kind of, um, you know, contains a lot of the, um, you know, the, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding of their customers, uh, you know, and or whether it's in product development faster time to market. Um, I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated, um, uh, realization appreciation of, for not just how valuable the data is, but, um, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? Uh, you know, customers that are realizing, Hey, if I'm collecting all this data, uh, in my on-prem location, um, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Um, maybe I need to kind of, uh, look at how I, how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services, uh, living over here and how do I bridge those two, um, uh, you know, two locations. I think you add on top of that, um, you know, newer, I would say realization of, uh, security and data governance, data, privacy concerns, and that certainly has customers. I think, um, you know, thinking a lot more thinking a lot more intently about, um, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data management, uh, governance and security strategies. >>Yeah. We've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in the threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word, and it's a matter of when versus if, as customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to persist for probably quite some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, um, I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when not if right. And I, and I think, um, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, um, uh, plan for, and, uh, have, you know, planned for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security and have focused on preventing an attack and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, Hey, if something happens where, you know, as, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? Uh, and so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, um, you know, form a robust strategies for, um, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware sense. >>Um, we do this by, uh, through our safe mode, um, uh, features which are available across, uh, all of our products and, you know, quite simply this is, uh, our capability to take, um, read only snapshots and then couple them with, uh, a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down. And it takes the control of the snapshots away from, uh, not just customer admins, but potential, uh, ransomware or malware. Right. Um, you know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have, uh, hit the industry, um, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware, um, uh, pieces of software taking are going after the backups, they go off to the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stop that chain or in the security world world, what's called the kill chain. Uh, we stopped that chain, uh, right at, right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, um, you know, no customer admin, whether, uh, it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, um, has the, has the ability to remove that backup. And you know, that that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular, uh, and most, uh, quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >>That's key. I saw that, um, some was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it to becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators. And of course, a source of driving revenue ensuring that the data, the backups are protected and the ability to recover, um, quickly is there is that is table stakes. I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >>Absolutely. And I think, um, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's, um, protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, um, you know, infrastructure failures or, or, or whatnot, um, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back five, 10 years and people are really fixated on, Hey, how quickly can I back? You know, how quickly can I back this environment up and how can I do it in the most cost-effective manner. Now, people are much more focused on, Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is, uh, when, when something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online? Because, um, chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online servants, right? >>Chances are, you've got customers waiting for a, you've got SLS, you've got transactions that can't complete. If you don't get this environment back up. Uh, and we've seen this, uh, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think, um, that maturing understanding of what true data protection is, is something that, um, has a driven, you know, a new approach, uh, from customers to, and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. Uh, and B I think it is also, um, you know, uh, found a new place for, um, you know, performance and reliability and really all of the properties of, um, you know, Pierce products, uh, in, in this space. >>Last question about, for you, give me an example, and you can just mention it by industry, or even by use case of, of a joint AWS pure customer, where you're really helping them create a very successful, uh, enterprise grade hybrid cloud environment. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, you know, so, so we've got, uh, we've got countless customers that, um, you know, uh, I could point to, you know, I, I think, um, you know, I think one that I would, uh, or one space that were particularly successful in, uh, that I would highlight are, um, you know, SAS companies, right? So, so companies that are, um, you know, are building, um, you know, are building modern SAS applications. Uh, and in one, in one particular example I can think of is, um, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, um, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And, uh, certainly is looking to AWS looking to the public cloud environments, um, you know, as, as a, um, you know, as a great place to scale, but at the same time, um, you know, needs, um, more capabilities than, um, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, uh, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. >>They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, um, you know, uh, really provide the 24 by seven by 365, uh, around the world, uh, service that they have, especially dealing with, um, high load bursts in different geos and, and just a very, very dynamic global environment. Um, and so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, um, you know, help the customer, uh, with port works, uh, be able to provide these capabilities, um, by augmenting the compute that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer. Um, you know, with me, uh, the storage level, um, uh, uh, replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities and auto scaling performance management, um, all the capabilities that they need, uh, to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, um, you know, uh, on-premise on-premise data center locations as well. >>Um, so that's just one, uh, one of many examples, um, you know, but, but I think that's a, a great example where, you know, as, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. Uh, but then as you scale, uh, whether it's, uh, because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute, um, volume and capacity, um, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, um, you know, more, uh, connectivity, uh, to other sites other potentially, uh, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. Um, and that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic, uh, infrastructure layer such as port works, uh, is able to provide, uh, comes in very handy. >>Got it, Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re-invent talking about the pure AWS relationship what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then very fast paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >>Thanks for having me. >>Likewise. Good to see you too. Probably I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage for ADFS reinvent 2020 I'm John Ford with the cube, your host. We are the cube virtual. We're not there in person this year. We're remote with the pandemic and we're here for the keynote analysis for Verner Vogels, and we've got some great analysts on and friends of the cube cube alumni is Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO of Rakin a pioneer in the dev ops space, as well as early on on the bare metal, getting on the whole on-premise he's seen the vision and I can tell you, I've talked to him many times over the years. He's been on the same track. He's on the right wave frog. Great to have you on. I'm going to have to start Veatch, come on. Y'all come on as well, but great to see you. Thanks, pleasure to be here. Um, so the keynote with Verna was, you know, he's like takes you on a journey, you know, and, and virtual is actually a little bit different vibe, but I thought he did an exceptional job of stage layout and some of the virtual stage craft. Um, but what I really enjoyed the most was really this next level, thinking around systems thinking, right, which is my favorite topic, because, you know, we've been saying, going back 10 years, the cloud is just, here's a computer, right. It's operating system. And so, um, this is the big thing. This is, what's your reaction to the keynote. >>Wow. So I think you're right. This is one of the challenges with what Amazon has been building is it's, you know, it is a lock box, it's a service. So you don't, you don't get to see behind the scenes. You don't really get to know how they run these services. And what, what I see happening out of all of those pieces is they've really come back and said, we need to help people operate this platform. And, and that shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Right? Last couple of years, they've been rolling out service, service service, all these new things. This talk was really different for Verner's con normal ones, because he wasn't talking about whizzbang new technologies. Um, he was really talking about operations, um, you know, died in the wool. How do we make the system easier to use? How do we expose things? What assistance can we have in, in building applications? Uh, in some cases it felt like, uh, an application performance monitoring or management APM talk from five or even 10 years ago, um, canaries, um, you know, Canary deployments, chaos engineering, observability, uh, sort of bread and butter, operational things. >>We have Savi Joel, who's a influencer cloud computing Xtrordinair dev ops guru. Uh, we don't need dev ops guru from Amazon. We got Sarpy and prop here. So it'd be great to see you. Um, you guys had a watch party. Um, tell me what the reaction was, um, with, of the influencers in the cloud or ADI out there that were looking at Vernon's announcement, because it does attract a tech crowd. What was your take and what was the conversation like? >>Yeah, we kinda geeked out. Um, we had a watch party and we were commenting back and forth, like when we were watching it. I think that the general consensus is that the complexity of AWS stack itself is, is increasing. Right. And they have been focused on developers a lot, I think a lot longer than they needed to be a little bit. I think, uh, now they need to focus on the operations. Like we, we are, we all love dev ops talks and it's very fancy and it's very modern way of building software. But if you think deep down that, like once we developed software traditionally and, and also going forward, I think we need to have that separation. Once you develop something in production, it's, it's, it's operating right. Once you build a car, you're operating car, you're not building car all the time. Right? >>So same with the software. Once you build a system, it should have some stability where you're running it, operating it for, for a while, at least before you touch it or refactoring all that stuff. So I think like building and operating at the same time, it's very good for companies like Amazon, AWS, especially, uh, and, and Google and, and, and Facebook and all those folks who are building technology because they are purely high-tech companies, but not for GM Ford Chrysler or Kaiser Permanente, which is healthcare or a school district. The, they, they need, need to operate that stuff once it's built. So I think, uh, the operationalization of cloud, uh, well, I think take focus going forward a lot more than it has and absorbable Deanna, on a funny note, I said, observability is one of those things. I, now these days, like, like, you know, and the beauty pageants that every contestant say is like, whatever question you asked, is it Dora and the answer and say at the end world peace, right? >>And that's a world peace term, which is the absorbability. Like you can talk about all the tech stuff and all that stuff. And at the end you say observability and you'll be fine. So, um, what I'm making is like observability is, and was very important. And when I was talking today about like how we can enable the building of absorbability into this new paradigm, which is a microservices, like where you pass a service ID, uh, all across all the functions from beginning to the end. Right. And so, so you can trace stuff. So I think he was talking, uh, at that level. Yeah. >>Let me, let's take an observer Billy real quick. I have a couple of other points. I want to get your opinions on. He said, quote, this three, enabling major enabling technologies, powering observability metrics, logging and tracing here. We know that it would, that is of course, but he didn't take a position. If you look at all the startups out there that are sitting there, the next observability, there's at least six that I know of. I mean, that are saying, and then you got ones that are kind of come in. I think signal effects was one. I liked, like I got bought by Splunk and then is observability, um, a feature, um, or is it a company? I mean, this is something that kind of gets talked about, right? I mean, it's, I mean, is it really something you can build a business on or is it a white space? That's a feature that gets pulled in what'd you guys react to that? >>So this is a platform conversation and, and, you know, one of the things that we've been having conversations around recently is this idea of platforms. And, and, you know, I've been doing a lot of work on infrastructure as code and distributed infrastructure and how people want infrastructure to be more code, like, which is very much what, what Verna was, was saying, right? How do we bring development process capabilities into our infrastructure operations? Um, and these are platform challenges. W what you're asking about from, uh, observability is perspective is if I'm running my code in a platform, if I'm running my infrastructure as a platform, I actually need to understand what that platform is doing and how it's making actions. Um, but today we haven't really built the platforms to be very transparent to the users. And observability becomes this necessary component to fix all the platforms that we have, whether they're Kubernetes or AWS, or, you know, even going back to VMware or bare metal, if you can't see what's going on, then you're operating in the blind. And that is an increasingly big problem. As we get more and more sophisticated infrastructure, right? Amazon's outage was based on systems can being very connected together, and we keep connecting systems together. And so we have to be able to diagnose and troubleshoot when those connections break or for using containers or Lambdas. The code that's running is ephemeral. It's only around for short periods of time. And if something's going wrong in it, it's incredibly hard to fix it, >>You know? And, and also he, you know, he reiterated his whole notion of log everything, right? He kept on banging on the drum on that one, like log everything, which is actually a good practice. You got to log everything. Why wouldn't you, >>I mean, how you do, but they don't make it easy. Right? Amazon has not made it easy to cross, cross, and, uh, connect all the data across all of those platforms. Right? People think of Amazon as one thing, but you know, the people who are using it understand it's actually a collection of services. And some of those are not particularly that tied together. So figuring out something that's going on across, across all of your service bundles, and this isn't an Amazon problem, this is an industry challenge. Especially as we go towards microservices, I have to be able to figure out what happened, even if I used 10 services, >>Horizontal, scalability argument. Sorry. Do you want to get your thoughts on this? So the observability, uh, he also mentioned theory kind of couched it before he went into the talk about systems theory. I'm like, okay. Let's, I mean, I love systems, and I think that's going to be the big wake up call here for the next 10 years. That's a systems mindset. And I think, you know, um, Rob's right. It's a platform conversation. When you're thinking about an operating system or a system, it has consequences when things change, but he talked about controllability versus, uh, observability and kinda T that teed up the, well, you can control systems controls, or you can have observability, uh, what's he getting at in all of this? What's he trying to say, keep, you know, is it a cover story? Is it this, is it a feature? What was the, what was the burner getting at with all this? >>Uh, I, I, I believe they, they understand that, that, uh, that all these services are very sort of micro in nature from Amazon itself. Right. And then they are not tied together as Rob said earlier. And they, he addressed that. He, uh, he, uh, announced that service. I don't know the name of that right now of problem ahead that we will gather all the data from all the different places. And then you can take a look at all the data coming from different services at this at one place where you have the service ID passed on to all the servers services. You have to do that. It's a discipline as a software developer, you have to sort of adhere to even in traditional world, like, like, you know, like how you do logging and monitoring and tracing, um, it's, it's your creativity at play, right? >>So that's what software is like, if you can pass on, I was treating what they gave an example of Citrix, uh, when, when, when you are using like tons of applications with George stream to your desktop, through Citrix, they had app ID concept, right? So you can trace what you're using and all that stuff, and you can trace the usage and all that stuff, and they can, they can map that log to that application, to that user. So you need that. So I think he w he was talking about, I think that's what he's getting too. Like we have to, we have to sort of rethink how we write software in this new Microsoft, uh, sort of a paradigm, which I believe it, it's a beautiful thing. Uh, as long as we can manage it, because Microsoft is, are spread across like, um, small and a smaller piece of software is everywhere, right? So the state, how do we keep the state intact? How do we, um, sort of trace things? Uh, it becomes a huge problem if we don't do it right? So it it's, um, it's a little, this is some learning curve for most of the developers out there. So 60 dash 70% >>Rob was bringing this up, get into this whole crash. And what is it kind of breakdown? Because, you know, there's a point where you don't have the Nirvana of true horizontal scalability, where you might have microservices that need to traverse boundaries or systems, boundaries, where, or silos. So to Rob's point earlier, if you don't see it, you can't measure it or you can't get through it. How do you wire services across boundaries? Is that containers, is that, I mean, how does this all work? How do you guys see that working? I just see a train wreck there. >>It's, it's a really hard problem. And I don't think we should underestimate it because everything we toast talked about sounds great. If you're in a single AWS region, we're talking about distributed infrastructure, right? If you think about what we've been seeing, even more generally about, you know, edge sites, uh, colo on prem, you know, in cloud multi-region cloud, all these things are actually taking this one concept and you're like, Oh, I just want to store all the log data. Now, you're not going to store all your log data in one central location anymore. That in itself, as a distributed infrastructure problem, where I have to be able to troubleshoot what's going on, you know, and know that the logs are going to the right place and capture the data, that's really important. Um, and one of the innovations in this that I think is going to impact the industry over the next couple of years is the addition of more artificial intelligence and machine learning, into understanding operations patterns and practices. >>And I think that that's a really significant industry trend where Amazon has a distinct advantage because it's their systems and it's captive. They can analyze and collect a lot of data across very many customers and learn from those things and program systems that learn from those things. Um, and so the way you're going to keep up with this is not by logging more and more data, but by doing exactly what we're talking through, which was how do I analyze the patterns with machine learning so that I can get predictive analysis so that I can understand something that looks wrong and then put people on checking it before it goes wrong. >>All right, I gotta, I gotta bring up something controversial. I can't hold back any longer. Um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg said many, many years ago, all the old people, they can do startups, they're too old and you gotta be young and hungry. You gotta do that stuff. If we're talking systems theory, uh, automated meta reasoning, evolvable systems, resilience, distributed computing, isn't that us old guys that have actually have systems experience. I mean, if you're under the age of 30, you probably don't even know what a system is. Um, and, or co coded to the level of systems that we use to code. And I'm putting my quote old man kind of theory, only kidding, by the way on the 30. But my point is there is a generation of us that had done computer science in the, in the eighties and seventies, late seventies, maybe eighties and nineties, it's all it was, was systems. It was a systems world. Now, when you have a software world, the aperture is increasing in terms of software, are the younger generation of developers system thinkers, or have we lost that art, uh, or is it doesn't matter? What do you guys think? >>I, I think systems thinking comes with age. I mean, that's, that's sort of how I think, I mean, like I take the systems thinking a greater sort of, >>Um, world, like state as a system country, as a system and everything is a system, your body's a system family system, so it's the same way. And then what impacts the system when you operated internal things, which happened within the system and external, right. And we usually don't talk about the economics and geopolitics. There's a lot of the technology. Sometimes we do, like we have, I think we need to talk more about that, the data sovereignty and all that stuff. But, but even within the system, I think the younger people appreciate it less because they don't have the, they don't see, um, software taught like that in the universities. And, and, and, and by these micro micro universities now online trainings and stuff like sweaty, like, okay, you learn this thing and you're good at it saying, no, no, it's not like that. So you've got to understand the basics and how the systems operate. >>Uh, I'll give you an example. So like we were doing the, the, the client server in early nineties, and then gradually we moved more towards like having ESB enterprise services, bus where you pass a state, uh, from one object to another, and we can bring in the heterogeneous, uh, languages. This thing is written in Java. This is in.net. This is in Python. And then you can pass it through that. Uh, you're gonna make a state for, right. And that, that was contained environment. Like ESBs were contained environment. We were, I, I wrote software for ESPs myself at commerce one. And so like, we, what we need today is the ESP equallant in the cloud. We don't have that. >>Rob, is there a reverse ageism developers? I mean, if you're young, you might not have systems. What do you think? I, I don't agree with that. I actually think that the nature of the systems that we're programming forces people into more distributed infrastructure thinking the platforms we have today are much better than they were, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, um, in the sense that I can do distributed infrastructure programming without thinking about it very much anymore, but you know, people know, they know how to use cloud. They know how to use a big platform. They know how to break things into microservices. I, I think that these are inherent skills that people need to think about that you're you're right. There is a challenge in that, you know, you get very used to the platform doing the work for you, and that you need to break through it, but that's an experiential thing, right? >>The more experienced developers are going to have to understand what the platforms do. Just like, you know, we used to have to understand how registers worked inside of a CPU, something I haven't worried about for a long, long time. So I, I don't think it's that big of a problem. Um, from, from that perspective, I do think that the thing that's really hard is collaboration. And so, you know, it's, it's hard people to people it's hard inside of a platform. It's hard when you're an Amazon size and you've been rolling out services all over the place and now have to figure out how to fit them all together. Um, and that to me is, is a design problem. And it's more about being patient and letting things, uh, mature. If anything might take away from this keynote is, you know, everybody asked Amazon to take a breath and work on usability and, and cross cross services synchronizations rather than, than adding more services into the mix. And that's, >>That's a good point. I mean, again, I bring up the conversation because it's kind of the elephant in the room and I make it being controversial to make a point there. So our view, because, you know, I interviewed Judy Estrin who helped found the internet with Vince Cerf. She's well-known for her contributions for the TCP IP protocol. Andy Besta Stein. Who's the, who's the Rembrandt of motherboards. But as Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, I would say both said to me on the cube that without systems thinking, you don't understand consequences of when things change. And we start thinking about this microservices conversation, you start to hear a little bit of that pattern emerging, where those systems, uh, designs matter. And then you have, on the other hand, you have this modern application framework where serverless takes over. So, you know, Rob back to your infrastructure as code, it really isn't an either, or they're not mutually exclusive. You're going to have a set of nerds and geeks engineering systems to make them better and easier and scalable. And then you're going to have application developers that need to just make it work. So you start to see the formation of kind of the, I won't say swim lanes, but I mean, what do you guys think about that? Because you know, Judy and, um, Andy better sign up. They're kind of right. Uh, >>Th th the enemy here, and we're seeing this over and over again is complexity. And, and the challenge has been, and serverless is like, those people like, Oh, I don't have to worry about servers anymore because I'm dealing with serverless, which is not true. What you're doing is you're not worrying about infrastructure as much, but you, the complexity, especially in a serverless infrastructure where you're pulling, you know, events from all sorts of things, and you have one, one action, one piece of code, you know, triggering a whole bunch of other pieces of code in a decoupled way. We are, we are bringing so much complexity into these systems, um, that they're very hard to conceive of. Um, and AIML is not gonna not gonna address that. Um, I think one of the things that was wonderful about the setting, uh, in the sugar factory and at all of that, you know, sort of very mechanical viewpoint, you know, when you're actually connecting all things together, you can see it. A lot of what we've been building today is almost impossible to observe. And so the complexity price that we're paying in infrastructure is going up exponentially and we can't sustain infrastructures like that. We have to start leveling that in, right? >>Your point on the keynote, by the way, great call out on, on the, on the setting. I thought that was very clever. So what do you think about this? Because as enterprises go through this transformation, one of the big conversations is the solution architecture, the architecture of, um, how you lay all this out. It's complexity involved. Now you've got on premise system, you've got cloud, you've got edge, which you're hearing more and more local processing, disconnected systems, managing it at the edge with visualization. We're going to hear more about that, uh, with Dirk, when he comes on the