>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Greetings from the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. It's theCUBE Live Day two of our coverage of Palo Alto Networks, ignite 22. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, what can I say? This has been a great couple of days. The amount of content we have created and shared with our viewers on theCUBE is second to none. >> Well, the cloud has completely changed the way that people think about security. >> Yeah. You know at first it was like, oh, the cloud, how can that be secure? And they realized, wow actually cloud is pretty secure if we do it right. And so shared responsibility model and partnerships are critical. >> Partnerships are critical, especially as more and more organizations are multicloud by default. Right? These days we're going to be bring Google into the conversation. Josh Haslet joins us. Strategic Partnership Manager at Google. Welcome. Great to have you Josh. >> Hi Lisa, thanks for having me here. >> So you are a secret squirrel from Palo Alto Networks. Talk to me a little bit about your background and about your role at Google in terms of partnership management. >> Sure, I feel like we need to add that to my title. [Lisa] You should, secret squirrel. >> Great. Yeah, so as a matter of fact, I've been at Google for two and a half years. Prior to that, I was at Palo Alto Networks. I was managing the business development relationship with Google, and I was kind of at the inception of when the cash came in and, and decided that we needed to think about how to do security in a new way from a platform standpoint, right? And so it was exciting because when I started with the partnership, we were focusing on still securing you know, workloads in the cloud with next generation firewall. And then as we went through acquisitions the Palo Alto added it expanded the capabilities of what we could do from cloud security. And so it was very exciting, you know, to, to make sure that we could onboard with Google Cloud, take a look at how not only Palo Alto was enhancing their solutions as they built those and delivered those from Google Cloud. But then how did we help customers adopt cloud in a more easy fashion by making things, you know more tightly integrated? And so that's really been a lot of what I've been involved in, which has been exciting to see the growth of both organizations as we see customers shifting to cloud transformation. And then how do they deploy these new methodologies and tools from a security perspective to embrace this new way of working and this new way of, you know creating applications and doing digital transformation. >> Important, since work is no longer a place, it's an activity. Organizations have have to be able to cater to the distributed workforce. Of course, the, the, the workforce has to be able to access everything that they need to, but it has to be done in a secure way regardless of what kind of company you are. >> Yeah, you're right, Lisa. It's interesting. I mean, the pandemic has really changed and accelerated that transformation. I think, you know really remote working has started previous to that. And I think Nikesh called that out in the keynote too right? He, he really said that this has been ongoing for a while, but I think, you know organizations had to figure out how to scale and that was something that they weren't as prepared for. And a lot of the technology that was deployed for VPN connectivity or supporting remote work that was fixed hardware. And so cloud deployment and cloud architecture specifically with Prisma access really enabled this transformation to happen in a much faster, you know, manner. And where we've come together is how do we make sure that customers, no matter what device, what user what application you're accessing. As we take a look at ZTNA, Zero Trust Network Access 2.0, how can we come together to partner to make sure the customers have that wide range of coverage and capability? >> How, how do you how would you describe Josh Google's partner strategy generally and specifically, you know, in the world of cyber and what makes it unique and different? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. I think, you know, from Google Cloud perspective we heard TK mention this in the keynote with Nikesh. You know, we focus on on building a secure platform first and foremost, right? We want to be a trusted cloud for customers to deploy on. And so, you know, we find that as customers do one of two things, they're looking at, you know, reducing cost as they move to cloud and consolidate workloads or as they embrace innovation and look at, you know leveraging things like BigQuery for analytics and you know machine learning for the way that they want to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. They have to think about how do they secure in a new way. And so, not only do we work on how do we secure our own platform, we work with trusted partners to make sure that customers have you mentioned it earlier, Dave the shared security model, right? How do they take a look at their applications and their workloads and this new way of working as they go to CI/CD pipelines, they start thinking about DevSecOps. How do they integrate tooling that is frictionless and seamless for their, for their teams to deploy but allows them to quickly embrace that cloud transformation journey. And so, yes, partners