queue, but you know, just in general as a practitioner out there, what, what's, what's your, what do you see people getting their arms around, around this, this keynote? What do they, what's your thoughts? >>Yeah, I, I think, uh, the, the pattern I see emerging is like, or in the whole industry, regardless, like if you put, when does your sign is that like, we will write less and less software in-house I believe that SAS will emerge. Uh, and it has to, I mean, that is the solution to kill the complexity. I believe, like we always talk about software all the time and we, we try to put this in the one band, like it's, everybody's dining, same kind of software, and they have, I'm going to complexity and they have the end years and all that stuff. That's not true. Right. If you are Facebook, you're writing totally different kind of software that needs to scale differently. You needs a lot of cash and all that stuff, right. Gash like this and cash. Well, I ain't both gases, but when you are a mid size enterprise out there in the middle, like fly over America, what, uh, my friend Wayne says, like, we need to think about those people too. >>Like, how do they drive software? What kind of software do they write? Like how many components they have in there? Like they have three tiers of four tiers. So I think they're a little more simpler software for internal use. We have to distinguish these applications. I always talk about this, like the systems of record systems of differentiation, the system of innovation. And I think cloud will do great. And the newer breed of applications, because you're doing a lot of, a lot of experimentation. You're doing a lot of DevOps. You have two pizza teams and all that stuff, which is good stuff we talk about, well, when you go to systems of record, you need stability. You need, you need some things which is operational. You don't want to touch it again, once it's in production. Right? And so the, in between that, that thing is, I think that's, that's where the complexity lies the systems are, which are in between those systems of record and system or innovation, which are very new Greenfield. That, that's what I think that's where we need to focus, uh, our, um, platform development, um, platform as a service development sort of, uh, dollars, if you will, as an industry, I think Amazon is doing that right. And, and Azura is doing that right to a certain extent too. I, I, I, I worry a little bit about, uh, uh, Google because they're more tilted towards the data science, uh, sort of side of things right now. >>Well, Microsoft has the most visibility into kind of the legacy world, but Rob, you're shaking your head there. Um, on his comment, >>You know, I, I, you know, I, I watched the complexity of all these systems and, and, you know, I'm not sure that sass suffocation of everything that we're doing is leading to less is pushing the complexity behind a curtain so that you, you, you can ignore the man behind the curtain. Um, but at the end of the day, you know what we're really driving towards. And I think Amazon is accelerating this. The cloud is accelerating. This is a new set of standard operating processes and procedures based on automation, based on API APIs, based on platforms, uh, that ultimately, I think people could own and could come back to how we want to operate it. When I look at what we w we were just shown with the keynote, you know, it was an, is things that application performance management and monitoring do. It's, it's not really Amazon specific stuff. There's no magic beans that Amazon is growing operational knowledge, you know, in Amazon, greenhouses that only they know how to consume. This is actually pretty block and tackle stuff. Yeah. And most people don't need to operate it at that type of scale to be successful. >>It's a great point. I mean, let's, let's pick up on that for the last couple of minutes we have left. Cause I think that's a great, great double-down because you're thinking about the mantra, Hey, everything is a service, you know, that's great for business model. You know, you hand it over to the techies. They go, wait a minute. What does that actually mean? It's harder. But when I talk to people out there and you hear people talking about everything is a service or sanctification, I do agree. I think you're putting complexity behind the curtain, but it's kind of the depends answer. So if you're going to have everything as a service, the common thesis is it has to have support automation everywhere. You got to automate things to make things sassiphy specified, which means you need five nines, like factory type environments. They're not true factories, but Rob, to your point, if you're going to make something a SAS, it better be Bulletproof. Because if you're, if you're automating something, it better be automated, right? You can measure things all you want, but if it's not automated, like a, like a, >>And you have no idea what's going on behind the curtains with some of these, these things, right. Especially, you know, I know our business and you know, our customers' businesses, they're, they're reliant on more and more services and you have no idea, you know, the persistence that service, if they're going to break an API, if they're going to change things, a lot of the stuff that Amazon is adding here defensively is because they're constantly changing the wheels on the bus. Um, and that is not bad operational practice. You should be resilient to that. You should have processes that are able to be constantly updated and CICB pipelines and, you know, continuous deployments, you shouldn't expect to, to, you know, fossilize your it environment in Amber, and then hope it doesn't have to change for 10 years. But at the same time, we'll work control your house. >>That's angle about better dev ops hypothetical, like a factory, almost metaphor. Do you care if the cars are being shipped down the assembly line and the output works and the output, if you have self-healing and you have these kinds of mechanisms, you know, you could have do care. The services are being terminated and stood up and reformed as long as the factory works. Right? So again, it's a complexity level of how much it, or you want to bite off and chew or make work. So to me, if it's automated, it's simple, did it work or not? And then the cost of work to be, what's your, what's your angle on this? Yeah. >>I believe if you believe in systems thinking, right. You have to believe in, um, um, the concept of, um, um, Oh gosh, I'm losing over minor. Um, abstraction. Right? So abstraction is your friend in software. Abstraction is your friend anyways, right? That's how we, humans pieces actually make a lot more progress than any other sort of living things here in this world. So that's why we are smart. We can abstract complexity behind the curtains, right? We, we can, we can keep improving, like from the, the, you know, wooden cart to the car, to the, to the plane, to the other, like, we, we, we have this, like when, when we see we are flying these airplanes, like 90% of the time they're on autopilot, like that's >>Hi, hiding my attractions is, is about evolution. Evolvable software term. He said, it's true. All right, guys, we have one minute left. Um, let's close this out real quick. Each of you give a closing statement on what you thought of the keynote and Verner's talk prop, we'll start with you. >>Uh, you know, as always, it's a perf keynote, uh, very different this year because it was so operationally focused and using the platform and, and helping people run their, their, off their applications and software better. And I think it's an interesting turn that we've been waiting for for Amazon, uh, to look at, you know, helping people use their own platform more. Um, so, uh, refreshing change and I think really powerful and well delivered. I really did like the setting >>Great shopping. And when we found, I found out today, that's Teresa Carlson is now running training and certification. So I'm expecting that to be highly awesomely accelerated a success there. Sorry, what's your take real quick on burners talk, walk away. Keynote thoughts. >>I, I, I think it was what I expected it to be like, he focused on the more like a software architecture kind of discussion. And he focused this time a little more on the ops side and the dev side, which I think they, they are pivoting a little bit, um, because they, they want to sell more AWS stuff to us, uh, to the existing enterprises. So I think, um, that was, um, good. Uh, I wish at the end, he said, not only like, go, go build, but also go build and operate. So can, you know, they all say, go build, build, build, but like, who's going to operate this stuff. Right. So I think, um, uh, I will see a little shift, I think, going forward, but we were talking earlier, uh, during or watch party that I think, uh, going forward, uh, AWS will open start open sourcing the commoditized version of their cloud, which have been commoditized by other vendors and gradually they will open source it so they can keep the hold onto the enterprises. I think that's what my take is. That's my prediction is >>Awesome and want, I'll make sure I'm at your watch party next time. Sorry. I missed it. Nobody's taking notes. Try and prepare. Sorry, Rob. Thanks for coming on and sharing awesome insight and expertise to experts in cloud and dev ops. I know them. And can firstly vouch for their awesomeness? Thanks for coming on. I think Verner can verify what I thought already was reporting Amazon everywhere. And if you connect the dots, this idea of reasoning, are we going to have smarter cloud? That's the next conversation? I'm John for your host of the cube here, trying to get smarter with Aus coverage. Thanks to Robin. Sarvi becoming on. Thanks for watching.

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Hello and welcome back. You're just in time for our third session spot. I Q amplify your insights with AI in this session will explore how AI gets you to the why of your data capturing changes and trends in the moment they happen. >>You'll >>start to understand how you can transform your data culture by making it easier for analysts to enable business users to consume insights in real time. >>You >>might think this all sounds too good to be true. Well, since seeing is believing, we're joined by thought spots. Vika Scrotum, senior product manager. Anak Shaped Mirror, principal product manager to walk you through all of this on MAWR. Over to you actually, >>Thank you. Wanna Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. I am Action Hera, together with my colleague because today we will talk to you about how spot I Q uses a. I to generate meaningful insights for the users Before we dwell into that. Let's see why this is becoming so important. Your business and your data is growing and moving faster than ever. Data is considered the new oil Howard. Only those will benefit who can extract value of it. The data used in most of your organization's is just the tip of the iceberg beneath the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see or what you don't know to ask. That makes the difference in this data driven world. Let's learn how one can extract maximum value of the data to make smarter business decisions. We believe that analytics should require less input while producing more output with higher quality in a traditional approach. To be honest, users generally depend on somebody else to create data models, complex data queries to get answers to their pre anticipated questions. But solution like hot spot business users already have a Google like experience where they can just go and get answers to their questions. Now, if you look at other consumer applications, there are multiple of recommendation engines which are out there, which keep recommending. Which article should I read next? Which product should I buy? Which movie should I watch in a way, helping me optimized? Where should I focus my time on in a Similarly in analytics, as your data is growing, solutions must help users uncovered insights to questions which they may not ask, we believe, and a I automated insights will help users unleash the full potential off their data Across the spectrum, we see a potential in a smart, AI driven solution toe autonomously. Monitor your data and feed in relevant insights when you need them, much like a self driving car navigates our users safely to their desired destination. With this, yeah, I'm happy to introduce you to spot like you are a driven insights engine at scale, which will help you get full potential off your data like you automatically discovers, personalize and drive insights hidden in your data. So whenever you search to create answers, spot that you continues to ask a lot more questions on your behalf as it keeps drilling and related date dimensions and measures employed insights which may be of interest to you. Now you as a user can continue to ask your questions or can dig deeper into the inside, provided by spotted you Spartak. You also provides a comprehensive set of insights, which helps user get answers to their advance business questions. In a few clicks, so spotted it. You can help you detect any outlier, for example, spot that you can not only tell you which seller has the highest returns than others, but also which product that sellers selling has higher returns than other products. Or, like you can quickly detect any trends in your data and help us answer questions like how my account sign ups are trending after my targeted campaign is over. I can quickly use for, like, toe get unanswered how my open pipeline is related to my bookings amount and what's the like there. What it means is that how much time a lead will take to convert into a deal I can use partake. You, too, create multiple clusters off my all my customer base and then get answers to questions that which customer segment is buying which particular brand and what are the attributes last and the most used feature Key drivers of change spotted you helps you get answer to a question. What factors lead to the change in sales off a store in 2020 as compared to 2019? We can do all this and simple fix. That's barbecue. What is so unique about Spartak? You how it works hand in hand with our search experience, the more you search, the smarter. The spot that you get as it keeps learning from your usage behavior on generates relevant insights for you for your users. Spartak. You ensures that users can trust every insights. A generator. It broadly does this and broadly, two ways. It keeps their insights relevant by learning the underlying data model on. By incorporating the users feedback that is, users can provide feedback to the spot I Q similar to any social media back from, they can like watching sites they find useful on dislike. What insights Do not find it useful based on users. Feedback Spot like you can downgrade any insight if the users have not find it useful. In addition to that, users can dig deep into any Spartak you insight on all calculations behind it are available for a user to look and understand. The transparency in these calculations not only increases the analytical trust among the users, but also help them learn how they can use the search bar to do much more. I'm super excited to announce Partake you is now available on embrace so our automated A insights engine can run queries life and in database on these datasets so you do not need to bring your data to thoughts about as you connect your data sources. Touch Part performs full indexing value to the data you have selected, not just the headers in the material and as you run sport in Q, it optimizes and run efficient queries on your data warehouse on. I am super pleased to introduce you. This new spot like you monitor the spot that you monitor will enable all your users to keep track of their key metrics. Spartak, you monitor will not only provide them regular updates off their key metrics, but we also analyze all the underlying data on related dimensions to help them explain. What is leading to the change of a particular metric monitor will also be available on your mobile app so that you can keep track of your metrics whenever and wherever you go, because will talk for further detail about this during the demo. So now let's see Spartak in action. But before we go there, let's meet any. Amy is an analyst at a global retail about form. Amy is preparing for her quarterly sales review meeting with the management, so Amy has to report how the sales has meat performing how, what, what factors lead to the change in the sales? And if there are any other impressing insights, which everyone should off tell to the management? So but this Let's see how immigrant use part like you to prepare for the meeting. So Amy goes to that spot, chooses the sales data set for her company. But before we see how many users what I Q to prepare for the meeting. I just wanted to highlight that all this data which we're going to talk about is residing in Snowflake. >>So >>Touch Part is going to do a life query on the snowflake database on even spot. A Q analysis will run on the Snowflake databases, so we'll go back and see how you can use it. So Amy is preparing for the sales meeting for 2019. We just ended. So images right Sales 2019 on here. She has the graph of the Continent tickets, >>so >>what she does is immediately pence it >>for >>the report. She's creating Andi now. This graph is available >>there now. >>Any Monnet observed >>that >>the Q four sales is significantly higher than Q >>three, so >>you she wants to deep dive into this. So she just select these two data points and does the right click and runs particularities. So now, as we talked earlier, Spartak, you recommends which columns Spartak Things Will best explains this change >>on. >>Not only that, you can look that Spartacus automatically understood that Amy is trying toe identify what led to this change. So the change analysis we selected So now with this, >>Amy >>has a bit more business context when he realizes that she doesn't want to add these columns. So she's been using because she thinks this is too granular for the management right now. >>If >>she wants, she can add even more columns. All columns are available for her, and she can reduce columns. So now she runs 42 analysis. So while this product Unisys is running, what the system will do with the background, this part I Q will drill across all the dimensions, which any is selected and try to explain the difference, which is approximately $10 million in sales. So let's see if Amy's report is ready. Yeah, so with this, what's product you has done is protect you has drilled across all dimensions. Amy has selected and presented how the different values in these dimensions have changed. So it's product. You will not only tell you which values in these dimensions have changed the most, but also does an attribution that how much of this change has led to the overall change scenes. So here in the first inside sport accuse telling that 10 products have the largest change out of the 3 45 values and the account for 39% increase. Overall, there has been look by the prototype category. It's saying that five product types of the largest change out of the 15 values, and they account for 98.6% of total increase. And they're not saying the sailors increased their also demonstrating that in some categories the sales has actually decreased to ensure the sales has decreased. Amy finds this inside should be super useful so immediately pins this on the same pain, but she was preparing for and she's getting ready with that. Amy also wants to dig deeper into this inside. My name goes here. She sees that spot. I Q has not only calculated the change across these product types, but has also calculated person did change. So Amy immediately sorts this by wasn't did change. And then she notices that even though Sweater as a category as a prototype, was not appearing in the change analysis but has the most significant change in terms of percentage in comparison to Q two vs Q four. So she also wants to do this so she can just quickly change the title. And she can pin this insight as well under spin board for the management to look at with this done. Now, Amy, just want to go back to this sales and see if she can find anything else interesting. So now Amy has already figured out the possible causes. What led to the increase in sales? So now, for the whole of 2019, as this is also your closing, Amy looks, uh, the monthly figures for 2019, and she gets this craft now. If Amy has to understand, if there is an interesting insight, she can dig into different dimensions and figure out on her own or immigrant, just click on this product analysis. That's product immediately suggest all the dimensions and measures immigrant analyze sales by Andi many. We will run this What will happen is this barbecue system will try to identify outliers. The different trend analysis Onda cross correlation across different measures. So Amy again realizes that this is a bit too much for her. So she reduces some of these insights, which she thinks are not required for the management right now from the business context and the business meeting. And then she just immediately runs this analysis. So now, with this, Amy is hoping to get some interesting insights from Spartak, which immigrant present to her management meeting. Let's see what sport gets for her. So now the Alice is run within 10 seconds, so spot taken started analyzing. So these are the six anomaly sport like you found across different products, where their total sales are higher than the rest. He also founded Spot. I just found eight insights off different product types which has tired total sales and look across these enemy sees that oh jackets have against the highest sales across all the categories in December as well. Amy wants toe been this to the PIN board on M. It moves further now. Amy's is that it has also shown Total Country purchased their product a me thinks this is not a useful insights. Amy can get this feedback. The system and system asked, Why are you saying you don't find this useful so the system can remember? So you can also say that anomalies are obvious right now and give this feedback and the system will remember. In addition, Amy finds that the system has automatically correlated the total sales in total contrary purchase. Amy Pence this as well to the pin board. Andi. She loves this inside where she she is that not only the total sales have increased, but total quantity purchases have increased a lot more on their training, opposed as well. So she also opens this now anything. She is ready for her meeting with the management. So she just goes and shares the PIN board, which she just created with the management. And you know what happens immediately? The jacket sales category Manager Mr Tom replies back to Amy and says in the request, Any d really like this? So now we will see how Spartak you can help any educators as request doesn't mean really need to create these kind of reports every month to cater toe Tom's request. So with this, I will handle it because to take us walk us through How spot that you can cater this request. Hi, >>everyone. So analysts like Amy are always flooded with such requests from the business users and with Spot and you monitor. Amy can set up everyone who needs updates on a on a metric in just a few simple steps and enable them to drag these metrics whenever and wherever they want. And north of the metrics, they also get the corresponding change analysis on the device off their choice with hot Spot. What I give money being available on both Web and the mobile labs. So let's get started with the demo will be set up a meet and go to the search tab and creator times we start for the metrics you want to monitor, right? And please know if the charges already created is already created. All is available is, um, usually a section in a PIN board. Also dancer. Then there's no need to create a new child. She can simply then uh, right click on the chart and select moisture from the menu, which then shows, which then shows the breakdown off the metric he's going to monitor, including the measure. What it's been grouped by on what it is filtered on. Okay, and also as this is a weekly metric, all the subscribers are going to get a weekly notification for this metric had been a monthly metric. Then the notifications would have been delivered on a monthly cadence. Next she can click on, continue and go to the configure dimensions called on Page. Here A is recommending what all dimensions could best being the change in this metric, she can go ahead with default recommendation, or she can change the columns as she seems very she can click, she conflict, continue and go to the next page, which is the subscriber stage. It is added by default to the subscriber, but she can search everyone who needs update on this metric and add them on this metric by clicking confirmed, she'll see a toast message on the bottom of the page, taking on which will take a me to this page, which is a metric detail page On the top of this page, we can see the movement of the metric and how it is changing over time, 92 you can see that the Mets jacket, since number has increased by 2.5% in the week off 23rd of December has compared toa the week off 16th of December and just below e a has invaded the man is generated in sites which are readily available for consumption. Okay to discharge. Right here says that pain products have the largest change out of all the 28 values and contributes to the 88% of the total increase in the same. And this one right here is that Midwest is the larger Midwest has the largest change and accounts for 55.66% off the total increase. Now, all this goodness is also available on the mobile lab. Right? So let me just show you how business users are going to get notified on the based. On this metric, all the business users who are subscribed to this metric are going to get a regular email as well as push notifications on the mobile lab. And when the click on this, they line on a metric detail page which has all the starts, which I just showed you on the on the bed version, okay. And one cyclic on back burden. They land on this page, which is a monitor tab, and it summarizes all the metrics Which opportunity monitoring and gives them a whole gave you to stay all I want to stay on top of their businesses. Okay. Eso that folks was monitor. Now I'll search back to slaves and cover. Summarize the key takeaways. From what? That she and I just don't know. So it's part of you wanted, uh, Summit Spartak you. It automatically discovers insights and helps you unless the full potential of your data and that's what I do is comprehensive set off analysis. You can answer your advanced business question in just a few simple steps and the end speed of your time. Bring state. And with a new support for embrace, you can run sport like you on your data in your data warehouse and with spotted you monitor, you can monitor all the business metrics and not just died. We can also understand that teaching teaching drivers on those metrics on the platform of your choice. So with that, I'll hand over toe, you know. >>Thank you so much. Both of you That was fantastic. Um, I just love spot like, because it makes me look like much more of a rock star with data than I really am. So thank you guys for that fantastic presentation. Um, so we've got a couple of minutes for a couple of questions for you. The first one is for action. Um, once spot I Q generates a number of insights. Can you run spot I Q again on one of those insights? >>Yeah, As a philosophy off Spiric, you sport like you never takes the user to the dead end Spartak. You also transparently shares the calculation. So user can not only the keeper that on edit Understand how this product you inside has been calculated, but user can also run us for like you analysts is honest for data analysis as well. Which music? And continue to do not on the first level. Second level in the third level as well. >>That's cool. Thank you. Actually on then The next one is for because for spot ik monitor is it possible to edit the dimensions used for explaining the factors to change that was detected? >>Yes. It's an owner of the metric you can change the dimensions whenever you want and save them for everyone else. >>Okay, well, I think that's about all we've got time for in this session. So all that remains is for me to say a huge thank you to Because an Akshay Andi, we've got the last session of this track coming up in a few minutes. So grab a snack. Come right back and listen to an amazing customer story with Snowflake on Western Union, they're up next.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi Bri welcome back this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special presentation made possible by IBM we're talking about data op data ops in Acton Steve Lucas here he's the senior vice president and director of data management at Associated Bank be great to see how are things going and in Wisconsin all safe we're doing well we're staying safe staying healthy thanks for having me Dave yeah you're very welcome so Associated Bank and regional bank Midwest to cover a lot of the territories not just Wisconsin but another number of other states around there retail commercial lending real estate offices stuff I think the largest bank in in Wisconsin but tell us a little bit about your business in your specific role sure yeah no it's a good intro we're definitely largest bank at Corvis concen and then we have branches in the in the Upper Midwest area so Minnesota Illinois Wisconsin our primary locations my role at associated I'm director data management so been with the bank a couple of years now and really just focused on defining our data strategy as an overall everything from data ingestion through consumption of data and analytics all the way through and then I'm also the data governance components and keeping the controls and the rails in place around all of our data in its usage so financial services obviously one of the more cutting-edge industries in terms of their use of technology not only are you good negotiators but you you often are early adopters you guys were on the Big Data bandwagon early a lot of financial services firms we're kind of early on in Hadoop but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about sort of the business drivers and and where's the poor the pressure point that are informing your digital strategy your your data and data op strategy sure yeah I think that one of the key areas for us is that we're trying to shift from more of a reactive mode into more of a predictive prescriptive mode from a data and analytics perspective and using our data to infuse and drive more business decisions but also to infuse it in actual applications and customer experience etc so we have a wealth of data at our fingertips we're really focused on starting to build out that data link style strategy make sure that we're kind of ahead of the curve as far as trying to predict what our end users are going to need and some of the advanced use cases we're going to have before we even know that they actually exist right so it's really trying to prepare us for the future and what's next and and then abling and empowering the business to be able to pivot when we need to without having everything perfect that they prescribed and and ready for what if we could talk about a little bit about the data journey I know it's kind of a buzzword but in my career as a independent observer and analyst I've kind of watched the promise of whether it was decision support systems or enterprise data warehouse you know give that 360 degree view of the business the the real-time nature the the customer intimacy all that in and up until sort of the recent digital you know meme I feel as though the industry hasn't lived up to that promise so I wonder if you could take us through the journey and tell us sort of where you came from and where you are today and I really want to sort of understand some of the successes they've had sure no that's a that's a great point nice I feel like as an industry I think we're at a point now where the the people process technology have sort of all caught up to each other right I feel that that real-time streaming analytics the data service mentality just leveraging web services and API is more throughout our organization in our industry as a whole I feel like that's really starting to take shape right now and and all the pieces of that puzzle have come together so kind of where we started from a journey perspective it was it was very much if your your legacy reporting data warehouse mindset of tell me tell me the data elements that you think you're going to need we'll figure out how do we map those in and form them we'll figure out how to get those prepared for you and that whole lifecycle that waterfall mentality of how do we get this through the funnel and get it to users quality was usually there the the enablement was still there but it was missing that that rapid turnaround it was also missing the the what's next right than what you haven't thought of and almost to a point of just discouraging people from asking for too many things because it got too expensive it got too hard to maintain there was some difficulty in that space so some of the things that we're trying to do now is build that that enablement mentality of encouraging people to ask for everything so when we bring out new systems - the bank is no longer an option as far as how much data they're going to send to us right we're getting all of the data we're going to we're going to bring that all together for people and then really starting to figure out how can this data now be used and and we almost have to push that out and infuse it within our organization as opposed to waiting for it to be asked for so I think that all of the the concepts so that bringing that people process and then now the tools and capabilities together has really started to make a move for us and in the industry I mean it's really not an uncommon story right you had a traditional data warehouse system you had you know some experts that you had to go through to get the data the business kind of felt like it didn't own the data you know it felt like it was imposing every time it made a request or maybe it was frustrated because it took so long and then by the time they got the data perhaps you know the market had shifted so it create a lot of frustration and then to your point but but it became very useful as a reporting tool and that was kind of this the sweet spot so so how did you overcome that and you know get to where you are today and you know kind of where are you today I was gonna say I think we're still overcoming that we'll see it'll see how this all goes right I think there's there's a couple of things that you know we've started to enable first off is just having that a concept of scale and enablement mentality and everything that we do so when we bring systems on we bring on everything we're starting to have those those components and pieces in place and we're starting to build more framework base reusable processes and procedures so that every ask is not brand new it's not this reinvent the wheel and resolve for for all that work so I think that's helped if expedite our time to market and really get some of the buy-in and support from around the organization and it's really just finding the right use cases and finding the different business partners to work with and partner with so that you help them through their journey as well is there I'm there on a similar roadmap and journey for for their own life cycles as well in their product element or whatever business line there so from a process standpoint that you kind of have to jettison the you mentioned waterfall before and move to a more being an agile approach did it require different different skill sets talk about the process and the people side of yeah it's been a it's been a shift we've tried to shift more towards I wouldn't call us more formal agile I would say we're a little bit more lean from a an iterative backlog type of approach right so what are you putting that work together in queues and having the queue of B reprioritized working with the business owners to help through those things has been a key success criteria for us and how we start to manage that work as opposed to opening formal project requests and and having all that work have to funnel through some of the old channels that like you mentioned earlier kind of distracted a little bit from from the way things had been done in the past and added some layers that people felt potentially wouldn't be necessary if they thought it was a small ask in their eyes you know I think it also led to a lot of some of the data silos and and components that we have in place today in the industry and I don't think our company is alone and having data silos and components of data in different locations but those are there for a reason though those were there because they're they're filling a need that has been missing or a gap in the solution so what we're trying to do is really take that to heart and evaluate what can we do to enable those mindsets and those mentalities and find out what was the gap and why did they have to go get a siloed solution or work around operations and technology and the channels that had been in place what would you say well your biggest challenges in getting from point A to point B point B being where you are today there were challenges on each of the components of the pillar right so people process technology people are hard to change right men behavioral type changes has been difficult that there's components of that that definitely has been in place same with the process side right so so changing it into that backlog style mentality and working with the users and having more that be sort of that maintenance type support work is is a different call culture for our organization and traditional project management and then the tool sets right the the tools and capabilities we had to look in and evaluate what tools do we need to Mabel this behavior in this mentality how do we enable more self-service the exploration how do we get people the data that they need when they need it and empower them to use so maybe you could share with us some of the outcomes and I know it's yeah we're never done in this business but but thinking about you know the investments that you've made in intact people in reprocessing you know the time it takes to get leadership involved what has been so far anyway the business outcome and you share any any metrics or it is sort of subjective a guidance I yeah I think from a subjective perspective the some of the biggest things for us has just been our ability to to truly start to have that very 60 degree view of the customer which we're probably never going to get they're officially right there's there everyone's striving for that but the ability to have you know all of that data available kind of at our fingertips and have that all consolidated now into one one location one platform and start to be that hub that starts to redistribute that data to our applications and infusing that out has been a key component for us I think some of the other big kind of components are differentiators for us and value that we can show from an organizational perspective we're in an M&A mode right so we're always looking from a merger and acquisition perspective our the model that we've built out from a data strategy perspective has proven itself useful over and over now in that M&A mentality of how do you rapidly ingest new data sets it had understood get it distributed to the right consumers it's fit our model exactly and and it hasn't been an exception it's been just part of our overall framework for how we get that data and it wasn't anything new that we had to do different because it was M&A just timelines were probably a little bit more expedited the other thing that's been interesting in some of the world that were in now right from a a Kovach perspective and having a pivot and start to change some of the way we do business and some of the PPP loans and and our business models sort of had to change overnight and our ability to work with our different lines of business and get them the data they need to help drive those decisions was another scenario where had we not had the foundational components there in the platform there to do some of this if we would have spun a little bit longer so your data ops approach I'm gonna use that term helped you in this in this kovat situation I mean you had the PPE you had you know of slew of businesses looking to get access to that money you had uncertainty with regard to kind of what the rules of the game were what you was the bank you had a Judah cape but you it was really kind of opaque in terms of what you had to do the volume of loans had to go through the roof in the time frame it was like within days or weeks that you had to provide these so I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how you're sort of approach the data helped you be prepared for that yeah no it was a race I mean the bottom line was it felt like a race right from from industry perspective as far as how how could we get this out there soon enough fast enough provide the most value to our customers our applications teams did a phenomenal job on enabling the applications to help streamline some of the application process for the loans themselves but from a data and reporting perspective behind the scenes we were there and we had some tools and capabilities and readiness to say we have the data now in our in our lake we can start to do some business driven decisions around all all of the different components of what's being processed on a daily basis from an application perspective versus what's been funded and how do those start to funnel all the way through doing some data quality checks and operational reporting checks to make sure that that data move properly and got booked in in the proper ways because of the rapid nature of how that was was all being done other covent type use cases as well we had some some different scenarios around different feed reporting and and other capabilities that the business wasn't necessarily prepared for we wouldn't have planned to have some of these types of things and reporting in place that we were able to give it because we had access to all the data because of these frameworks that we had put into place that we could pretty rapidly start to turn around some of those data some of those data points and analytics for us to make some some better decisions so given the propensity in the pace of M&A there has to be a challenge fundamentally in just in terms of data quality consistency governance give us the before and after you know before kind of before being the before the data ops mindset and after being kind of where you are today I think that's still a journey we're always trying to get better on that as well but the data ops mindset for us really has has shifted us to start to think about automation right pipelines that enablement a constant improvement and and how do we deploy faster deploy more consistently and and have the right capabilities in place when we need it so you know where some of that has come into place from an M&A perspective is it's really been around the building scale into everything that we do dezq real-time nature this scalability the rapid deployment models that we have in place is really where that starts to join forces and really become become powerful having having the ability to rapidly ingesting new data sources whether we know about it or not and then exposing that and having the tools and platforms be able to expose that to our users and enable our business lines whether it's covent whether it's M&A the use cases keep coming up right they we keep running into the same same concept which is how rapidly get people the data they need when they need it but still provide the rails and controls and make sure that it's governed and controllable on the way as well [Music] about the tech though wonder if we could spend some time on that I mean can you paint a picture of us so I thought what what what we're looking at here you've got you know some traditional IDI w's involved I'm sure you've got lots of data sources you you may be one of the zookeepers from the the Hadoop days with a lot of you know experimentation there may be some machine intelligence and they are painting a pic before us but sure no so we're kind of evolving some of the tool sets and capabilities as well we have some some generic kind of custom in-house build ingestion frameworks that we've started to build out for how to rapidly ingest and kind of script out the nature of of how we bring those data sources into play what we're what we've now started as well as is a journey down IBM compact product which is really gonna it's providing us that ability to govern and control all of our data sources and then start to enable some of that real-time ad hoc analytics and data preparation data shaping so some of the components that we're doing in there is just around that data discovery pointing that data sources rapidly running data profiles exposing that data to our users obviously very handy in the emanating space and and anytime you get new data sources in but then the concept of publishing that and leveraging some of the AI capabilities of assigning business terms in the data glossary and those components is another key component for us on the on the consumption side of the house for for data we have a couple of tools in place where Cognos shop we do a tableau from a data visualization perspective as well that what that were we're leveraging but that's where cloud pack is now starting to come into play as well from a data refinement perspective and giving the ability for users to actually go start to shape and prep their data sets all within that governed concept and then we've actually now started down the enablement path from an AI perspective with Python and R and we're using compact to be our orchestration tool to keep all that governed and controlled as well enable some some new AI models and some new technologies in that space we're actually starting to convert all of our custom-built frameworks into python now as well so we start to have some of that embedded within cloud pack and we can start to use some of the rails of those frameworks with it within them okay so you've got the ingest and ingestion side you've done a lot of automation it sounds like called the data profiling that's maybe what classification and automating that piece and then you've got the data quality piece the governance you got visualization with with tableau and and this kind of all fits together in a in an open quote unquote open framework is that right yeah I exactly I mean the the framework itself from our perspective where we're trying to keep the tools as as consistent as we can we really want to enable our users to have the tools that they need in the toolbox and and keep all that open what we're trying to focus on is making sure that they get the same data the same experience through whatever tool and mechanism that they're consuming from so that's where that platform mentality comes into place having compact in the middle to help govern all that and and reprovision some of those data sources out for us has it has been a key component for us well see if it sounds like you're you know making a lot of progress or you know so the days of the data temple or the high priest of data or the sort of keepers of that data really to more of a data culture where the businesses kind of feel ownership for their own data you believe self-service I think you've got confidence much more confident than the in the compliance and governance piece but bring us home just in terms of that notion of data culture and where you are and where you're headed no definitely I think that's that's been a key for us too as as part of our strategy is really helping we put in a strategy that helps define and dictate some of those structures and ownership and make that more clear some of the of the failures of the past if you will from an overall my monster data warehouse was around nobody ever owned it there was there wasn't you always ran that that risk of either the loudest consumer actually owned it or no one actually owned it what we've started to do with this is that Lake mentality and and having all that data ingested into our our frameworks the data owners are clear-cut it's who sends that data in what is the book record system for that source data we don't want a ability we don't touch it we don't transform it as we load it it sits there and available you own it we're doing the same mentality on the consumer side so we have we have a series of structures from a consumption perspective that all of our users are consuming our data if it's represented exactly how they want to consume it so again that ownership we're trying to take out a lot of that gray area and I'm enabling them to say yeah I own this I understand what I'm what I'm going after and and I can put the the ownership and the rule and rules and the stewardship around that as opposed to having that gray model in the middle that that that we never we never get but I guess to kind of close it out really the the concept for us is enabling people and end-users right giving them the data that they need when they need it and it's it's really about providing the framework and then the rails around around doing that and it's not about building out a formal bill warehouse model or a formal lessor like you mentioned before some of the you know the ivory tower type concepts right it's really about purpose-built data sets getting the giving our users empowered with the data they need when they need it all the way through and fusing that into our applications so that the applications and provide the best user experiences and and use the data to our advantage all about enabling the business I got a shove all I have you how's that IBM doing you know as a as a partner what do you like what could they be doing better to make your life easier sure I think I think they've been a great partner for us as far as that that enablement mentality the cloud pack platform has been a key for us we wouldn't be where we are without that tool said I our journey originally when we started looking at tools and modernization of our staff was around data quality data governance type components and tools we now because of the platform have released our first Python I models into the environment we have our studio capabilities natively because of the way that that's all container is now within cloud back so we've been able to enable new use cases and really advance us where we would have a time or a lot a lot more technologies and capabilities and then integrate those ourselves so the ability to have that all done has or and be able to leverage that platform has been a key to helping us get some of these roles out of this as quickly as we have as far as a partnership perspective they've been great as far as listening to what what the next steps are for us where we're headed what can we what do we need more of what can they do to help us get there so it's it's really been an encouraging encouraging environment I think they as far as what can they do better I think it's just keep keep delivering write it delivery is ping so keep keep releasing the new functionality and features and keeping the quality of the product intact well see it was great having you on the cube we always love to get the practitioner angle sounds like you've made a lot of progress and as I said when we're never finished in this industry so best of luck to you stay safe then and thanks so much for for sharing appreciate it thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube data ops in action we got the crowd chat a little bit later get right there but right back right of this short break [Music] [Music]

so it definitely fits into basic being able to automate the redundant main mundane types of tasks that anyone can do right so you if you think about it if you have a security operations center with five or ten analysts it might take one analyst to do a task make two comes two or three hours and where you can leverage a tool like Sansom any type of sort platform to actually create a playbook to do that tasks within 30 seconds so not only are you minimizing the amount of you know headcount to do that you're also you know using your consistent tool to make that folks should make the function of you know more I want to say enhanced so you can build playbooks around it you can basically use that on a daily basis whether it's for security monitoring or network operations reporting all that becomes and the impact of mine thank you so what we do is we are a data analytics and intelligence nonprofit dedicated to countering all forms of human trafficking whether it's labor trafficking sex King or any of the subtypes men women and children all over the world so when you think about that what that really means is that we interact with thousands of state across law enforcement government nonprofits academia and then the private sector as well and all of those essentially act as data silos for human trafficking data and when you think about that as trafficking as a data problem or you tackle it as a data problem what that really means is that you have to have a technology and data led solution in order to solve the problem so that's really our mission here is to bring together all of those stakeholders give them easy access to tools that can help improve their counterpose yeah so like a day to day or like kind of what our team does is we focus on like what's going on previously what are we seeing in the wild like what campaigns are happening and then my role within my team is focused on what's coming so what are what are red team's working on what are pen testers looking into take that information begin testing it begin building proof of concepts put that back into our product so that whether it's two weeks six months two years we have coverage for it no matter what so a lot of us a lot of our time is generating proof of concepts on what may be coming so there's a lot of you know very unique things that maybe in the wild today and then there's some things that we may never see that are just very novel and kind of once one Center once a time kind of thing I joined nine months ago and when I was interviewing for the role I remember Doug Merritt saying to me hey you know we might be the only two billion dollar enterprise software company that nobody's ever heard of he said I want to go solve for that right like the folks you know Splunk and our customers they love us our product is awesome and our culture is awesome but the world doesn't know about us yet and we haven't invested there so I want to go take the brand to the next level and I want the world to understand what data use cases are out there that are so broad and so vast leave that every problem ultimately can be solved through data are almost every problem and we wanted to set the stage for that with this new brand campaign about the product were you guys ad using Splunk and you putting data sensors out there you leveraging an existing data bulb take us through some of that you know the nuts and bolts of what's going on the price so part of it is building out some data sets so there are some data sets that don't exist but the government and the counties and the private sector have built out a huge ball of corpus of data around where the buildings are where the people are where the cell phones are where the traffic is so we're able to leverage that information as we have it today the technology we're using the Amazon stack it's easy for us to spin up databases it's easy for us to build out and expand as we grow and the response we're able to have a place for all this real-time data to land and for us to be able to build API is to pull it out very very simple when we say dated everything we really mean it it's really you know it's a personal story for me I am on the government affairs team here is blog so I manage our relationships with governor's and mayors and these are the issues that they care about right when the city is burning down the mayor cares about that the governor this is you know one of the governor and California's and major initiatives is trying to find solutions on wildfires you know I met charlie my hometown Orinda California art fire chief in that town was one of sort of the outside advisors working with Charlie on this idea and we ran I met him at a house party where the fire chief was telling me that trim my trees back and shrubs back and then I was at a conference three days later that same fire chief Dave Winokur was on a panel with like folks from a super computer lab and NASA and MIT I was like you know my fire chief's still the smartest guy in that panel I got to meet this guy a few weeks later we were literally in the field doing these proof of concepts with sensors and data super savvy folks some of the other folks from Cal Fire there you know dropping Cox was with us today here it's what my and you know we've we've just been collaborating the whole time and seeing you know that that Splunk can really put some firepower the power behind these guys and we just see like look they've got the trust of these customers and we need to make sure this idea happens it's a great idea and it's going to save lives yeah the little small nuance data to everything data time and the reason behind that was we believe you can bring and we can enable our customers to bring data to every question every decision and every action to create meaningful outcomes and the use cases are vast and enormous we talked about some of them before the show started but helping look global law enforcement get ahead of human trafficking fierce Punk and spelunking what's going on across all sorts of data sources right helping zone Haven which is our first investment from Splunk ventures which startup that's actually helping firefighters figure out burn burn patterns with pilot wildfires but also when temperatures and humidity change we're sensors are they can alert firefighters 30 to 45 minutes earlier than they would usually do that and then they can also help influence evacuation patterns I mean it's it's remarkable what folks are doing with data today and it's really at the core of solving some of the world's biggest issues so I'm glad you mentioned data right we're a data company and we're very proud that we actually pull star diversity inclusion number so we moved the needle 1.8% on gender last year year-on-year pride but not satisfied we understand that there's much more to diversity inclusion than just gender but our strategy is threefold for diversity inclusion so its workforce workplace marketplace the farces arranged is where I talk about is improving our representation so that these women are no longer the only czar in the minority they were much