are critical to that. The other thing is, you know we find that, you mentioned earlier, Lisa that customers are multicloud, right? That's kind of the the new normal as we look at enterprises today. And so Google Cloud's going to do a great job at securing our platform, but we need partners that can help customers deploy policy that embraces not only the things that they put in Google Cloud but as they're in their transformation journey. How that embraces the estates that are in data centers the things that are still on-prem. And really this is about making sure that the applications no matter where they are, the databases no matter where they are, and the users no matter where they are are all secure in that new framework of deploying and embracing innovation on public cloud. >> One of the things that almost everybody from Palo Alto Networks talks about is their partnering strategy their acquisition strategy integrations. And I was doing some research. There's over 50 joint integrations that Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks. Have you talked about Zero Trust Network Access 2.0 that was announced yesterday. >> Correct. >> Give us a flavor of what that is and what does it deliver that 1.0 did not? >> Well, great. And what I'd like to do is touch a little bit on those 50 integrations because it's been, you know, a a building rolling thunder, shall we say as far as how have we taken a look at customers embracing the cloud. The first thing was we took a look at at how do we make sure that Palo Alto solutions are easier for customers to deploy and to orchestrate in Google Cloud making their journey to embracing cloud seamless and easy. The second thing was how could we make that deployment and the infrastructure even more easy to adopt by doing first party integrations? So earlier this year we announced cloud IDS intrusion detection system where we actually have first party directly in our console of customers being able to simply select, they want to turn on inspection of the traffic that's running on Google Cloud and it leverages the threat detection capability from Palo Alto Networks. So we've gone from third party integration alone to first party integration. And that really takes us to, you know, the direction of what we're seeing customers need to embrace now which is, this is your Zero Trusts strategy and Zero Trust 2.0 helps customers do a number of things. The first is, you know, we don't want to just verify a user and their access into the environment once. It needs to be continuous inspection, right? Cause their state could change. I think, you know, the, the teams we're talking about some really good ways of addressing, you know for instance, TSA checkpoints, right? And how does that experience look? We need to make sure that we're constantly evaluating that user's access into the environment and then we need to make sure that the content that's being accessed or, you know, loaded into the environment is inspected. So we need continuous content inspection. And that's where our partnership really comes together very well, is not only can we take care of any app any device, any user, and especially as we take a look at you know, embracing contractor like use cases for instance where we have managed devices and unmanaged devices we bring together beyond Corp and Prisma access to take a look at how can we make sure any device, any user any application is secure throughout. And then we've got content inspection of how that ZTNA 2.0 experience looks like. >> Josh, that threat data that you just talked about. >> Yeah. >> Who has access to that? Is it available to any partner, any customer, how... it seems like there's gold in them, NAR hills, so. >> There is. But, this could be gold going both ways. So how, how do you adjudicate and, how do you make sure that first of all that that data's accessible for, for good and not in how do you protect it against, you know, wrong use? >> Well, this is one of the great things about partnering with Palo Alto because technically the the threat intelligence is coming from their ingestion of malware, known threats, and unknown threats right into their technology. Wildfire, for instance, is a tremendous example of this where unit 42 does, you know, analysis on unknown threats based upon what Nikesh said on stage. They've taken their I think he said 27 days to identification and remediation down to less than a minute, right? So they've been able to take the intelligence of what they ingest from all of their existing customers the unknown vulnerabilities that are identified quickly assessing what those look like, and then pushing out information to the rest of their customers so that they can remediate and protect against those threats. So we get this shared intelligence from the way that Palo Alto leverages that capability and we've brought that natively into Google Cloud with cloud intrusion detection. >> So, okay, so I'm, I'm I dunno why I have high frequency trading in my mind cause it used to be, you know, like the norm was, oh it's going to take a year to identify an intrusion. And, and, and now it's down to, you know take was down to 27 days. Now it's down to a minute. Now it's not. That's best practice. And I'm, again, I'm thinking high frequency trading how do I beat the speed of light? And that's kind of where we're headed, right? >> Right. >> And so that's why he said one minute's not enough. We have to keep going. >> That's right. >> So guys got your best people working on that? >> Well, as a matter of fact, so Palo Alto Networks, you know when we take a look at what Nikesh said from stage, he talked about using machine learning and AI to get ahead of what we what they look at as far as predictability not only about behaviors in the environment so things that are not necessarily known threats but things that aren't behaving properly in the environment. And you can start to detect based on that. The second piece of it then is a lot of that technology is built on Google Cloud. So we're leveraging, their leveraging the capabilities that come together with you know, aggregation of, of logs the file stitching across the entire environment from the endpoint through to cloud operations the things that they detect for network content inspection putting all those files together to understand, you know where has the threat vector entered how has it gone lateral inside the environment? And then how do you make sure that you remediate all of those points of intrusion. And so yeah it's been exciting to see how our product teams have worked together to continue to advance the capabilities for speed for customers. >> And secure speed is critical. We had the opportunity this morning to speak with Lee Claridge, the chief product officer, and you know one of the things that I had heard about Lee is that despite all of the challenges in cybersecurity and the amorphous expansion of the threat network and the sophistication of the adversaries he's really optimistic about what it's going to enable organizations to do. I see you smiling. Do you share that optimism? >> I, I do. I think, you know, when you bring, when you bring leaders together to tackle big problems, I think, you know we've got the right teams working on the right things and we understand the problems that the customers are facing. And so, you know, from a a Google cloud perspective we understand that partnering with Palo Alto Networks helps to make sure that that optimism continues. You know, we work on continuous innovation when it comes to Google Cloud security framework, but then partnering with Palo Alto brings additional capabilities to the table. >> Vision for the, for the partnership. Where do you want to see it go? What's... we're two to five years down the road, what's it look like? Maybe two to three years. Let's go. >> Well, it was interesting. I, I think neer was the one that mentioned on stage about, you know how AI is going to start replacing us in our main jobs, right? I I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think as we look forward, we see that our teams are going to continue to help with automation remediation and we're going to have the humans working on things that are more interesting and important. And so that's an exciting place to go because today the reality is that we are understaffed in cybersecurity across the industry and we just can't hire enough people to make sure that we can detect, remediate and secure, you know every user endpoint and environment out there. So it's exciting to see that we've got a capability to move in a direction to where we can make sure that we get ahead of the threat actors. >> Yeah. So he said within five years your SOC will be AI based and and basically he elaborated saying there's a lot of stuff that you're doing today that you're not going to be doing tomorrow. >> That's true. >> And that's going to continue to be a moving target I would think Google is probably ahead in that game and ahead of most, right? I mean, you guys were there early. I mean, I remember when Hadoop was all the rage like just at the beginning you guys like, yeah, you know Google's like, no, no, no, we're not doing Hadoop anymore. That's like old news. So you tended to be, I don't know, at least five maybe seven years ahead of the industry. So I imagine you using a lot of those AI techniques in your own business today. >> Absolutely. I mean, I think you see it in our consumer products, and you certainly see it in the the capabilities we make available to enterprise as far as how they can innovate on our cloud. And we want to make sure that we continue to provide those capabilities, you know not only for the tools that we build but the tools that customers use. >> What's the, as we kind of get towards the end of our conversation here, we we talk about zero trust as, as a journey, as an approach. It's not a product, it's not a tool. What is the, who's involved in the zero trust journey from the customers perspective? Is this solely with the CSO, CSO, CIOs or is this at the CEO level going, we have to be a data company but we have to be a secure data company 24/7. >> It's interesting as you've seen malware, phishing, ransomware attacks. >> Yeah. >> This is not only just a CSO CIO conversation it's a board level conversation. And so, you know the way to address this new way of working where we have very distributed environments where you can't create a perimeter anymore. You need to strategize with zero trust. And so continuously, when we're talking to customers we're hearing that as a main initiative, you know from the CIO's office and from the board level. >> Got it, last question. The upgrade path for existing customers from 1., ZTNA 1.0 to 2.0. How simple is that? >> It's easy. You know, when we take- >> Is there an easy button? >> So here's the great thing [Dave] If you're feeling lucky. [Lisa] Yeah. (group laughs) >> Well, Palo Alto, right? Billing prisma access has really taken what was traditional security that was an on-prem or a data center deployed strategy to cloud-based. And so we've worked with customers like Princeton University who had to quickly transition from in-person learning to distance learning find a way to ramp their staff their faculty and their students. And we were able to, you know Palo Alto deploy it on Google Cloud's, you know network that solution in very quick order and had those, you know, everybody back up and running. So deployment and upgrade path is, is simple when you look at cloud deployed architectures to address zero trusts network. >> That's awesome. Some of those, some of those use cases that came out of the pandemic were mind blowing but also really set the table for other organizations to go, yes, this can be done. And it doesn't have to take forever because frankly where security is concerned, we don't have time. >> That's right. And it's so much faster than traditional architectures where you had to procure hardware. >> Yeah. >> Deploy it, configure it, and then, you know push agents out to all the endpoints and and get your users provisioned. In this case, we're talking about cloud delivered, right? So I've seen, you know, with Palo Alto deploying for customers that run on Google Cloud they've deployed tens of thousands of users in a very short order. You know, we're talking It was, it's not months anymore. It's not weeks anymore. It's days >> Has to be days. Josh, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks in in addition to secret squirrel. I feel like when you were describing your background that you're like the love child of Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud, you might put that on your cartoon. >> That is a huge compliment. I really appreciate that, Lisa, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much, Josh. [Josh] It's been a pleasure being here with you. [Dave] Thank you >> Oh, likewise. For Josh Haslett and Dave, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live coverage for emerging and enterprise tech. (upbeat outro music)

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey guys and girls. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage at Palo Alto Ignite '22. We're live at the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of our coverage. We've been talking with execs from Palo Alto, Partners, but one of our most exciting things is talking with Founders day. We get to do that next. >> The thing is, it's like I wrote this weekend in my breaking analysis. Understanding the problem in cybersecurity is really easy, but figuring out how to fix it ain't so much. >> It definitely isn't. >> So I'm excited to have Nir here. >> Very excited. Nir Zuk joins us, the founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks. Welcome, Nir. Great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> So Palo Alto Networks, you founded it back in 2005. It's hard to believe that's been 18 years, almost. You did something different, which I want to get into. But tell us, what was it back then? Why did you found this company? >> I thought the world needed another cybersecurity company. I thought it's because there were so many cybersecurity vendors in the world, and just didn't make any sense. This industry has evolved in a very weird way, where every time there was a new challenge, rather than existing vendors dealing with a challenge, you had new vendors dealing with it, and I thought I could put a stop to it, and I think I did. >> You did something differently back in 2005, looking at where you are now, the leader, what was different in your mind back then? >> Yeah. When you found a new company, you have really two good options. There's also a bad option, but we'll skip that. You can either disrupt an existing market, or you can create a new market. So first, I decided to disrupt an existing market, go into an existing market first, network security, then cyber security, and change it. Change the way it works. And like I said, the challenges that every problem had a new vendor, and nobody just stepped back and said, "I think I can solve it with the platform." Meaning, I think I can spend some time not solving a specific problem, but building a platform that then can be used to solve many different problems. And that's what I've done, and that's what Palo Alto Networks has done, and that's where we are today. >> So you look back, you call it now, I think you call it a next gen firewall, but nothing in 2005, can it be next gen? Do you know the Silicon Valley Show? Do you know the show Silicon Valley? >> Oh! Yeah. >> Yeah, of course. >> You got to have a box. But it was a different kind of box- >> Actually. >> Explain that. >> Actually, it's exactly the same thing. You got to have a box. So I actually wanted to call it a necessary evil. Marketing wouldn't go for that. >> No. >> And the reason I wanted to call it a necessary evil, because one of the things that we've done in order to platform our cyber security, again, first network security now, also cloud security, and security operations, is to turn it into a SaaS delivered industry. Today every cyber security professional knows that, when they buy cyber security, they buy usually a SaaS delivered service. Back then, people thought I was crazy to think that