more represented and we're lucky we have three women on our board we have four women in our C suite so we're making good good progress but there's a lot more to do and as I say it's not just about gender we want to do we know that innovation is fueled by diversity so we want to attract you know folks of different race different ethnicity books who are military veterans people with disability one its plans to be successful the important thing thing is you know the things you mentioned the the vulnerability scanning the intrusion detection these are all still important in the cloud I think the key thing that the cloud offers is the fact that you have the ability to now automate and integrate your security teams more tightly with the things that you're doing and you can actually we always talk about the move fast and stay secure customers choose AWS for the self-service the elasticity of the price and you can't take advantage of those unless you're secure you can actually keep up with you so the fact that everything isn't based on an API you can define infrastructure as code you can actually enforce standards now whether they be before you write a line of code in your DevOps pipeline we're actually being able to detect and >> those things all through code and in a consistent way really allows you to be able to look in your security in a different way and take the kind of philosophy and mindset you've always had around security but actually do something with it and be able to maybe do the things you've always wanted to do that have never had a chance to do it so I think I think security can actually keep up with you and actually help you different you're different to your business the acquisition is really extremely you know exciting for us you know after meeting Marcus I've known of Marcus he's a very positive influence in the community but having worked with him the vision for threat care and the vision for alike rests really closely aligned so where we want to take the future of security testing testing controls making sure upstream controls are working where threat care wanted to go for that was very much with what we aligned war so it made sense to partner up so very excited about that and I think we will roll that in our gray matter platform as another capability we really see the product involving the same way that you see a lot of the portfolio overall so Doug has talked a lot about investigate monitoring and analyzing and right and so those same concepts apply to how you think about a process as well so right now we're really helping the investigation and monitoring but will also continue to extend across that spectrum lifetime a lot of cloud services and micro services observability a big part of all this yeah definitely and how we've built the product but also I think you can sit alongside some of the other things that you're also seeing in that so I think the thing to understand is correct we're not just a security company but we are number one in the security magic quadrant we're number one in both IDC and Gartner and so that's important but what happens is all of the data that you collect first security can also be used for all these other use cases so generally speaking whatever you're collecting for security is also valuable for IT operations and it's also valuable for many other use cases so I'll give you an example Domino's which is a great customer of ours there they've gone 65% of their orders now come in digitally ok and so they monitor the entire end-to-end customer experience what they monitor not only from an IT operations perspective that same data that they use for IT operations also tells them you know what's being ordered what special orders are being made and they use that data for promotions based upon volume in traffic and timing they actually create promotions so now you're talking about the same data that you collected for a security night operations you can actually use for promotions which is marketing it's a great intro on data is awesome but we all have data to get to decisions first and actions second what that in action there's no point in gathering data and so many companies been working their tails off to digitize her landscapes why well you want a more flexible landscape but why the flexibility because there's so much data being generated there you can get effective decisions and then actions that landscape can adapt very very rapidly which goes back to machine learning and eventual AI opportunity set so that is absolutely squarely where we've been focused is translating that data into value and into actual outcomes which is why our orchestration automation piece is so so important one big 18 factors that we felt as existed is for this plunk index it's only for this blank index the pricing mechanism mechanism has been data volume and that's a little bit contrary to the promise which is you don't know where the values could be within data and whether it's a gigabyte or whether it's a petabyte why shouldn't be able to put whatever day do you want in to experiment you

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio today for a CUBE Conversation that's a little bit of a deeper dive into the Cisco CloudCenter, we've had an ongoing conversation and there's a new component today, we're going to do a deep dive, so we're excited to welcome back to the studio CUBE alumni Ali G, technical leader, software engineering group from Cisco, Ali, great to see you again. >> Thank you so much, happy to be here. >> Absolutely, and joining us from New Jersey via the phone is Michael Chenetz, he's a technical marketing engineer from Cisco, Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you guys. >> And I hope you'll go get a cheese steak when we're finished and figure out how you can send it to me, I don't know if that's possible. But anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it, so Cisco CloudCenter, we've been talking about it for a while, but today we wanted to dig into a very specific feature, and it goes technically by AO, but that stands for the Action Orchestrator. Ali, what's Action Orchestrator all about? >> Well, action orchestration is a component inside our CloudCenter Suite that brings together cross-domain orchestration. And it's extremely useful because not only is it valuable for DevOps engineers to orchestrate and maintain and automate their infrastructure, but it's also useful for application developers to define workflow and orchestration in their products as well. So, this tool is heavily used throughout the stack, inside the cloud, at the application level, all the way down to the intro level as well, and it's made it extremely easy for DevOps engineers to get their hands on defining workflows, and conditions and logics where they can create, maintain, all the appropriate infrastructure that they need. Works very well hand to hand with the current technology out there like Terraform or Ansible, and it's part of our CloudCenter Suite, so. >> And is it more on the config side or is it more on kind of the operational workflow side? >> Correct, so it could be used for both, right, it's so flexible in a matter of this abstraction of having the orchestration engine outside, enables both developers and DevOps engineers to illustrate and create their workflows. Rather, it's again based on infrastructure or even networking layers, are all the way up the stack to the application where if your product requires an orchestration engine in the back end, to process work, this component definitely plays a big role, right, so. >> Okay. Michael, throw it over to you. >> Yeah, so I think everything that Ali is saying is absolutely correct, the nice part about it is it's a product that can really do whatever you imagine, so I mean we've seen people use it for business process, for automation of network, server, cloud, whatever you can think of, it's extensible but we're going to talk about that in a little bit, but really the nice part about it is you create the workflows and you design the way that you want to go. And what I have here, if you can show the next video, is just a little clip of what it would look like to go through a workflow. So let's cue that up and we'll take a walk through it. >> Jeff: Let's go to the video number one, guys. >> Michael: All right, so... Yeah, so if you look here, what we're seeing is, we're seeing a preview of what Amazon looked like beforehand, looking at VPCs and subnets, and now what we're doing is going through a workflow that is going to show afterwards that those actual VPCs and subnets were created by using a flow. So what we're going to do is just pick one flow here, which is called create infra, and this is just an example, and what you see on the left-hand side is something called actions, so these are all the atomic actions that are available. But these are just out of the box, we're adding stuff all the time, and these actions could be dragged over to the right and create workflows. And the nice thing about it is if it's not there, you can create them in minutes and we're going to show you that in a little bit, too. So, right now what I'm going to show you is the fact that if you click on each one of these actions, there's actually some kind of information that you'll see on the right-hand side, and this information is how you configure that particular action, so this particular one's going to create a VPC, and you can see the VPC name, you can see the VPC subnet, and whatever other parameters are needed for that particular action. So now I'll have to do, you pretty much select the target, and this one already had a target selected, which is Amazon, or AWS, and this second action here, if you look down, actually has a parameter too, or a couple parameters, and one of those parameters, you can see the first one is just the name, the second one, though, is actually used in a variable from the previous step. So really really easy to map stuff from different workflow elements, and it allows you to quickly kind of glue things together to make things work, so this is just an example, again, very simple example, that this is going to create infrastructure on Amazon, and you can think about using this as part of the process, like when you're trying to bring up a cloud environment, maybe you run this first. Maybe you run this to say, "Hey, I need some infrastructure "for that cloud environment," and maybe you even want to execute bringing up certain VMs or containers, you could do that afterwards. But this was just a really really quick showcase of a simple thing you can do with very few steps, that you could then run and it will actually, we're going to run, hit validate here, just validates the workflow, but once we click run here, it's actually going to create all of that stuff within Amazon, so in this step you're going to see the run, you can see that both steps work, because they're green. If they didn't work, they'd be red, and we're going to show that in one second. But, when you click on a step it actually shows you the input and output of each one of those steps, so it's really really cool in that all the information that you could possible think of that you'll need to troubleshoot, to look at these things, is available in the workflow by just clicking on each one of these steps and seeing what that input and output, so if you could imagine, if you had an error there, you could quickly figure out what that is, it would tell you the error, it would tell you what's going on, or, if you needed information from a step before, you could run it, get the information from the step before, and then figure out what values you need for the next step. So really really cool in that you could look at this workflow, you get all the information you need, and it allows you to create these workflows and kind of glue 'em together, really really quick. And now what I'm going to show you, I believe, is in the next part here, I'm just going to illustrate that if you go over to the runs that we have here, it'll actually keep a list of all of the different runs we did, and you can see one is in red. Well, that one in red means that a step didn't work. Well let's click on that step and figure out "Hey, why didn't this step work?" Well this step didn't work because of an error that we got, and if we scroll down to the bottom over here, what we're going to see is the actual error that had occurred within this step. So now we know exactly what the problem was, and we can fix it within the next step, so in this particular one, we illustrated right there that there was some problem with, I think a VPC, or the way that I phrased that VPC, or that subnet, I'm sorry, and it caused the problem. But I fixed it within the next step, and now you can see that in these particular two screens that the VPC and the subnet was created automatically within that workflow. >> Pretty cool, so what would they have done to accomplish that in the past? >> So to accomplish that in the past, and this is the real thing that we see, we see that people have all these tools all over the place, those tools might be things that are orchestration engines, other products that might be things that you run from the command line. Which work great together, but what you find is that, there's no central orchestration, and what we want to provide is that central orchestration that can run those other tools, and also schedule them together. So if you use other tools besides AO, that's fine. We're happy to bring them in, and you could use the variables, you could use everything that you still would use, but now you have all the integration, you have all the variables, you have all the workflow, and not only just from AO, but from Workload Manager too, so if you bring up a VM and bring up a container, you get that information. So there's just a lot of tooling inside that allows you to really take advantage of everything you might already even have. >> Correct, I mean that was a good demo, and one of the things I'd like to point out here is that, compared to some of the competitors that are out there with this orchestration engine, I don't want to name anyone particular, but if you look at it, the schema that Michael just showed us in that demo is JSON-based, versus others out there are some still in XML. The other very beneficial to this is that since this is a component of our CloudCenter Suite, it also gets installed on-prem, and what that means is footprint is extremely important when it comes to on-prem especially. And with the technology and the cloud-native solutions, that the team has done inside Cisco, our footprint is very small, due to the technology choices that we use in writing our services in Go, and et cetera, versus outside competitors are doing it in Java, which have a much more larger footprint on the infrastructure, that clients and customers get to install, so there are a lot of features with this orchestration engine that comes when we're trying to compare them with the market and the competitors of that are out there. Conditional logicking, what Michael just showed us inside the workflows, right, it makes it super simple for someone who has not had any experience coding, to put together the workflows and introduce conditions, either for loops or if else statements or conditional blocks, whereas in the competitors, you have to know a certain amount of programming skills in order for you to do those conditioning, so, I feel that that's a great advantage that we have here, so. >> And so does a lot of things come packaged out of the box? Standard processing, standard workflows, standard processes? >> Yep. >> And then what do they code it in, then, if it is a custom workflow that you don't have, how do they go in and manipulate the tool? >> Good question, because like I mentioned, competitors, you would have to know a certain language in order for you to code those logical flows that you want inside your orchestration, right? Inside AO, it's all driven by the DSO, which is all JSON-based, right, and the DSO is so powerful that you can introduce if and else conditions, you don't have to know a language per se, it's just you define your logic, right, and the tool actually allows you to provide those flows, those if conditions, the loops that are required, and also defaulting onto fallbacks or et cetera. >> Think Michael, you were going to show us a little bit more on that, and kind of set up some of these actions. >> Yeah, I think that's absolutely key, is that what we're talking about is extensibility here, so the extensibility is one thing that we kind of tout, because you don't need to be a programmer, but we live in an API world, so we need a way to consume these APIs. How do we do that in companies and businesses that think developer is expensive, and it's very hard to get into. So we're trying to take that out of that and say "Hey, we have this engine." So let's take a look at some of that extensibility on the next video that I have here. >> Jeff: Kay, pulling that up. >> Michael: So what you're seeing here is Postman. So this is a regular tool that a lot of people use, and what I'm showing is just a call, which is in Postman. And this particular call just gets a Smartsheet, so this gets a Smartsheet from Smartsheets, and it just lists what Smartsheets are available. And in AO, I want to be able to create this, and if we look at the timer, I'm doing this in less than five minutes. So I have no calls for Smartsheets, but I want to create a call, so what I did is I created a target for Smartsheets, that's an http target. And what that means is that I can connect to Smartsheets, and if you look at the bottom I list the API address, and I list the default path, so you don't have to enter that path a million times, so we know that API/2.0 is the path that we're always going to use. On top of that, there's always some other kind of element to that path that we're going to need in each particular action that we want to call. So what I'm going to do here is showcase what I did. So, in this first step, what I've done is I actually did a generic http request, so no programming needed, all I had to do is use a URL. People have used the World Wide Web, they know how to use URLs. In this one, the call is /sheets. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. So, really I did /sheets is what I'm calling, and I'm using the target, and then the next step what I'm doing is I'm setting up a variable that's going to be my output variable, so what am I going to call this, maybe I'll call it Sheets, and really all I'm doing is just setting this up and saying that we are going to call this Sheets, going out of it, and that's about it. So what I've done within a couple minutes is created a new action that's going to be shown on the left-hand side. So now you can think of a reusable element, and what I'm showcasing here is I'm actually going to turn it off and turn it back on just to showcase, but there's something called atomic actions. So I'm just validating that this is running, I'm going to take a look at the atomic action, I'm going to give it a category, so I'm going to put this under the Smartsheet category, so if you can imagine, I had a lot of these Smartsheet actions, I could just put 'em all into one category where I'll find 'em on the left-hand side. But, I'm just going to validate that the atomic action is good, and now what I'm going to show you is that when I call up a new workflow, I could just drag that right from the left-hand side, and it'll be under Smartsheets, it'll be under get those lists, list Smartsheets, and what it's going to ask for now is a token, because you need a token in order to authenticate with Smartsheet, that's a Smartsheet requirement, so what I'm going to do is just go over to Postman, and grab that token real quick, and then come back over to this page and enter that token in. So, the first thing I'm going to do is create an input variable, and that input variable is going to ask for a token, so what that does is it, when I run this, in this particular workflow, I can ask for an input variable, and that means every time it runs it's going to pop up with that variable. Right now what you're seeing is I'm associating that variable that I created with that token parameter, and this is a secure string, so you can never see what that string is. It's hidden, it's made so that it's not ever seen. And so now if I run the run, you'll see it asks for a token. Now is actually when I'm going to go over to Postman, I'm going to grab that token, so you'll see I'm going into Postman, and Postman, again, is just what we use to test these calls, a lot of people use it, it's very industry-standard, and I'm just grabbing the token from here. It's blurred out so that the public can't see it, but I grabbed it, and now I'll go back out into here, and I hit run, and you'll see that I created that action, I brought the action into a workflow, I ran it, it's running, and now it's giving me that exact same output that I would've got in Postman, but now it's a reusable element. So this just illustrates the extensibility that's available within our product. Again, only took a couple of minutes, and I have an action that I might have needed that wasn't available in this tool, but it was created, and it works out of the box now. >> Very slick, and so that was with Smartsheets, how many connectors do you guys already have preconstructed? >> There are so many, I mean I don't want to list a lot of different vendors, but you can imagine every DevOps tool is in there, there are connections to Amazon, to Google, to Kubernetes, to, internally through ACI, through Meraki, through a lot of the Cisco ecosystem. So really, there's just a lot available, and it's growing, it's growing tremendously and we're building communities and we just want people to try it, use it, I think they'll really like it once they see what it can do. >> Yeah, and I'm just curious, Ali, is this something then that people are going to be working on all the time, or are these pretty much, you set your configs and go back to work, you set these relationships and go back to work, or is this, this is not your working screen. >> This is, I mean how cool was that, right, creating those atomic actions and being able to templatize those and building those building blocks like Lego, right, that in the future you can just build more and more out of, and just add to the complexity without it being complex at all, right? But going back to your question is, a lot of these toolings that are build with AO, one of the other advantages that we see that unfortunately some of the competitors don't have outside, is that you have the ability of four different type of events that inside AO is supported. So you, as DevOps engineers, they tie them up to scheduling, they tie them up to events coming in from a message queue, so these workflows that are created get triggered by these events, which makes it possible for them to execute at a certain time, or for a certain event that gets triggered, right, so again, reusable atomic workflows and actions that Michael just demonstrated, along with having both engineers and, application developers and DevOps, and I kind of stress it out, because of how flexible this is. For them to define it one time, and then have it reusable whenever they want. >> I'm just curious, what's the biggest surprise when you show this to people in the field? What do they get most excited about? >> They love it, they immediately say, "How can we start using it the next day?" And we also have, CloudCenter Suite has a SaaS offering where it's made it very easy for us to get them a trial access so that they can come in, get their foot wet and try it out. And once they start doing these calls and building these workflows and as Michael demonstrated, these actions where they perform API calls at the very least, they just get hooked to it, right, and then start using it from thereon. >> Michael, what about you, what's your favorite response from clients when you demo this, what's the one, two things that really grabs 'em, gets their attention, gets a big smile on their face? >> Yeah, well first and foremost you see people's minds spinning on what use cases have been bothering them that they haven't been able to fix, because maybe they're not programmers, or maybe they are, but it's just, they thought it would be too complex and too much work. So, I think it's just, it's so open-ended but you just see the interest in people's faces, it's like the first time, I have a three year old, the first time I gave him Legos and he's like, "I can build stuff, I can do stuff myself?" I mean it's just like that, I mean that's the amazing part of it is that it's so extensible, and to build onto what Ali was saying, there's so many ways to trigger it, too. So this can work standalone and work by itself, or it can be triggered by an API call, it can be scheduled, it could be called from Workload Manager, it can be triggered from a RabbitMQ, it could be triggered from Kafka. There's so many different things that you can do to trigger these workflows, that it just makes it so that it can integrate with other products, and you can integrate other products, so it really becomes that glue that kind of ties everything together, I mean we really really think about it as building blocks or Legos, or something like that. It just is really extensible, really easy to use, and we think it's a real game-changer. >> Great, all right, Ali, so last word, where do people go to get more information if they can't see that cool demo on that itty-bitty screen on their phone? >> So, we definitely recommend them to go to CloudCenter Suite, if you easily Google it on Cisco website or on Google itself, you'll see it apart from first or second links, but definitely check out CloudCenter Suite, Action Orchestrator is where you would like to visit and learn more about this tool and this component. >> All right, well thanks for stopping by, and thanks for joining us from New Jersey, Michael. >> Oh, thank you, and I'll send you a cheese steak. >> All right. I don't know if I want that in the mail, but we'll see if we can maybe fast shipment, all right, thanks again for stopping by, he's Ali G, he's Michael, I'm Jeff and you're watching theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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>>From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation >>and welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the cue. We're in our Palo Alto studio today for a Q conversation that a little bit of a deeper dive into the Cisco cloud center. We've had an ongoing conversation. There's a, a new component today. We're going to do a deep dive, so we're excited to welcome back to the studio. Uh, Kube alumni, uh, Ali G technical leaders software engineering group from Cisco. All great to see you again. Happy to be here. Absolutely. And joining us from New Jersey via the phone is Michael Chenoweth's. He's a technical marketing engineer from Cisco. Michael, great to see you. Hey rich, see you guys. And I hope you'll go get a cheese steak when they're finished and uh, after grad how you can send it to me. I don't know if that's possible, but uh, yeah. Anyway, welcome. Uh, so let's jump into it. So Cisco cloud center we've been talking about for a while, but today we want to dig into a very specific feature and it's a, it goes technically by a O, but that stands for the action orchestrator Ali. What's action orchestrator? >>Well, action orchestration is a component inside our cloud center suite that brings together cross domain orchestration and it's extremely useful because not only is it valuable for dev ops engineers to orchestrate and maintain and automate their infrastructure, but it's also useful for application developers to define workflow and orchestration in their products as well. So this tool, um, is heavily used throughout the stock, inside the cloud, at the application level, all the way down to the intro level as well. And um, uh, it's made it extremely easy for DevOps engineers to get their hands on the fining workflows and, uh, conditions and logics where they can create, maintain all the appropriate infrastructure that they need. Works very well hand to hand with the current, uh, technology out there like Terraform or Ansible. And, um, it's part of our CloudCenter suites. Huh. >>And is it more on the config side or is it more on kind of the operational workflow side? Correct. >>So it could be used for both. Right. It's so flexible in a matter of, I'm this abstraction of having the orchestration engine outside, uh, enables both developers and dev ops engineers to illustrate and create their workflows. Um, uh, rather, it's again, based on infrastructure or, uh, even networking layers or all the way up the side to the application where if your product requires an orchestration engine in the backend to process work, this, uh, this component definitely plays a big role. Right? So, >>okay, Michael, throw it over to you. >>Yeah, so I think everything that a Ali is saying is absolutely correct. Um, the nice part about it is it's, it's, >>you know, >>it's a product that can really do whatever you imagined. So, I mean, we've seen people use it for business process, for a automation of network, server, cloud, whatever you can think of. It's, it's, um, you know, it's extensible. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. But really the, the nice part about it is you create the workflows and you designed the way that you want to go. And what I have here, if you could show the next, uh, video is just a little clip of what it would look like to go through a workup. Well, okay, so let's go queue that up and we'll uh, we'll take a walk for it. Let's go to the video number one guys. All right. So yeah, so if you look here, what we're seeing is we're seeing a pre, a view of what Amazon looked like, a beforehand looking at VPCs and subnets. >>And now what we're doing is going through a workflow that is going to show afterwards that those actual VPCs and subnets were created by using a flow. So we're going to do is just pick one flow here, which is called creative for us. And this is just an example. And what you see on the left hand side is something called actions. So these are all the atomic actions that are available. A, but these are just out of the box. We're adding stuff all the time. And these actions can be dragged over to the right and create workflows. And then just think about it as if it's not there, we can create, you can create them in minutes. And we're going to show you that in a little bit too. So right now what I'm gonna show you is the fact that if you click on each one of these actions, there's actually some kind of uh, information that you'll see on the right hand side. >>And this information is how you and figure that particular action. So this particular one's going to create a VPC and you can see the VPC name, you could see the VPC sub-net, um, and whatever other parameters are needed for that particular action. So not a lot to do. You pretty much select the target. And this one already had a target selected, which is Amazon or AWS. And the second action here, if you look down, actually has a parameter two or a couple parameters and one of those parameters you can see the first one is just the name. The second one though is actually using a variable from the previous step. So really, really easy to map stuff different workflow elements and it allows you to quickly kind of glue things together to make things work. So this is just an example again, very simple example that this is going to create infrastructure on Amazon. >>And you can think about using this as part of the process. Like when you're trying to bring up a cloud environment, maybe you run this first, if you run this to say, Hey, I need some infrastructure for that cloud environment and maybe you even want to execute, um, you know, bringing up certain VMs or containers, you can do that afterwards. But this was just a really, really quick showcase. Oh, a simple thing you can do with very few steps that you can then run and it will actually, we're going to run, hit validate here. It just validates the workflow. But once we click around here, it's actually going to create all of that stuff within Amazon. So in the next, in this step, you're going to see the run. You can see that both steps work because they're green. If they didn't work, they'd be red. >>And we're going to show that in one second. Um, but when you click on a step, it actually shows you the input and output of each one of those steps. So it's really, really cool on that all the information that you could possibly think of that you'll need to, to troubleshoot, to look at these things is available in the workflow by just clicking on each one of these steps and seeing what that input and output. So if you can imagine if you had an error there, uh, you could quickly figure out what that is. It would tell you the error, it would tell you what's going on, or if you needed information from a step before you can run it, get the information from the step before and then figure out what values you need for the next step. So really, really cool in that you could look at this workflow, you get all the information you need and it allows you to create these workflows and kind of glue them together really, really quick. >>Uh, and now what I'm going to show you, I believe is in the next part here. I'm just going to illustrate that. If you go over to the runs that we have here, it'll actually keep a list of all of the different runs we did. And you could see one is in red. Well that one in red means that a step didn't work well. Let's click on that step and figure out, Hey, why didn't this step work? Well, this step didn't work because of an error that we got. And if we scroll down to the bottom over here, what we're going to see is the actual error that are had had occurred within this step. So now we know exactly what the problem was and we can fix it within the next step. So in this particular one, um, we, we illustrated right there, uh, that there was some problem with, uh, I think a VPC, um, or the way that I, I sorry, the way that I phrase that VPC or that's something that I'm sorry. >>And uh, it, it, it positive problem, but I fixed it within the next step in. Now you can see that in these declare two screens that the VPC and the sudden that was created automatically within that workflow. Pretty cool. So what, what would they have done to accomplish that in the past? So there'll come a sound the past, and this is the real thing that, that we see. We see that people have all these tools all over the place. Those tools might be, you know, things that are uh, orchestration engines, you know, other products that it might be things, uh, that, uh, they run from the command line, uh, which are, you know, work great together. But what we find is that, you know, there's no central orchestration and when we want to provide is that central orchestration that can run those other tools and also schedule them together. >>So if you use a, if you use other tools besides a AAO, that's fine. We're happy to bring them in. And we could, you could use the valuables, you could use everything that's, that you still use. Okay, now you have all the integration, you have all the variables, you have all the workflow. And not only just for Mayo but from workload manager too. So if you bring up a VM and and bring up a container, you get that information. So there's just a lot of uh, you know, tooling inside that allows you to really take advantage of them. Everything you might already even have. >>Yeah, correct. I mean that was a good demo. And, uh, one of the things I like to point out here is that compared to some of the competitors that are out there with this orchestration engine, uh, I don't want to name anyone particular, but if you look at it, the schema that Michael just showed us in that demo is Jason Bass versus others out. There are some still in XML. The other very beneficial to this is that since this is a component of our cloud center suite, it also gets installed on prem. And what that means is footprint is extremely important when it comes to OnPrem especially. And, uh, with the technology and the cloud native solutions that you know, the team has done inside Cisco, our footprint is very small, uh, due to the technology choices that we use. And writing our services and go and et cetera versus outside competitors are doing it in Java, which have a much more larger footprint on, you know, the infrastructure that clients and customers get to insult. >>So there are a lot of features, uh, with this orchestration engine, uh, that comes when it, uh, when we're trying to compare them with the market and the competitors that are out there. Conditional logic in what Michael just showed us inside the workflows, right. It makes it super simple for someone who has not had any experience coding to put together their workflows and introduced conditions, um, either for loops or if L statements are conditional blocks, whereas in the competitors you have to know a certain amount of programming skills in order for you to do those conditionings. So I feel that that's a great advantage that we have here. So, >>and so do you does a lot of things come packaged out of the box kind of standard processes, standard standard workflows and our processes. Yup. And then what do they coat it in then? If, if, if it is a, a custom workflow that you don't have, how do they go in and manipulate the tool? >>Good question. Because I'm like I mentioned, right? The competitors, you would have to know a certain language in order for you to code those, a logical flows that you want inside your orchestration, right? Inside EO, it's all driven by the DSL, which is all Jason base, right? And the GSL, the DSLR is so powerful that you can introduce if an ELs conditions, you don't have to know a language per se, right? It's just you define your logic, right. And um, the tool actually allows you to provide those flows, those if conditions of the loops, uh, that are required and also defaulting onto fallbacks or etc. So, right. >>I think Becca, you're going to show us a little bit more that, uh, >>yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely key is that, you know, what we're talking about is extensibility here. So the extensibility is, is one thing that we kind of tell because you don't need to be a programmer, but we live in an API world. So we need a way to consume these API. How do we do that in, and you know, companies and businesses that think developer is expensive and it's very hard to get into. So we're trying to take that out of that and say, Hey, we have this engine. So let's take a look at some of that extensibility on the next video that I have here. >>Okay. Pulling that up. So what you're seeing here, uh, is, uh, postmaster. So this is a regular tool that a lot of people use. And what I'm showing is just appall, which is, which is in boost Matt. And this particular call just gets a Smartsheet. So this gets a Smartsheet, uh, from Smartsheets and it just lists what Smartsheets are available and yeah, in a, Oh, I want to be able to create this. And if we look at the time, or I'm doing this in less than five minutes, so I have no calls for Smartsheets, but I want to create a call. So what I did is I created a target for Smartsheets that's an HTTP target. And what that means is that I can connect to Smartsheets and if you look at the bottom, I list the API a address and I list the default path. >>So you don't have to enter that path a million times. So we know that API slash 2.0 is the path that we're always going to use. On top of that, there's always some other kind of, uh, element to that path that you know we're going to need in each particular action that we want to call. So what I'm going to do here is showcase what I did. So in this first step, what I've done is I actually did a generic HTTP requests. So no programming needed. All I had to do is use a URL. People have used the worldwide web, they know how to use URLs. And this one, the cause slash sheets doesn't take a lot of, you know, um, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. So ah, really I did slash sheets is, is what I'm calling. And um, you know, I'm using the target and then the next step when I'm doing is I'm setting up a variable that's going to be my output variables. >>So what am I gonna call this? Maybe I'll call it sheets. And really all I'm doing is just setting this up and saying that we are going to call this Sheetz going out of it. And that's about it. So what I've done within a couple minutes is created a new action that's going to be shown on the left hand side. So now you can think of a reusable element. And what I'm showcasing here is I'm actually gonna turn it off and turn it back on just to showcase. But there's something called atomic actions. So I'm just validating that this is running. I'm going to take a look at the atomic action. I'm going to give it a category. So I'm going to put this, the Smartsheet category. So if you could imagine I had a lot of these, a Smartsheet actions, I could just put them all into one category. >>We'll find them on the left hand side, but I'm just going to validate that the atomic action is good. And now what I'm going to show you is that when I call up a new workflow, I can just drag that right from the left hand side and it'll be under smart sheets. It'll be under, you know, get those lists are uh, Smartsheet, um, lists Smartsheets and what it's going to ask for. Now as a token, because you need a token in order to, uh, authenticate with Smartsheet. That's a Smartsheet requirement. So what I'm gonna do is just go over to postman and uh, grabbed that token real quick and um, and then come back over to this page and enter that token in. So, uh, the, the first thing I gonna do is create an input variable and that input variable is going to ask for a token. >>So what that does is it, when I run this in this particular workflow, I could ask for an input variable. And that means every time it runs, it's going to pop up with that variable right now where you're seen as an associate in that variable that I created with that token parameter. And this is a secure string so you can never see what that string is. It's hidden, it's a, you know, it's a, it's made so that it's, it's not ever seen. And um, so now if I run the run, you'll see it asks for a token. Now is actually when I'm going to go over to postman. I'm going to grab that to again a, so you'll see I'm going into postman and post again is just what we use to test these calls. A lot of people use it. It's very industry standard. >>Uh, and I'm just grabbing the token from here. Uh, it's blurred out so that, so that though public can't see it. But I grabbed it and then we'll go back out into here and I hit run and you'll see that I created that action. I brought the accidents who workflow, I ran it, it's running and now it's giving me that exact same output that I would've gotten in postman. But now it's a reusable element. So this just illustrates the extensibility that's available within our product. Again, when we took a couple of minutes and I have an action that I might've needed that wasn't available in this tool, but it was created and it, uh, you know, it works out in the box now, so >>very slick. And so that was with, uh, with Smartsheets, how many connectors do you guys already have pre constructed? >>There are so many. I mean, you know, I don't want to list a lot of different vendors, but you could imagine every dev ops tool is in there. Um, there are connections to Amazon, to Google too, uh, to Coopernetties, to, um, to internally through ACI, through Muraki, through a lot of the Cisco ecosystem. So really there's, there's just a lot available, uh, and it's growing. It's grown tremendously and we're building communities and we just want people to try it, use it, I think really like it. Once they see what it can do. >>Yeah. And I'm just curious all, is this something that then that people are going to be working on all the time or these pretty much, you know, you set your configs and go, go back to work, you set these relationships and go back to work or is this, this is not your work screen, >>this is, I mean, how cool was that, right? Creating those atomic actions and being able to templatize those and, and, and building those building blocks like Lego, right, that in the future you can just build more and more out of and just either add to the complexity without it being complex at all. Right. Um, but going back to your question is a lot of these toolings that are built, um, with EO, the, uh, one of the other advantages that we see that unfortunately some of the competitors don't have outside, um, is that you have the ability of, for different types of events that inside AOL is supportive. So, you know, you as dev ops engineers, they tied them up to scheduling, they tied them up to events coming in from a message queue. So these are workflows that are created get, uh, triggered by these events, which, uh, you know, makes it possible for them to execute at a certain time or for a certain event that gets triggered. Right? So, uh, again, uh, re-usable, uh, Automic workflows and actions that Michael just demonstrated along with, um, having, uh, both engineers and the both engineers, both application developers and dev ops, and I kind of stress it out because how flexible this is, right. Um, for them to define it one time and then have it reusable whenever they want. Right. >>I'm just curious, what's the biggest surprise when you show this to people in the field? Um, what do they get most excited? >>They love it. I mean cut. They immediately say, how can we start using it the next site? Right. And, um, it's, uh, you know, we also have a cloud center suite has a SaaS offering where it's, uh, made it very easy for us to, uh, get them a trial access. So that they can come in, get their foot wet, you know, and try it out. Right. And once they start doing these calls and building these workflows and uh, as a Michael demonstrated these actions where they perform API calls at the very least, right. Uh, they just get hooked to it. Right. And then start using it from their answer. Right. >>Mike, what about you? What's your, uh, what's your favorite response from, from clients when you demo this? W what's the one, two things that really, uh, that really grabs them, gets their attention and gets a big smile on their face? >>Yeah. Well, first and foremost, you see people's minds spinning on, like what use cases have been bothering them that they haven't been able to, to, to like fix, you know, because maybe they're not programmers or maybe they are, but you know, it's just, they thought it would be too complex and too much work. So, you know, I think it's just, it's, it's so open-ended, but you just, the interest in people's faces. It's like the first time, you know, I have a three year old, it's the first time I gave him Legos and he's like, you, I can build stuff. I can do stuff myself. I mean, it's just like that. I mean that's the amazing part of it is that it's so extensible and to build on to what Ali was saying, uh, you know, there's so many ways to trigger it too. So this can work standalone and work by itself. >>Or it can be triggered by an API call. It could be scheduled, it could be called from workload manager. It can be, uh, you know, it can be triggered from a, you know, a rabid. It could be triggered from PACA. There's so many different things that you can do to trigger these workflows that it just makes it so that it can integrate with other products and you can integrate other products. Right? So it really becomes that glue that kind of ties everything together. I mean, we really, really think about it as building blocks or Legos or something like that. Um, it just is really extensible, really easy to use. And you know, we think it's a real game changer. >>Great. All right. All a last word. Where do people go to get more information if they can't see that cool demo on that DVD screen on their phone? >>So, um, we definitely recommend them to go to cloud center suite. Uh, you know, if you easily Google it on Cisco, uh, website or on Google itself, you know, you'll see it, uh, apart from, uh, first or second links. But definitely check out CloudCenter suite action orchestrator is where you would like to visit and learn more about this tool and this component. So. >>All right, well thanks for, uh, for stopping by and uh, thanks for joining us from New Jersey, Michael. Oh, thank you. And I'll send you a cheese. All right. I'm, I don't know if I want that in the mail, but we'll see. We can make fast shit, but all right. Thanks again for stopping by. He's only T's Michael. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. >>okay.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studio with two great guests from Cisco as we talk about a content series around cloud, cloud management, cloud orchestration, and interesting cloud native. It's a cloud native world, hybrid multicloud. Two great guests, Matt Ferguson, director of cloud management orchestration at Cisco, and Ali G, technical leader in software engineering. Guys, thanks for coming on, good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, tanks for having us. >> Sporting the nice Kubernetes shirt there. Of course I'm jealous. (laughs) Great shirt because we'll be at KubeCon, so looking forward to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> We'll be there, too. >> So thanks. Matt, first start with you. You're the director of product management. You see the whole portfolio. What makes up the Cloud Center Suite? What are the components, let's get that out. >> Yeah, no, thanks, I appreciate that. Cloud Center is really our cloud management platform. It's a suite of products, quite candidly, and in the suite we have a Workload Manager module that is about taking workloads and modeling them out in blueprints, and then actually targeting them to very specific infrastructures, whether that's on-prem or in a public cloud, so that's module number one. The second module is our Action Orchestrator product, and this is an orchestration platform that can take various elements of code, of script, and take functions and actually sort of apply those with various different sort of capabilities to either set up infrastructure, or you know, do other sort of capabilities. And the third product in the suite is Cost Optimizer, and this is about understanding how much you're spending. It's understanding budgets, it's trying to categorize that in the public space. We can also apply that into an on-prem and how much you might want to sort of target that. We have, so that's the suite, and the suite is a combination of either self-hosted, so you can actually sort of like download the software and then self-host it on-prem, or we also have a SaaS platform, or SaaS-hosted capabilities for the Cloud Center. >> And the market's growing like crazy. You guys are doing a lot of product work. We've done a great interview with Ryan Hart from your team on the business benefits, but there's a lot of technical product managers out there, or cloud architects, people who are actually in the trenches, who need to look under the hood and figure out if this kind of is going to fit their environment. Ali, you've been, you know, a developer, you are a developer. At the end of the day all the talk on the marketing side is about the benefits. When they come in to you and they say, "Okay, implement this." >> Right. >> Does it work together, can it work by itself, I mean, can you mix and match? Take us through what it means for the folks who have to implement or design around the platform. >> Absolutely, so (clears throat) as a developer, you know, when we're coding it's key that we take our thoughts and ideas and as soon as we can bring it up to a POC, because normally we're working in an Agile fashion, and in two-week sprints at the end of the sprint you have to do a demo. So in order to achieve that this suite gives the capability of taking away any blockers that a developer may have, so a lot of times the developers and the teams already set up their tools around Jenkins and different CI components that they have, which is great but you know, me being in that part of the work and we hit roadblocks where failures happened, right, and we have to have our eye on the builds. And unfortunately there are manual, you know, interactions that we have to do retries. It would be great if the system was fault tolerant. Now that doesn't mean that we have to completely remove what we've done inside our CICDs, right? We've spent so much time, however if we can bring item potent commands and loose couple them a little bit and use the suite in order for us to do some of the work and give us that fault tolerancy, that'll be great, and that's what Cloud Center Suite has to offer, right? As Matt pointed out, you know, there are different components to it. You have the Workload Manager which sets up the infrastructure, but then you have AO, Action Orchestrator, which is the orchestration engine. Where I strongly believe that picking out an orchestration engine, either for you CICD and devops work, or even at the application level for development, becomes challenging, right? Does it support all the features that I have, does it have the patterns that does fault tolerancy, does threshold settings and retries? Does it do circuit breaker patterns, you know, does it take care of everything? So having that AO being your center of orchestration, both for your devops and your application, I feel that plays a strong role as a developer, right? >> So talk about the orchestration engines. I want to unpack, there's a lot there. I want to just kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Unpack it a little bit. Okay, so I'm a developer, I'm like, okay. I'm working hard, I've got the cloud architecture, I've got some cloud native, and every single day a new thing comes over the transit. "Try this new tool, it's going to be killer." Orchestration you mentioned is a buzzword that's been kicked around a lot. Obviously some people try to say, "Orchestration's about Kubernetes." Some people say no, orchestration's about a lot of other things within the enterprise, so IT is starting to get this orchestration fatigue of meaning. What is, when you say orchestration engine, what is it specifically applying to, because certainly there's orchestration within containers with Kubernetes-- >> Absolutely. >> And you're wearing, supporting the shirt. >> Right. >> But it's more than that, what does that mean for me? I'm the person in the trenches, I'm making it happen. >> No, that's a great question. The reason it's a great question is because orchestration means different things at different levels, and you brought up a good point, like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an orchestration, but it's a container orchestrator, correct? But I'm looking at Action Orchestrator acting as the orchestration for your devops activity, as part of your CICD. Not everything needs to be inside our CIs, whether as if they're command patterns that are item potent and designed, that could move into the Action Orchestrator so that we can leverage retries and have the system be fault tolerant, that's one thing. The other thing is if you're building an application that requires orchestration, that has a workflow, that requires some requests that are given to the application to be processed at the backend, right? That could also leverage this Action Orchestrator engine as well, so you're absolutely right that orchestration is there, for example, in Kubernetes, but that falls into the context of containers, whether as this falls into the context of developers. Does that-- >> Yeah, makes total sense. I mean, fault tolerance you mentioned, you mentioned loosely coupled. >> Right. >> What do you mean by that, because I get loosely coupled. Anyone that designs OSs knows. You want to couple things and make things highly cohesive. Great practice in a systems architecture. What do you mean by loosely coupled, what's the impact of me as I'm trying to figure out my devops, I've got developers pipelining. What does that mean, loosely coupled? >> So when it goes to keeping loosely coupled is if you look at today how let's say I would have done it in my team, and we've done this before, right, is that we'd set up a pipeline in our CI environment where we're performing unit testing and then we're performing integration testing, but then we're also building, packaging, pushing the containers up to the registries, right? What happens where the endpoint registry is down, there is no retries, right, there is no capability of the system knowing how to heal itself. Okay, so keeping loosely coupled in this sense is why not I keep a lot of my UT and integration testing remaining inside Jenkins, which I've done already a lot of investment in, right? I don't want to remove it, right? However, if I bring those third party connection calls that we're doing inside the orchestration which the system heals itself, that's where I see the loose coupleness that can definitely benefit us here. >> Talk about third party. Matt, you talk about it first from a product perspective because you have the roadmap to deal with. Obviously Cisco has legacy positions in the enterprise. You guys are number one in networking, in other areas. Now the cloud native world, so you got to deal with third parties. You guys have done that, been multivendor in the past. There's a business and technical impact in connecting. >> Right. >> As the world's getting faster and more microservice-oriented, what does that mean, third party? What does it mean to be third party connected? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So we're going through this, you know, transition as well where we have to enable the development community as they're going through their proof of concepts, as they're becoming more Agile, as they're actually doing the true continuous integration, the continuous delivery of that proof of concept that ultimately will land into production. So what we want to provide is the tools in order to, you know, provide either the line of business owner or the business element of the IT organization of, you know, maybe the cost associated with, you know, how much it's, you know, that particular development effort is taking, you know, by looking at how much their, you know, that public cloud provider's charging. We might be able to leverage different infrastructures, so you could leverage the, you know, on-prem and in the cloud, the public cloud, and so with Cloud Center you're able to actually take either, in Workload Manager you're able to actually set up, you know, that infrastructure and place that workload there. You're able to use Action Orchestrator to glue a variety of different either scripts or languages, or you know, whatever element that the developer is friendly or familiar with, and then you're also to actually leverage the cost associated. So I get an update on how much this is costing me as the developer is going through their cycle. >> All right, Ali, let's attack that statement. Glue, who doesn't like a glue layer? But at the expense of throwing away what I got is not cool. Like people don't want-- >> Absolutely. >> They want to be, I love to create more opportunities to glue things together, make it more integrated with data modeling going back and forth, I love that. How does your customer, in this case a devops or a developer or a technical architect, get the best of a glue layer-like feature at the same time not compromising any disruption to how they do their business? >> Perfect, so a lot of the work that they already invested inside their devops work could be there. However, like I mentioned about the orchestration section is that the ability to introduce any custom adapters are also available, correct, so there are out-of-the-box adapters for Ansible, Terraform, and many more, for RESTful API calls, and if a team requires to do a custom adapter creation via an SDK that they have inside they can simply implement it because of the interface that's available. So that's where I feel that the glue is where it comes to the orchestration level. Now where Matt pointed out on the Cost Optimizer this is very key because the realtime data that Cost Optimizer is providing from the underlying clusters that we have our services running provides us, if you tie that, and ending out I want to use the word 'glue' here, if you tie that with the orchestration engine you can do realtime system decision making on knowing that the next service that you're introducing, now think about it, when we're talking about huge companies, right, 200-plus microservices, you know, we're not talking about one or two, and there are out there, and when we're talking about those number of microservices cost becomes important. Where should I be able to push the next service? Should I push it, if it's in my public cloud should I go to Azure or should I go to AWS, right? And cost is a key factor there as well, right? >> Explain cost, I mean cost is cash, but there's also cost in code, there's cost in operations. Do you mean cost in terms of actually hard dollars, are you talking about cost of the service, impact to the system, or both? I mean, why do I care if I'm a technical person? Hey, someone else is paying the bills. >> Correct, so a couple of things as a technical person's concerned is that when it comes down to, costs aside, but where the orchestrator actually plays a role and when it comes to where deployment needs to happen on which cloud is key. As a technical person sometimes our environments and our persistence layers that we have services connecting to require only access to private data, so it cannot go into the public sector. So that service needs to be deployed onto the private cloud. Whereas you have other services that have to live on the edge because they communicate with the internal cloud, so those services need to be pushed onto that public. So it's here that the suite basically gives you the opportunity to do all of that automatically without any, you know, interference at all. >> And you know, and I'll just dive in. I mean, I think the thing that, you know, if I was a line of business owner, right, I'm really looking for my developer community, my team to move faster. I don't want to necessarily slow them down, so I want to be able to say, "Hey, if there is a service within Azure, "if there is something within Google Cloud "that really helps you develop either faster "or provides a service that makes "the functionality of the experience better," I want the developer to be able to use that as a target infrastructure. At the same time, you know, I also want to go, "Okay, so as we're building out this application "or this service, is it growing out of bounds in cost, "is this something that I can actually "sort of take to production," and then I have an awareness of exactly when they go through the unit test, the integration test, how much this is actually going to cost. >> It's a fascinating conversation, certainly on our next segment when we do more of these interviews I'd love to drill into technical debt, but I'll ask you guys while you're here, technical debt is something that developers are used to dealing with, especially when they want to go from idea to POC, you take chances, there's technical debt and people have a good form for balancing debt. Cost also factors into things like that, and we add microservices to the equation, there's services going up and down, you don't know what's happening. So automation comes into a big part of this. So this idea of getting from point A to point B, whether it's idea to POC or POC to production, there's sometimes technical debt involved, there's sometimes thinking around that. How does the platform help there? Is that something that you guys help developers with? Because that's some, I'll take a chance. If I want to get a POC up and running maybe I take some technical debt to try to get it going, then I'll fill it in after. (laughs) >> Right, so I think like Matt mentioned about the different components that play inside the suite, you know, you have the infrastructure handled by Workload Manager, you have your orchestration again by AO, you have Cost Optimizer providing cost. The ability to set up your system inside these components and then creating a template out of it so that later when you want to challenge technical debt you're not reinventing things, so you already have templates created. So going back and dealing with technical debt is about how you can take your templates to the next version. >> And that's in line with devops thinking, iteration. >> Exactly. >> You know, just keep it Agile, keep it going. What's your guy's take on automation? Obviously when you look at the biggest trends in multicloud and hybrid cloud you have two things pop up in this new cloud architecture, observability and automation are two hot trends, which is essentially, observability's just network management on steroids and automation's configuration management on steroids, (chuckles) so the world's kind of the same but evolving. I mean this is in your, both are in your wheelhouse for Cisco as a company. >> Yeah, and another element that I think we haven't really talked about was, you know, we have a container platform that actually will leverage the APIs to either the public cloud or on-prem to like an ESXi host on VMware, and what that provides is to leverage the best of where that particular service would reside. If it's on-prem because of particular use cases, of data sovereignty or just locality, you know, hey, put your workload there. If you want to leverage something that's in the public cloud because of a service or something, we're not actually putting a cluster on AWS, we're leveraging EKS, we're connecting via APIs. You know, the cluster that you are controlling from the control plane all the way to the workload or the worker node, it would actually be spun up within EKS. So we're trying to bridge that on-prem world to the public cloud, so very much hybrid cloud, the connectivity piece and being able then to understand, you know, the connectivity and the workloads that go there. >> Bridge, an old school term. >> Bridge, yes. >> It means something. >> Yes. >> Bridge. >> Yes. >> Gateways. >> Yes. >> Internetworking. >> Yes. >> Cloud, same movie, different generation, isn't it? >> Yeah. (laughs) (laughs) >> You got it. >> I mean they're moving up the stack a bit. >> Yeah. >> But this is serious, this is going on. People want to have things move around. It takes a lot of networking knowledge, but it's all being done now with software with a lot of automation abstraction. This is why I think the devops and the net devops world, whatever we're calling it, is really creating this new abstraction layer. So great conversation, let's bring it all together and end this up. Bottom line I'm a technical person. I have responsibility, my boss is saying, "Go faster, be Agile, be devops," but we've got all this legacy to deal with. Why Cisco platform, what's the bottom line? >> With the container platform what we're trying to do is enable IT to have the tools that they can actually enable the speed and agility for their developers, and that's really the bottom line. And we're trying to, you know, just basically empower and move at the speed of Agile, so IT is now a part of the process of innovation and proof of concepting. I know the challenge though is governance, policy, security, all the things, the connectivity. Those are the elements that we're bringing to the table for the IT, you know, ops organization that can also sort of like go, "I am able to provide that for their developers." >> And Ali, your perspective, you're one of us. You're a technical brother. What's the bottom line, why should I take a chance, why should I implement this platform? >> Because developers really want to code at the end of the day, and they want to just focus on their business logic. They want the system to be automated. They want the system to be self-healed, and just like what Matt said, right, this suite basically gives you that so that you just focus on your code and your business logic, nothing else. >> Awesome, guys, great conversation. Looking forward to following up. I think there's a lot to unpack. I think as this cloud 2.0 world, or whatever it's being called, is about modernization of the enterprise, and it's going to be around for a long, long time. Thanks for sharing your expert opinions and commentary, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> This is theCUBE here in Palo Alto for a CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Seattle Washington, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine, nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're actually on the waterfront in Seattle at the AWS Imagine nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the AWS Imagine education event. This is really about nonprofits and solving big, big problems. So Dave Levy and team have you know dedicated to some of these big problems. And one of the big problems in the world is human trafficking, and problems that people are encountering and all kinds of nasty situations all over the world. And we're really excited to have someone who's tackling that problem, and really trying to bring a voice to those people that wouldn't otherwise have a voice. And she's Hend Alhinnawai, she's the CEO of Humanitarian Tracker. Hend, good to see you. >> Thank you Jeff, good to be here. >> Absolutely. So before we jump into it, impressions on this event? >> Wonderful event bringing together technologists, people in nonprofits, really creating synergies for people to collaborate and talk to each other and network and learn how they can advance their organizations. >> Such important work. >> Yes. >> So give us kind of the background on what you're up to, what Humanitarian Tracker's all about. >> So Humanitarian Tracker's a nonprofit forum. It was created to connect and empower citizens using innovation and technology, but specifically for humanitarian events. We were among the first to combine crowdsourced reports with data mining and artificial intelligence and apply them to humanitarian disasters, conflicts, human rights violations, disease outbreak. All the way to tracking the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Really giving a holistic view of what's happening. >> It's interesting, you know, it's probably like the middle eastern spring, I can't remember the exact term that people use, where it was kind of the first use of regular people using their mobile phones to kind of grab a ground swell of action. You're not looking at the politics specifically, you're looking more at humanitarian disasters. But pretty amazing kind of what a connected phone represents to anyone anywhere in the world now to communicate what's happening to them. To share that story. We really didn't have anything like that before. To get that personal event on the ground. >> No it's really a new way of consuming, creating and consuming information. So the cell phone has really given people on the ground a chance to tell their own story. But it's not enough. If you have an event that happens to you. Something happens to you. And you record it, it stops there. But the unique thing with Humanitarian Tracker is it gives people that forum to show the world and tell them what's happening to and around them. >> Right, but it's not just about the individual. And what you guys are doing is using cutting edge technology, obviously you're here as part of the AWS event. In terms of machine-learning and big data to grab a large number of these reported events and distill it into more of an overarching view of what is actually happening on the ground. How did you do that, where did you get that vision, how are you executing that? >> Well, we're all about empowering the citizen. And in our line of work we deal with a lot of data, a lot of information, most of it is unstructured, most of it is crowdsourced. So we use machine-learning to help us extract important details. Information on time. Event location, what is happening. And at the same time we really cared that this reporter, stays anonymous for their own safety. We, privacy and security is utmost importance to us. So that's always our focus. So in that space, we de-identify them. We take out any information that could be identifiable, that could lead to their arrest, or could lead to someone identifying that it was them that reported. >> And how do you get this information to the people that are suffering this activity ground? How do they know about you, how do they know that you are anonymizing their information so there's not going to be repercussions if they report. You know, how do, kind of I guess your go-to-market, to steal a business terms, in making sure that people know this tool's available for help? >> It depends on the situation. For example in the conflict situation, we rolled it out, and we kept it low key for awhile. Because we didn't want government attacks, we didn't want people to be arrested, or to be tried. So we rolled it out. And it was word of mouth that spreads. And people started submitting supports. Actually the first project we did with conflict, we weren't sure if we were going to get one report, zero reports. The first week we got nothing. And then slowly as people learned about it they started submitting their reports. And we see our job as really elevating the otherwise marginalized voice. So you submit a report to us, we then take it. We verify it. We make it public. And that, we welcome, we encourage, we want people to consume it. Whether you're a student, whether you're a journalist, whether you're a government, whether you work in a nonprofit, the UN. It's been used to address human rights violations, it's been used to identify humanitarian hotspots. The data's phenomenal, and what you get from it. It's not just collecting data. We're not just about collecting the data. We want to make sure it's meaningful, and we want to derive insights. So we want to know what is the data actually telling us? >> Right, right. So just to be clear for people that don't know, so you're making that data available, you're cleansing the data, you're running some AI on it to try to get a bigger picture, and anyone with a login, any kind of journalist can now access that data in support of whatever issue or topic or story they're chasing? >> That's it Jeff. >> That's phenomenal. And just kind of size and scope. You've been at this I think you said since 2011. You know kind of how many active, activities, crisis, I don't know, what the definition is of a bucket of these problems. Are you tracking historically at a given point in time? Give us some kind of basic sizing type of dimensions. >> It really ranges, because it could, when we were tracking conflict for example, we were really focused on one area, and the surrounding countries. Because you had refugee population, you had displacement, you had all sorts of issues. But it could be anywhere from five projects, it just depends. And we want to make sure that each project we're taking on we're giving it our full attention, full scope. And I like to run the organization like a two-team pizza team. And so I don't take on more than I could handle. >> Right, right. So then how did it morph from the conflict to the Global Sustainability Goal? So we've worked with Western Digital, they're doing a lot of work, ASP's doing a lot of work on kind of these global sustainability goals. How did you get involved in that, and how did the two kind of dovetail together? >> So the elasticity of the cloud has helped our operation scale tremendously. And in 2016 we were selected as a top 10 global innovation, that could be applied to the Sustainable Development Goals, and-- >> So they found you, the UN find you, or did you get nominated? How did that happen? >> We were nominated, and from over 1,000 solutions we were chosen. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. And we were showcased at the Solutions Summit which is hosted at the United Nations. And just based on that experience of meeting people that were doing really cool things in their respective communities, we launched the Global Action Mosaic. Because we wanted to create one place where people that are doing projects in their communities could submit it, and have it showcased. And the goals are not only to crowdsource the SGD's, but to also be a part of the effort to track what's happening. Who's doing what where, make it easy for people to search say, Jeff you decided to get involved in a project with education. You can go onto our Global Action Mosaic, search projects on education in your community or in other parts of the world and then get involved in it. So it's really creating a centralized place where people can get information on the global goals. >> Awesome. So that's pretty much the Global Action Mosaic. It's pretty much focused on the UN global goals versus your core efforts around the Humanitarian Tracker. >> Yes. >> That's great. So we're here at AWS. Have you always been on AWS? Is this something new? How does being on kind of the AWS infrastructure help you do your mission better? >> We are, we've been partners in running AWS since we actually started. >> Since the beginning. >> Yes we have Yusheheedi as one of our partners, development partners, AWS. And because one of the core, one of the most important things to us is privacy and security, we want to make sure that whatever data is being handled and received is stored securely. >> Right, right. >> And that information transmitted, handled is also being done so in a secure way. Like I mentioned, the elasticity of the cloud has helped us scale our mission tremendously. It's affordable, we've been able to us it, we've learned their machine-learning stock to de-identify some of the data that comes in. So we're firm believers that AWS is essential to how we run our operation. >> Because do the individual conflicts kind of grow and shrink over time? Do you see it's really a collection of kind of firing up hotspots and then turning down versus one long, sustained, relatively flat, from kind of a utilization and capacity point of view? >> Yeah, no it definitely, it flares up and you'll have like a year, months, weeks sometimes where it's just focused on one area. But one of the things we focus on, it's not just. So what is the data actually telling us? So say you're focusing on point A. But just down the street in location B there is a dire humanitarian emergency that needs to be addressed. The crowdsourced reports, combined with the data mining and the AI, helps us identify those hotspots. So everybody could be focused here, but there could be an emergency down the street that needs to be addressed as well. It just depends. >> And do you have your own data scientists or do you, do other people take your data and run it through their own processes to try to find some of these insights? >> We have both. >> You have both. >> Yeah. >> So what's been the biggest surprise when you anonymize and aggregate the data around some of these hotspots? Is there a particular pattern that you see over and over? Is there some insight, that now that you've seen so much of it, from kind of the (muffled speaking) that you can share and reflect on? >> I think it' very unique to each project to do. But there is one thing that I strongly support, that I don't see enough of, and that's the sharing of data within the organizations. And so, for example just getting to that culture where sharing your data between organizations is encouraged and actually done. Could help create a, create a pool of knowledge. So, for example we worked with 13 different organizations that were all tackling humanitarian events. The same one, in Syria. And the 13 did not share data and did not talk to each other. And so we found that for example, they were all focused on one area. When just a few miles down, there was a need that wasn't being addressed. But because they don't share information, they had no idea. >> Right. >> It was only when we were able to take a look at it, kind of from the, from an overarching view, looking all their data, we were able to say you know, it would be helpful, it would actually, you could save on resources, and less time, and less effort, and you guys are tackling a small funding pool to begin with. If you shared information and tackled different things, instead of focusing on one area, because you don't know what the other guys doing. >> And were they using crowdsource data, is there source data, or were they just trying to collect their own from the field? >> They were collecting their own. >> So I assume that the depth, and the richness, and the broadness of data is nothing like you're collecting. >> Well you get a different kind of, you get different kind of information when the individuals actually telling you what's happening versus you asking a very direct question like, "Are you healthy? Yes or No?". Whereas you give them the chance, they might tell you that they haven't eaten, and their diabetic and you know, give you other pieces of information. Where they're living, are they refugees? Are they healthy? Are they not healthy? Do they go to school? Do their kids go to school? How many kids they have? Are they a female-run household? All this information could help guide development in the proper way. >> Right, right. All right. So give you the final word, how should people get involved if they want to help? >> You can go to humanitariantracker.org if you want to volunteer with us. And if you're doing a project that is related to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, I would like you to go to globalactionmosaic.org, and map it there, and be part of our community. >> So Hend, thank you for taking a few minutes to share your story, and for all the good work that you're doing out there. >> Thank you Jeff it was a pleasure. >> All right, she's Hend, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS Imagine nonprofit. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin at Coupa Inspire on the ground in Las Vegas, and I'm super super super excited to welcome Suze Orman to theCUBE! Suze, host of the Women and Money podcast. >> Suze: How much money have you lost? >> Lisa: Oprah's friends. Oh, I don't gamble. >> Oh yeah, girlfriend! >> Lisa: No way! >> Suze: I know. >> I do spend too much money on Starbucks every day and I felt I needed to confess that to you. >> Oh God! >> But I know-- >> Really? >> A million dollars in forty years, I'm going to curb my habits, Suze. >> All right, there we go, all right! >> Confessing it to you on camera. >> You have been forgiven (laughs). >> Oh thank you! So love listening to your podcast, watched your show on CNBC for a long time, Women and Money, is something that, obviously as a woman in technology, is really imperative to me and something that really captures my attention, because the pay gap is so obvious, has been for so long, but one of the things that always think when I hear you give advice, whether you're at a tech conference like we are now, or anywhere else, is so much of it is common sense that as humans, we just don't want to hear because it's easy to ignore it. >> It's, here's the thing, is that women in particular have so much on their plate, most of them have their parents they're taking care of, their husband or their spouse, their children, and they're bringing in an income. So they don't have a second to breathe. They can't, like (imitating garbled chaotic noise) all the way around. And the truth is, their husbands don't know anything more about money than they do. Men are financial fakers, I've always said that. So women are really, they want to know more, but they're really overloaded right now. So you got to give it to them in a way that they can digest it when they can. >> One of the things, being in software and tech now for 14 years, you know, when you're in a room, whatever meeting you're in, you think, "I didn't understand that." But you think, "I don't want to be the one to ask a stupid question," so you don't ask, and it's sort of the same thing in the financial situation. Somebody might be explaining something to you, and it's happened to me recently, and I'm like, "I don't understand it." But then I default, "Well, they're the expert." >> Suze: No. >> Lisa: And you're saying, >> "No, trust your guts." >> No, you have got to trust yourself more than you trust others. You know when I was seeing clients, you know what I used to do? First of all, it was mandatory that if you were married, you came in with your spouse. Now it was normally, back then, a male and a female, okay? Now, I'm like, greatest thing is it's a woman and a woman or a man and a man, but that's another thing. And the woman would go to the bathroom, because our meetings were long, and while she was at the bathroom, I would say the most complicated strategy to her husband that made no sense on any level. And I would say, "Do you understand this?" "I do." I go, "So you know, if you do this and then this, this will be the result?" "Got it." "Okay." His wife would come back and sit down, and I would then say to him, "All right, explain to your wife what I just explained to you." And he couldn't do it. So then the conversation was, "Why did you pretend to understand something that there was nothing to understand about?" What is that? So you really have to say, "I don't get it." And here's the thing: money is so easy. Money is not complicated. It really is not. Wall Street wants you to think it's complicated, so that you go ahead and hire a financial advisor, a bank-- You can do this. You can do this. But everybody is so afraid of it, they're they just, you know, and they don't want to deal with it because they're so afraid. >> Or even if we do take that step and start working with a financial planner, there's that, I call it 'conscious incompetence'. "They know what they're doing." >> Suze: They don't. >> "I'm going to let them handle it." >> Suze: They don't, they don't, they don't. I would not work with a financial advisor that wasn't at least 15 years into it. >> Lisa: Fifteen? Okay! >> Fifteen, because the past ten years the market's gone straight up. You could have been a monkey and made money in the stock market the past ten years. You want somebody who went through the recession, who's been through it all. And they've seen the ups, they've the downs, and now they can keep their calm. Don't give me a ten year track record. Give me a twenty year track record. Give me a 15 year. Start with the year that the markets crashed, and how did you do? So if you don't have an advisor that has been through all of that, danger! Number two, if they talk to you about an insurance product, universal life, whole life, variable life insurance, I'm here to tell you, that is-- don't ever ever mix insurance and investments. You want to buy life insurance policy, fine. Buy a term life insurance policy. Do not buy an insurance policy that's also an investment. Crazy out there! Crazy! >> I just heard your podcast on Women and Money, just the other day about mistakes to avoid, so of course I listened to it. I was shocked. You were saying nurses and teachers are too-- >> Suze: Are targeted. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Suze: Nurses. >> And there was this one woman who invested, I think it was like, seventy-five bucks a month, for-- >> Twenty years. >> And only made $4000! >> Yeah, and it's, I had one yesterday that wrote in, that has been doing $200 a month for twenty years, and they have no money. They have like, it's-- Anyway, just, here's the thing. If you don't know what to do, let me tell you what not to do. Do not buy a whole life, universal, or variable life insurance policy. Do not buy a variable annuity within a retirement account. Do not buy loaded mutual funds that have a letter A or B on it. Just those few things alone, great. >> So, getting back to women and money, women and technology, you know, like I mentioned a minute ago, the pay gap. We all know it. How do we, how do women, how do you advise us to to find that inner voice, to find that power to ask for the better job, the promotion, the better opportunities. How do we find that? >> You have to make those that you are dependent on a paycheck for dependent upon you. When I started the Suze Orman Show at CNBC, all right, so 2001, they offered me, it was like, "I'm not doing this show and signing for five years for whatever this little amount of money is." And since I didn't need money, it was like, "I'll do it for free." I did that show the very first year, and I did not make one penny. >> Lisa: Really? >> In one year, it became the number one show on CNBC of all CNBC-produced shows. Now, CNBC needed me. Now, CNBC paid me what I wanted. Not what I needed, what I wanted. And I got what I wanted because I came from a place of power. So women, we have to put ourselves in a position where you're powerful with your own money. And when you're powerful, and you don't need that pay raise, you don't need that job promotion, you want it, but you don't need it, you'll get it because they need you. So when you make somebody dependent upon you, you become valuable to them. And if they don't value you, then get out of there. >> That's great advice, because oftentimes people will think, "Well they can just replace me." Or we think, >> Suze: So then let them. >> "I'm not replaceable." So then, okay >> Suze: Then let them. >> What if that happens? What do I do? >> You have to be always prepared that that can happen. Because that can happen if there's a downsizing, if there's a downturn in the economy. That's why I always say, an eight month emergency fund, don't have any debt, put yourself in a situation that if anything were to happen, you get sick, you're in a car accident, and you can't work, that it's okay. It's okay! When you come from that place, then magic starts to happen. When you come from a place of, "Oh please, when was my paycheck? Is it in another two days? I need it. It's another two days!" So that-- Keep a car forever. You know, I have a car that's now going on eight years old. I keep my cars 10 to 13 years. I don't get a new car just because I can! I don't, what is that about? It's so, live below your means but within your needs. Only purchase needs, not wants, and get as much save pleasure out of saving as you do spending. Those three things alone will absolutely change your life. >> So, we're at a tech conference. Let's talk about tech and how do we, we're bombarded with ads all the time, we're on Instagram, and there's, "Oh, there's that cute dress I wanted." Click! And I don't have any accountability for it because all I did was tap something. I didn't see that transaction going to my bank account. How do you see technology, how do we utilize it for actually getting better control over our own financial freedom and not letting it-- >> I never ever, because I'm on the internet all the time. If an ad comes in, I immediately turn it off. I never click on an ad that has come to me. I only purchase things, and I can purchase anything I want, but I only purchase things that I go after and I look at it. Then I put it in the cart. And I don't buy it. >> Lisa: You think about it. >> And I think about, did I really want it, was it an impulse? Whatever. But you know what I found out, when I put it in the cart, a day later, I get something from them with a discount code. So if I just waited, I'm going to get it for cheaper. And so, I always thought because it's so easy, put it in your cart, and just wait a day or two before you push, yet you won't even remember it's there. >> Right, well it's a little bit of self-control. I think that's just that opening up to, and Oprah's other friend, I know you're friends with Oprah, Brene Brown taught me vulnerability is awesome! It's not weakness! It's the courage to say to your financial planner, "I don't get this." Or, to your point, if this person doesn't have fifteen years experience, and they haven't been through the tumults of the economy, "I'm sorry, I'm sure you're a great person. I need to go somewhere else because this is my money for the rest of my life!" >> You know there's a law that I live by, which is, "It's better to do nothing than something you do not understand." Now I apply it to other things in life, like I'm really into being a boat captain and fishing, but I don't go places in my boat that I don't understand how the waters work, where the ledges are. I don't venture out because I don't want to get in trouble. So it's better to do nothing than something you do not understand, and just do something else that you understand. >> And again, one of the things I love about your advice, Suze, is it's so simple. But I think as a society, we're so governed by technology. It's our alarm clock in the morning, the first thing we do is check email or Instagram, or something on .com, we're listening to podcasts. It's so easy to have a shoppable moment anywhere. Yes, it's probably just as easy-- >> And it's going to be a whole lot easier as time and artificial intelligence and everything takes over, it's going to be really easy. So the question is, "Do you want to have things, or do you want to have money? What do you want?" >> Yeah, because you say, what is it? >> People first-- >> Both: People first, then money, then things. >> Lisa: Tell me about that. >> The reason that I did that, it's a long story as to how that came about, but when I said, "People first," I always meant women. Meant you. Do not put everybody else in front of you. Don't go buying gifts for all your friends and everybody when you have absolutely no money. Put yourself first for once. Next is money. You want more money in your bank account than things that you have in your closet. So make your priorities. Those are your priorities. Put yourself first, then your money, and then if you have those things together, then if you want to buy things, okay. >> I love it. "People first, then money, then things." So you've been doing this for so long, and before we went live I was asking you, "How do you not clunk people's heads together because sometimes it's like, 'What!'" But you're saying these are the same problems that persist over and over because people don't know. >> Well, two things. It shows you that money's not that complicated. That people still ask the same questions over and over again. There aren't all these little gadgets and these little widgets and these things. It's usually Roth 401(k), traditional 401(k)? Roth IRA, 401(k)? Credit card debt first or student loans? Saving, they're the same over and over again. And but each question, to that person, is the most important question in the world to that person. And that one person is important to me. Because if I can save or help one person change their life, that one person can go on and change this whole world. Never know who that one person's going to turn out and be. And so, I mean, if I think back on it, Fred Hasbrook, who is the man who gave me money when I worked at the >> Both: Buttercup Bakery! >> Lisa: Which isn't there anymore. >> And that one man who gave me $2000 with all these other people that took-- He, those actions, to me, created me. And I've changed millions of lives with people, with the information that I've given people. They actually changed their own life. But, so one action can change a whole world >> I love that. >> You never know who that person will be. >> Lisa: You don't. You never know. Well Suze, when are we going to do our next show together? This has been so much fun! >> I don't know, we have to come back here! It seems I'm, have you, where are you out of? >> Palo Alto, California. >> Palo Alto, well we come back there. >> Lisa: All right! All right! >> Suze: We come back there. >> Well good, I'll say I'll look forward to our next show together, Suze. >> You got it, Lise. Thank you, sweetheart, bye bye. >> Been a pleasure, thank you. For Suze Orman, I am Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching theCUBE at Coupa Inspire 19! (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. The signal here is all about automation, robotic process automation, software robots, we're seeing the ascendancy of that market space. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath's Forward conference, big user conference, UiPath Forward Americas, about 1500 people here, Stu. They have conferences all over the world, I think I heard 14,000 people in the last year have attended such shows. They're intimate, there are a lot of partners here, they're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Ana Cinca is here, she's the Vice President of Enabling Technologies, and she's joined by old friend Tom Clancy, who's the Senior Vice President of UiPath Learning, both folks from UiPath, welcome. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Ana, let's start with you. VP of Enabling Technologies. What does that mean, what's that role? >> Well, my role in the organization is to generate a set of non-core products and programs that are creating an ecosystem that is actually contributing actively into accelerating the adoption of the core platform. And that would be through learning, through generating new products like the UiPath Go!, the Marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users and so on. >> Okay, so you started the training program, correct? >> Ana: Yeah. >> How did that get started? What was your kind of mission, how'd you do it? >> Well it started from a very simple need. Back then, about two years ago, we were, a bunch of my team members were a bunch of RPA developers, who were losing their time only delivering training, so, two years ago about 500 trainings, five days per week, per year. That were a lot of training, so we said, we need to automate this, we need to do something about it. And the only thing that could come into our mind was to, we got inspired by the Udemy, by Coursera, by all the right courses out there, like platforms out there, which were very democratic in sharing the knowledge. So we said, how about we actually create a set of online courses that are really, really good, RPA focused, UiPath focused, courses, and put it out there? That's how it all started, we just wanted to get rid of these repetitive trainings, ultimately. >> Alright, so you had to do it for yourselves and then. >> Ana: Absolutely, yeah. >> So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moon shot. He said we are going to train a million people in three years, right? >> Well, Tom, it seems like you've got a challenge in front of you to really scale this business. We've talked with you for years, back in your EMC days, your not just storage but new architectures, this convergent approach to the silos, and then cloud architects, really training kind of next generation of the work force in IT, give us a little bit, what's the same, what's different between what you did back at EMC and what you're doing now here with RPA? >> So the biggest difference between EMC and UiPath is EMC had a technology that a lot of people thought was kind of commodity, right? So, the excitement wasn't there when you started going outside of your partners and customers, right? This technology, there is passion about this throughout the entire globe. This is the next big wave, and so, if you're going to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ana just talked about is the academy, you have to bring value somehow, and that starts with having the right courses. If you don't have the courses built up, then you're starting from zero, right, from scratch. But, the other thing that's even more important, is the passion from the CEO. You know, when I first met with Daniel, it was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and forty-five minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so he started with universities, which that was kind of a no brainer. And then he went to Youth in Action, under-represented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team, so, at UiPath, the team is the company, everybody wants to do this. If you're the leader in India, Japan, China, the US, they're all coming to us saying "We need this program." Not just universities but all the way down to the youths. And then, you need a good academic alliance team. So the team that we're building is going to leverage academy, but we are bringing in some of those EMC academic alliance people, we're bringing in a person from Salesforce.com that was running a big piece of it, starts today. We're bringing in a VMware person, a Cisco person, so we're getting all the best. Those are the best programs in the industry. >> Tom, there's one underlying thing, that I saw, a similarity, is back when you talked about convergence or cloud, there was an underlying fear of "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have the skills, I'm going to be out of a job." Automation's always been that thing "Oh wait, if I automate it, what's that mean for me?" How do you address that? >> Well, first of all, there's a report all that says by 2030, 1.5 billion jobs will be impacted. It doesn't say negative, it just says impacted. So, everybody is going to have to understand that this is coming, and how does it impact me? We're going to put together, as part of this, we'll have an upscaling rescaling, so everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, will be able to leverage the academy, and we'll be tweaking the academy courses, so if it's upscaling rescaling, they will take the courses in a different way, in a different format, than the university students, than the Youth in Action, so we'll target those different audiences, and the other, one other thing is marketing is hugely important, because you can't rely on the training group to get the word out. So, Bobby Patrick and his team, are working hand-in-hand with us to drive the awareness across the globe. >> So Ana, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, and said "Okay, there's a few leaders out there, let's "play with it, let's go download the software "and see how hard it is to do." Turned out, we could only get our hands on UiPath software, it was very easy to get our hands on the software, it was very open. Some of the other guys were like, "Why do you want to use it?" Forget it. But then we built some automations, and it was kind of, you know, it took a little, there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not a developer who did it, so it was relatively low code, or even no code. So, when you started this program and as you scale it, who are you targeting? Is it the hardcore developer, is it the, you know, RPA developer, is it the citizen developer, both? And how do you adjust the training correspondingly? >> Yeah, so, first of all, the way we set up the trainings, were, we wanted to make sure that, exactly like we did with the core platform, that was the first RPA software that had a trial version that was available for everyone, right? We had to do the same thing in learning and we're an academy, so what we said were we're launching courses which are free of charge, online, for everyone to use. But, moreover than that, what we wanted to do, is to, have courses that take someone from a very basic foundation level, of basic programming, and actually guide him or her through a learning curve that will get them to an expert level. So, the way we built the courses, are in such a matter that it is very easy to be followed by anyone, actually. And now, that's the reason why, now we're having not only courses for the RPA developers, the techie guys, or solution architects, or infrastructure engineers, but, moreover than that, we're tackling into the space of non-technical people who are equally very important in the RPA journey. Like business analysts, the RPA project managers, and so on. So we're trying to cover all the personas that are critical in an RPA COE set up. >> So it's interesting, Tom, hearing you say you're recruiting people from Cisco, Vmware, some EMC folks, a lot of the traditional, some would say legacy, enterprise companies, who are constantly in the process of reskilling, so I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about Vmware admin, Cisco certified engineers, Microsoft certifications, they sort of led to full employment for at least some period of time. Do you think RPA skills are going to be similar, in that they are going to be in such demand, if young people start to get trained in RPA they're going to essentially have full employment for life, or do you think it's more fleeting that that? You're thoughts? >> So I've been here for three months now, so I guess that makes me a veteran at UiPath, but robotics is going to be in everybody's job. So one of the things that it took me a while to kind of grasp when I was talking to Daniel the first time, the first meeting I mentioned, is he said that there will be at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, you know, when you had the flip phone before, well actually, when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying everybody's going to have a cell phone, you know, everybody looked like "That's kind of crazy," but then, next thing you know, you have a computer on your phone, and everybody has at least one phone. This is going to be the same way with robots. It's going to be ubiquitous across the entire industry. So, people will grow up understanding what robots are. That's why we're going after the youth, so they understand robots right from the get go. And then, it will integrated into everybody's job across the globe, so it's not fleeting at all, it's actually the complete opposite. >> How do you guys measure success? Obviously, you got to get to a million in three years, that's a lot of training. How else do you measure success? What kind of parameters do you set? Tests you take, how do you measure it? >> Want to take that one up for scaling? >> So, one of the things we did, well Ana, one of the things that Ana did before I got here, was they built certification. Certification is going to continue to get more and more important for us. You know, so, think Microsoft, Cisco, certification, and so forth, and so, we believe we will have the industry standard certification program, period. But one of the things we did, was we built our own certification platform, high stakes certification. So what that does is, we do not have to charge, or charge much, any of the people going through our courses and certification. So, today, because we had to go through a third party, we're charging 850 dollars per test. This quarter, through the end of the year, it's going to be zero, just to bring more people in. And then, going forward, it would be significantly lower than 150. What we want to do, and what we will do, is democratize learning and certification for robots. >> I think this is huge, go on you want to add something? >> Yeah, I really want to add one more thing, because what we're doing together, is actually, through the way we're approaching community, and through the spaces that we have already built so far like the academy, the forum, we're bringing now the UiPath Go! in October, the end of October, the project space, all holistically wrapped up in a new version of the community. What we're trying to get out there is an RPA developer getting trained on the academy, being certified, but then practicing within the UiPath universe. Ultimately, where we want to get to, is to measure success also through the number of community users, of end-users, who are not only certified, but we will be able to see what is their activity status, like reputation, and recognition, within the community itself. And, hence, ultimately, reaching up to a stage, where we will be able to pinpoint to a true UiPath expert elite of people throughout the world. >> I love that it's a community driven measurement. >> Everything goes into building up a holistic and global community. >> Very open-- >> If I could just say one thing on community if you just look at the education and the different audiences, you know, let's say, you know, people that do robotics and they get certified, all the way down to youth, we will have a community, where all these different organizations are talking to each other, and to professionals. So, you might have a ten year old in Bangladesh, that is on the community asking questions, and you might have an engineer in Romania at UiPath answering those questions because they're part of the community. Or, it could be a customer or partner, you know, in Philadelphia, but they're all part of the community, we're bringing all these people together. So, things like STEM, Women in Coding, one person came up to me last night, he was so excited, he said "I represent a lot of the black community when "it comes to education and I really want to get my teams "across the country involved in this." >> Phenomenal, now, the no cost training is available roughly when? >> Yeah, right now. >> It's today? >> Well no cost training has been available-- >> Since the beginning. >> That was a decision that Ana made 18 months ago. If somebody, if a customer wants to have a seminar, or something like that, we have third-party training companies that will go in, and they'll charge, but if you go online to the academy, 100 percent free. And the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100 percent free. >> That's unbelievable, because, you know, I got three kids in college and one of them is he's doing Python, he's doing R, he's doing Tableau and he's texting me, "Hey, these Tableau courses "are really expensive, can you pay for it?" And I'm like well, what's the ROI? And I'm sayin' learn about RPA, because it's going to change the world, you know, visualizations important and all that stuff's important, but that's, I think, a huge investment that you guys are making, and then also, helps me understand how you guys plan on staying ahead. So congratulations on getting this started, Tom, you basically came out of retirement, you know, quasi-retirement so it had to be pretty alluring. Extremely successful career at EMC, so great to have you back in the game. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Thanks so much, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you. >> Right there, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, live, from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back, right after this short break, you're watching UiPathForward Americas, we'll be right back.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld day three, continuing coverage for theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante sporting this fantastic salmon tie, and what you can't see is the matching salmon pants. Dave- >> There ya go. I still have my voice. (laughs) >> The outfit game is on point, Dave. >> Thank you. >> So we've been here, this is our third day, this is a huge event, 25,000 or so people here, lots of great announcements. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Mimi Spier the Vice President of the Internet of Things Business at Vmware, Mimi, it's great to have you! >> Thank you! I'm so happy to be here. >> Thanks for comin' on. >> Yeah, it's great. >> So, three action packed days, lot's of announcements, lots of momentum. You lead a team at VMware that launched the VMware IoT business about a year and a half ago, including, launching the product, the GTM strategy, the partner in marketing strategy. In the last year and a half, talk to us about the evolution of VMware IoT, the business challenges that you're helping customers to solve. >> Absolutely, so, this has been a journey for almost a couple years now, and, VMware saw a need to really start to look at what we'll call the edge or IoT use cases. Our customers started coming to us saying "Wait a minute, this is coming, I know my business units are starting to invest in IoT, I have no control over it, I have no exposure to it, what should I do?" And, we are really committed to being an infrastructure company, we knew that when started this journey, and we said "We really want to focus on infrastructure, but we want to help our customers go to the edge, really start to embrace this new opportunity in the industry, to be able to take advantage of this data." We call it, the data is the gold, how do you actually be able to take advantage of it? So, we're really excited, we just started the journey and now we've really this VMworld is where the momentum is starting to take off. >> How do you look at that opportunity? Because it's complicated, especially for a bunch of IT people, right? And now you're entering this world of operations technology. But how do you sort of look at the landscape of the market? >> I'm really glad you asked that, 'cause that's one of my favorite topics, so. I want our customers to think about, first of all, what are the mission critical objectives of their business? They shouldn't do IoT just to do IoT, they need to do what's right for their business; but I also think it's important that they look beyond that. So, if you look at some of the macro trends happening in the world today, there will need to be 70% more food that's created, and there's only 5% more land that it can be built on. There's going to be 300 million connected cars out on the roads There was a statistic that there will be two thirds of energy is consumed by cities, yet we still have very old ways of doing it, but it's in this very consolidated area; why would we not take advantage of that? So I think industries, whether you're in energy or you're in smart cities or you're in automotive, you have to really think about where is your industry going? And even IT people need to think about this, I think, and I'll explain why in a minute but, how can I actually create an industry and a company that can sustain in this future world, and also contribute to the future of what our world's going to be like. So I think, and the technology, and the way we set this up, and the architecture, is really the foundation to do that. So, that's where VMware comes in. >> Okay. And talk a little bit more about VMware's specific strategy as it relates to IoT. I mean I was at the big Dell announcement last fall. Okay, so you've got Dell sort of with existing relationships actually with a lot of the industrial giants. But now enter VMware, what's your strategy? >> So, first I want to say that Dell and VMware have come together into one big business unit to solve IoT and edge. And the beauty of that is we believe that our customers can really have a more simplistic way of achieving this infrastructure foundation, if we can offer these end-to-end solutions together; so I'll talk about how the Dell piece fits into the VMware strategy. But what VMware's trying to do is drastically simplify the complexity of the infrastructure and the foundation you'll need for IoT. So we want to extend what we're doing in the cloud and the multi-cloud, because we fundamentally believe most of our customers are actually in multiple clouds, private, public, multiple public, and actually be able to extend that down to whatever edge they need as well. Because of the amount of data that will be generated at the edge, there's going to be, I don't know, analysts say 50 to 75% of data will be generated at the edges of our business by 2020. And think about it, all of our applications today are in the cloud, so there must be edge computing that is local to be able to process that data. And there also needs to be, there's this heterogeneous set of devices that will need to be managed, monitored, secure, and collect that data; so this requires, it's complex, so we want to drastically simplify that and that's the overarching part of our strategy. But we also want to allow our customers to do it in a way that's secure, that's scalable, and that's manageable over time, so. >> So does that mean putting some, first of all the Dell partnership is interesting, and Alan Cohen one of our guest analysts this week said "Partnerships used to be like tennis, one-on-one, and now partnerships are like soccer." There's just so many parts of the ecosystem so that's sort of one observation, but. Are you sort of bringing VMware to the edge? Is that? >> We are, so we're bringing VMware to the edge, we announced a new portfolio of solutions called VMware Edge it will take advantage of the ability to do the compute edge which is the processing at the edge, and really extending our hyper-converge technology as a service, like we're doing for VMC on AWS, to the edge; and it includes our device edge, and there's a lot of things that is happening on the device edge, which is like gateways and things, that we want to help provide a more software-defined approach, as well as ensure that those can be managed, monitored, secure, across all the diverse set of devices. Now, you can't do that alone. The ecosystem you mentioned, I've never seen any in my history of my career the amount of collaboration that's going on across the ecosystem, because IoT is so hard; so, you really do need to collaborate. And we are collaborating with the IoT platform providers, the gateway and the thing providers, the hardware providers, the system integrators; it requires that to be successful. But what we want to do with Dell is do it in a way that we offer these end-to-end solutions so that it's just more simple, you can go to one place to consume it, to ensure that it gets deployed, and to actually support that solution, but offering it from a multitude of our partners, typically so. >> So let's dig into to simplicity because we hear that, Mimi, all the time, as you do too. Customers want choice, they want simplicity, right Dave? They want flexibility. >> They want it all! >> They want it all! We all want it all. But how is the VMware edge computing strategy, the technology level, actually facilitating simplicity, in what is inherently a complex world of multiple devices, multiple clouds, et cetera? Talk to us about the technology and the actual enablers of that simple approach they need. >> I'm so glad you asked me that! So, we've been saying very consistently, that we want to offer consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, but we want to give you the choice of your application platform or development platform. We're going to do the exact same thing at the edge. So everything that VMware customers experience in their private cloud, their SDDC solution, private cloud, public cloud, we are now going to offer as a service at the edge same infrastructure, same operational model as the HyperCloud model, but at the edge; with the choice of the application development tools that they would like, because, they might want Greengrass from Amazon, they might want the Azure, they might IoT Watson, whatever they want at the edge we want to be able to support that on our infrastructure, but still maintaining that simplicity of a consistent infrastructure no matter where you choose to run your applications. We want to just eliminate the even thought process, run your applications anywhere, on a consistent infrastructure, with the same management, the same operations, and move 'em around as much as you like. >> So is there an abstraction layer almost that this can enable so that that management of all of these different applications and development platforms can be really done seamlessly? >> Yeah, so Project Dimension we announced a tech preview, and, well we'll be launching it later this year, and it will have a management layer that allows you to move your infrastructure and be able to actually, actually it's a VMware managed solution, so we will do it for you, it's even more simple; but be able to choose where you want to run that appliance as a service or infrastructure, whether it be the public cloud, the private cloud or the data center, and the edge. So that is the new what you call extraction, it's almost a new dimension, no pun intended. >> Hence the name. >> Hence the name, of, across all of your different clouds, or edge. >> So the notes I had on dimension, a hybrid cloud control plane, and the end-to-end VMware stack, on-prem cloud at the edge. And I think I heard Lenovo, VMware, and Dell are the initial sort of platform providers. >> That's right, Lenovo, Dell is the hardware. >> And that, what's the consumption model, is that an as a service consumption model? >> So we'll start with as a service, and what that means is VMware will actually manage your hardware, your infrastructure, and your software, we will do it for you. Obviously with the collaboration of when to do it and if everything, because this could be at the edge running mission critical applications. We want to make sure the OT, it's really an opportunity for OT and IT to collaborate and ensure that it's meeting the OT needs as well. >> So it's bringing a cloud-like consumption model to the edge, which of course is huge for VMware, I think probably 10% of your business today is SaaS-based, and the trend is clear; and the trend is your friend as they say, but, it's not easy to necessarily get there. So that's exciting I think that you're delivering as a service. >> I think we got really lucky. We ended up with this hybrid cloud strategy, it was the right thing to do, it's absolutely where the market's gone, and we're now almost at a multi-cloud strategy. And that puts us at the perfect position because we have set up our customers to be flexible and be able to choose whatever cloud or private they want in a cloud, we are very easily able to extend that to the edge, so it puts us in a very good position. >> Talking about the ecosystem again, I mean IoT it's every industry, every sector, every size of company, and I want you to discuss an ISV piece of this it's a very complex situation. >> I would love to talk with ISVs. >> But there's so many ISVs it makes your eyes bleed when you look at the list of ISVs, hard to figure out, okay who's real, who's not, and who to partner with; how are you guys sorting all that out? >> Okay. So, we are the infrastructure, what is beautiful about that is we are not competing with ISVs at all, so they all want to work with us. And the ISVs in the IoT world consist of not only specific application providers, but also IoT platform providers. So it's the SAPs of the world, it's Microsoft, it's also the Bosch, the GE, everybody that wants to do something with that data and build applications it. Most of those are doing industry-specific things, so what we're going to do is take Project Dimension and we're going to offer appliances as a service for industry-specific use cases, and sometimes they're horizontal like building management, but we're going to pick the best ones that we think have the right solution that can scale to the level our customers need in a secure way, and doing the most rich experience with our data. In fact we have 15 different partners in our zone right now really showing what they can do across six different industries, and that's what we're going to do with them. We're also, with Pulse, so I need to talk a little bit about Pulse because it's my baby, we announced Pulse IoT Center 2.0. And what that is, is it's the ability to manage, monitor, and secure things, or IoT gateways. So, one example of that is surveillance, we are partnering with camera companies that also offer analytic applications for visualization and surveillance, and we offering an end-to-end solution. In fact we announced the Dell Technologies surveillance solution partnering with companies like Access Communications owned by Cannon, Pulse runs on the camera to ensure that that camera is working properly, hasn't been hacked into, can get patched, can get isolated, God forbid something happens; and we're doing the same thing across many of the device and thing providers as well, which really falls into that. >> Let's talk about- Sorry Mimi, let's talk about an actual customer. Where do they start in this conversation? Because as you were saying in the beginning, the world is going IoT, there's this proliferation of devices, companies are moving in this direction because they have no choice. We were talking with a school district yesterday and the proliferation of BYOD, all of the things. So where does the conversation start with a customer about VMware edge? Does it start with the business level leadership who need to be able to get a handle on this, and identify new revenue streams, new business models? Does it start with the technology folks who have to have the infrastructure to support it? What is that sort of, I'm a customer, maybe a hospital or what not, where do I start? >> Great question. So, it starts, it depends is the answer, it can start either way, even if it starts on the infrastructure side. What we always tell IT is that you really need to have a reason to do this. You need to work with your business, you need to prioritize, you need to understand the mission critical objectives of your business, the outcome you're trying to achieve; and then let's work together on a use case, and we can help solve it with your business. So, whether we go through IT and we really educate them on the importance of this digital foundation at the edge, and then we work with one of their businesses, maybe in security and surveillance, or maybe it's with a bank, the ATM group; actually there is a group that runs the ATMs and we're working with that group. It might be the bank of the future retail bank, and they're all different organizations with many different use cases, we'll work with all of them. The nice thing about starting with IT is IT understands the challenge that they're faced with, and they really want to have the impact that they've had on the IT organization now on the OT, OT's very siloed. So, anyway, it starts there, but, with our partners, and the beauty about working with partners like ISVs, it will start on the OT side, and it will start with a use case; and then they'll go to the IT side and say "Hey, what about VMware to solve this?" And the IT will say are you serious? That's a dream. So, it absolutely is both, but it has to have a business outcome. >> Mimi, how about the data model? I mean, we know from talking to IT people they understand data, they've lived data their whole lives. A lot of the operations side of the business is analog today, and it's becoming digital. What's the conversation like around data? >> So, okay, so my whole background is data, I started business intelligence and then analytics, and then big data, now IoT. The purpose of the data, so first of all it depends on the use case, so the one thing we like to educate our anyone we're talking to is that you are going to need deep learning, and you're going to need real-time analytics. And each use case will be unique, and depending on the use case, you will need a slightly different architecture. So we'll help support this foundation based on the data, it's always about the data, or actually even more importantly the insights you're trying to get from the data. Once you know your use case, then you can determine where am I getting this data? Although sometimes you already know. And what's the right analytic process? Am I doing machine learning, am I doing AI, am I doing just predictive analytics, do I want to do something quickly at the edge to determine something in real-time and then send it back to make that process smarter, that's actually what I think will ultimately happen, it will be a decision making loop that goes from the edge to the cloud and back. But that's the data conversation we have, and I could talk all day, just in that topic. (laughs) >> And I mean I know we're tight on time but, how prominent is the discussion around data ownership? I mean, does the factory own the data? Does the device manufacturer own the data? I mean yes and yes? I don't know. >> I mean, there is controversy there, but typically, I know the device manufacturers want to own the data, and often times they have access to that data. Every industry's slightly different, but at the end of the day, the customer should own the data, I mean they should at least have access to that data. And we will always say in our situation the customer, the data is yours. And we will work with the both of those organizations 'cause those will be our constituents to a use case, and we will do what's right for that use case, and hopefully everybody wins. It really does depend. If it's car manufacturer, they have to own the data, because they have to make sure that car's safe and secure, but there might need to be level of access that the consumers get as well, so. >> Mimi, thanks so much for stopping by. I can tell by your energy and your genuine passion for this, we're going to hear a lot more, Dave, about what VMware edge is doing and helping customers embrace the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger was talking about on Monday. Great to have you on the show, Mimi. >> Thank you for having me, have a great day. >> Thank you, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watch theCUBE, continuing coverage of VMworld 2018, this is our third day, stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (bubbly music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE! Covering IMAGINE: A Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington at the AWS IMAGINE education event. First time ever as part of the public sector series. Theresa Carlson kicked it off earlier today. 900 registered people watched this thing grow, like every other Amazon event that we've ever covered. And really, this is all about education. We're excited to be here. Our next guest has been working on this for awhile, He's Lou Pugliese, he's the Senior Innovation Fellow and Managing Director of Technology Innovation at Action Lab, Arizona State. Welcome. >> Thanks for letting me interview here. >> Absolutely. So just before we get started, kind of general impressions of this event? >> You know, it's amazing. I was just saying just a few minutes ago that you go to a lot of conferences, and you know, you go to so many conferences that the goal is to sort of try to meet 80% of the time new people. And you don't ever do that. Here you do, you know. And so there's a lot of people here that I've known for years, that I haven't seen. And there are a lot of new faces here too, so it's great. >> Right. It's really interesting, we cover a lot of conferences and kind of the lifecycle as they grow. But when they're small like this and just getting started you know, it's so intimate. There's so much hall conversations going on, there's so much just genuine sharing of best practices 'cause everybody's still trying to figure it out. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what you're doing here now. >> Absolutely. So, one of the things you're involved in, that caught my eye doing the research for this, is working on research based approach to really understand what works for the student learning experience. So there's all kinds of conversations we can have about higher education. Does it work, does it not work, is it broken? There's a lot of interesting things. Here, you know, it's been really interesting to focus on community colleges specifically and this kind of direct path between skills and getting a job. And it almost feels like the old apprenticeship model, kind of back in the day. You're at a big four year institution and really exploring. What is changing in the education interaction between kids and teachers, kids and curriculum, and how that stuff gets communicated and what's effective? 'Cause it's a new world, it's not the old world. >> No, it is. And you know, at ASU, what's interesting is is that there's a significant digital presence. You know, 35 thousand students very historically, back to 2009. So with that comes a significant amount of footsteps, digital footsteps, that students have taken. And so now you have the ability to be able to analyze that at a much higher level. And so now what we can do, and the part of what we're doing at the Action Lab is: looking specifically at the efficacy of these digital programs, finding out what course design elements do work, and what needs to be changed. And that gives us the ability to sort of feed that information back into the instructional design process, and continue to iterate on that improvement. The unique thing about the lab is that, it's a persistent lab. Most universities are sort of stop and start research initiatives, and they learn a lot and they publish a lot of papers. We've been around for three years, and we'll be around for 10 more, and it's a persistent examination of what we're doing at a digital environment, and we're taking it one step further, we're trying to understand how students behave in a digital environment. We know a lot about how students behave in a classroom or traditional learning setting, but we don't know how they how they learn in a digital environment. >> Right. I love, you said digital footprints, not digital exhaust, (both laugh) and it kind of reminds me of kind of these older you know, long term longitudinal studies, because it's still pretty early days in trying to figure out how these educational tools and mobile and stuff are impacting the way these kids learn. But we know they spend so much time on them, that is their interface to the world. It's almost like your remote control to life is actually this little thing that you carry around in your hand. So I'm curious, what are some of the things you've discovered that are working? What are some of the things that maybe that were kind of surprising that didn't work? What's some of the early findings that's coming out of that research? >> Sure, so in the early studies, we looked specifically at how demographic populations succeed or don't succeed in an environment. And what we found out is: there are certain demographics of students that flourish in an online environment, and consistently perform well. There are some that don't. The second thing we learned specifically is: what types of design features within a course, like the interaction within students, or exposing learning objectives, or getting students to really understand what rubrics of measurement, how content is being used and paced throughout our curriculum. A lot of really detailed information that faculty need to reorient and redesign their instruction, and so we can see a direct predictive value of improvement based on those changes. >> Right. So are you getting stuff out now that's impacting curriculum development? Or are you still kind of pulling the data together and there has not been enough time to really implement it? >> We are doing that, absolutely. One of the elements that we're introducing into the research now is: this notion of, it sounds like a fancy term, non cognitive or social and emotional learning; things that are a predispositions of learning about a student in their, you know, sort of soft skills world. Grit, determination, goal orientation, a variety of different soft skills, and their disposition, and how that impacts how they learn, and how they succeed in a classroom. >> And how important is that? I would imagine it's got to be super important. >> It's a field that is just still early in its science, but we're learning a lot. Not necessarily just about how students will succeed in a course environment, but those types of social/emotional learning skills that are required for them to be successful in a workplace environment. >> Right, right. And then the other factors that were discussed earlier in the key note are some of the, you know, what's happening at home? You know, there's all these other factors that are in a student's life that aren't directly tied to their education, but it can have a significant impact on their ability to learn, either temporarily, or-- >> They're all predispositions, yeah absolutely, yeah. >> Yeah, or full time. That's great. So, as you look forward now, and I think it came up too in the keynote, there's no shortage of data (chuckles) in this education environment. It's really been the time to grab it, analyze it, and put it to work. So, how are, you know, your engagement with Amazon kind of helping you to move your objectives forward? >> Well the Amazon engagement allows us to sort of off load all of the technological constraints, and gives us ultimate possibilities of not necessarily focusing on the tough stuff; the hardware, the integration, the specific tool sets that are required to extract data and analyze data, and focusing specifically on the research. So ultimately, it allows us to redirect our focus in what's really important in our world, because it's not necessarily about the technology, it's how the technology can point and draw a direct line between what the data says and how we create an intervention with students. >> Right. So I'm just curious to get your perspective. You said before we turned on the cameras, you've been involved in this field for a long time, trying to figure out how people can learn, how they can learn better, more effectively. Are there some big, kind of macro themes, that maybe people don't think about enough, that you've seen repeated time and time again, that people should be thinking about when they think about effective education and how to get kids to actually learn what we're trying to teach them? >> Sure, so a couple things. I mean, what we're focused on is not necessarily what we call big data, what we typically know big data as, it's really more about small data, which shows us causality. So for instance, one of the things that we are learning is that peer-to-peer engagement is really, really important in many courses in engaging in asynchronous and synchronous organizations within the course to learn from peers. Also avenues specifically to faculty, so faculty can actually look at the map of the entire classroom and understand who's achieving and focus just only on those people. >> Interesting. Well, good stuff, and, I'm sure, as you get more and more of the digital footprints, the insights will only increase by leaps and bounds. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, Lou, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time >> Thank you. and we'll look forward to catching up next year and getting some new information. >> Thanks. >> He's Lou, I'm Jeff, thanks for watchin', we're in Seattle, signing off from AWS IMAGINE educate, See ya next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are here, day one of the PTC LiveWorx conference, IOT, blockchain, AI, all coming together in a confluence of innovation. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Wolfgang Ulaga is here. He's the AT&T Professor of Services Leadership and Co-Executive Director, the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE, thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So services leadership, what should we know? Where do we start this conversation around services leadership? >> The Center of Services Leadership is a center that has been created 30 years ago around a simple idea, and that is putting services front and center of everything a company does. So this is all about service science, service business, service operations, people and culture. When you touch service, you immediately see that you have to be 360 in your approach. You have to look at all the aspects. You have to look at structures and people. You have to look at operations with a service-centric mindset. >> I mean, it sounds so obvious. Anytime we experience, as consumers, great service, we maybe fall in love with a company, we're loyal, we tell everybody. But so often, services fall down. I mean, it seems obvious. Why is it just not implemented in so many organizations? >> One of the problems is that companies tend to look at services as an afterthought. Think about the word after-sales service, which in my mind is already very telling about how it's from a cultural perspective perceived. It's something that you do after the sale has been done. That's why oftentimes, there is the risk that it falls back, it slips from the priority list. You do it once, you have done all the other things. But in reality, businesses are there to serve customers. Service should be the center of what the company does, not at the periphery. >> Or even an embedded component of what the company, I mean, is Amazon a good example of a company that has embraced that? Or is Netflix maybe even a better example? I don't even know what the service department looks like at Netflix, it's just there. Is that how we should envision modern-day service? >> It excites me at the conference at LiveWorx. We see so many companies talking about technology and changes. And you really can sense and see how all of them are thinking about how can they actually grow the business from historic activities into new data-enabled activities. But the interesting challenge for many firms is that this is going to be also journey of learning how to serve its customers through data analytics. So data-enabled services is going to be a huge issue in the next coming years. >> Wolfgang, you're speaking here at the conference. I believe you also wrote a book about advanced services. For those that aren't familiar with the term, maybe walk us through a little bit about what that is. >> Earlier this morning, I presented the book "Service Strategy in Action", which is a very managerial book that we wrote over 10 years of experience of doing studies, working with companies on this journey from a product-centric company that wants to go into a service and solution-centric world and business. Today we see many of the companies picking up the pace, going into that direction, and I would say that with data analytics, this is going to be an even more important phenomenon for the next years to come. >> A lot of companies struggle with service as well because they don't see it as a scale component of their business. It's harder to scale services than it is to scale software, for example. In thinking about embedding services into your core business, how do you deal as an organization with the scale problem? Is it a false problem? How are organizations dealing with that? >> No, you're absolutely right. Many companies know and learn when they are small and they control operations. It's easy to actually have your eyes on service excellence. Once you scale up, you run into this issue of how do you maintain service quality. How do you make sure that each and every time to replicate into different regions, into different territories, into different operations, that you keep that quality up and running. One way to do it is to create a service culture among the people because one way to control that quality level is to push responsibility as low as possible down so that each and every frontline employee knows what he or she has to do, can take action if something goes wrong, and can maintain that service quality at the level we want. That's where sometimes you see challenges and issues popping up. >> What role do you see machines playing? You're seeing a lot of things like Chatbox or voice response. What role will machines play in the services of the future? >> I think it's a fascinating movement that is now put in place where, machine, artificial intelligence, is there to actually enhance value being created for customers. Sometimes you hear this as a threat or as a danger, but I would rather see it as an opportunity to raise levels of service qualities, have this symbiosis between human and machine to actually provide better, outstanding service for customers. >> Could you share some examples of successes there or things that you've studied or researched? >> Yeah so for example, if I take a consumer marketing example. In Europe I worked with a company, which is Nespresso. They do this coffee machines and capsules. In their boutique, they don't call it a store, by the way, they call it a boutique, they have injected a lot of new technology into helping customers to have different touchpoints, get served the way they want to, at the time they want to, how they want to. So this multi-channel, multi-experience for customers, is actually a growing activity. When you look at it from a consumer perspective, I get more opportunities, I get more choices. I can pick and choose when, where, and how I want to be served. A similar example is Procter & Gamble here in the United States. P&G has recently rolled out a new service business, taking a brand, Tide, and creating Tide Dry Cleaners here in America. It's a fascinating example. They use technology like apps on a smartphone to give the customer a much better experience. I think there's many of these example we'll see in the future. >> When we talk about IOT, one of the things that caught our ear in the keynote this morning is, it's going to take 20 to 25 partners putting together this solution. Not only is there integration of software, but one of the big challenges there, I think, is how do you set up services and transform services to be able to live in this multi-vendor environment. I wonder if you could comment on that? >> I agree, I agree. What I see, which makes me as a business professor very excited and that is, of course there's technology, of course there's hardware and software. But one of the biggest challenges will be the business challenges. How do you implement all of these offers? How do you roll it out? One of my talk topics today were how do you commercialize it? How do you actually make money with it? How do you get paid for it? One of my research areas is what they call free to fee. How do you get the r out of the free, and make customers pay for value you create? What I find, especially in the digital services space, there's so much value being created, but not every company is able to capture the value. Getting adequately paid for the value, this is a huge challenge. In sum, I would say it's really an issue about business challenges as much as it's a technological issue or technical challenges. >> I think about IOT, so many of the different transfer protocols, it's open source, that free to fee. Any advice you can give to people out there as to how they capture that value and capture revenue? >> I think you have to be super careful where the commoditization will kick in. If over time, something that was a differentiator yesterday, with the open sources and everything, will become not so much differentiator tomorrow. So where is your competitive edge? How do you stand out from competition? I know these are very classic questions, but you know what? In the IOT and digital space, they resurface, they come back, and having the right answers on these questions will make the difference between you and competition. >> Last question, we got to go. The trend toward self-service, is that a good thing, a bad thing, a depends thing? >> I think everything that allows customers to have choices. Customers today want to be in charge. They want to be in control. They, in fact, want all of it. They want to have service when they want it, but they want to have a non-self-service option if they feel like. So I think the trick is to know, how can I be nimble and give customers all of these choices so that they are in charge and pick and choose. >> Wolfgang, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Appreciate it, >> It's a pleasure having you, >> thank you very much, >> good to see you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're here at the PTC LiveWorx show, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)