customers are going to send their data to their vendor in order to process, and they wanted everything on premise and so on, but I said, "No, customers are going to send information to us for processing, because we have much more processing power than they have." And we needed something in the infrastructure to send us the information. So that's why I wanted to call it the necessary evil. We ended up calling it next generation firewall, which was probably a better term. >> Well, even Veritas. Remember Veritas? They had the no hardware agenda. Even they have a box. So it is like you say, you got to have it. >> It's necessary. >> Okay. You did this, you started this on your own cloud, kind of like Salesforce, ServiceNow. >> Correct. >> Similar now- >> Build your own data centers. >> Build your own data center. Okay, I call it a cloud, but no. >> No, it's the same. There's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. >> According to Larry Ellison, he was actually probably right about that. But over time, you've had this closer partnership with the public clouds. >> Correct. >> What does that bring you and your customers, and how hard was that to navigate? >> It wasn't that hard for us, because we didn't have that many services. Usually it's harder. Of course, we didn't do a lift and shift, which is their own thing to do with the cloud. We rebuild things for the cloud, and the benefits, of course, are time to market, scale, agility, and in some cases also, cost. >> Yeah, some cases. >> In some cases. >> So you have a sort of a hybrid model today. You still run your own data centers, do you not? >> Very few. >> Really? >> There are very, very few things that we have to do on hardware, like simulating malware and things that cannot be done in a virtual machine, which is pretty much the only option you have in the cloud. They provide bare metal, but doesn't serve our needs. I think that we don't view cloud, and your viewers should not be viewing cloud, as a place where they're going to save money. It's a place where they're going to make money. >> I like that. >> You make much more money, because you're more agile. >> And that's why this conversation is all about, your cost of goods sold they're going to be so high, you're going to have to come back to your own data centers. That's not on your mind right now. What's on your mind is advancing the unit, right? >> Look, my own data center would limit me in scale, would limit my agility. If you want to build something new, you don't have all the PaaS services, the platform as a service, services like database, and AI, and so on. I have to build them myself. It takes time. So yeah, it's going to be cheaper, but I'm not going to be delivering the same thing. So my revenues will be much lower. >> Less top line. What can humans do better than machines? You were talking about your keynote... I'm just going to chat a little bit. You were talking about your keynote. Basically, if you guys didn't see the keynote, that AI is going to run every soc within five years, that was a great prediction that you made. >> Correct. >> And they're going to do things that you can't do today, and then in the future, they're going to do things that you can't... Better than you can do. >> And you just have to be comfortable with that. >> So what do you think humans can do today and in the future better than machines? >> Look, humans can always do better than machines. The human mind can do things that machines cannot do. We are conscious, I don't think machines will be conscious. And you can do things... My point was not that machines can do things that humans cannot do. They can just do it better. The things that humans do today, machines can do better, once machines do that, humans will be free to do things that they don't do today, that machines cannot do. >> Like what? >> Like finding the most difficult, most covert attacks, dealing with the most difficult incidents, things that machines just can't do. Just that today, humans are consumed by finding attacks that machines can find, by dealing with incidents that machines can deal with. It's a waste of time. We leave it to the machines and go and focus on the most difficult problems, and then have the machines learn from you, so that next time or a hundred or a thousand times from now, they can do it themselves, and you focus on the even more difficult. >> Yeah, just like after 9/11, they said that we lack the creativity. That's what humans have, that machines don't, at least today. >> Machines don't. Yeah, look, every airplane has two pilots, even though airplanes have been flying themselves for 30 years now, why do you have two pilots, to do the things that machines cannot do? Like land on the Hudson, right? You always need humans to do the things that machines cannot do. But to leave the things that machines can do to the machines, they'll do it better. >> And autonomous vehicles need breaks. (indistinct) >> In your customer conversations, are customers really grappling with that, are they going, "Yeah, you're right?" >> It depends. It's hard for customers to let go of old habits. First, the habit of buying a hundred different solutions from a hundred different vendors, and you know what? Why would I trust one vendor to do everything, put all my eggs in the same basket? They have all kind of slogans as to why not to do that, even though it's been proven again and again that, doing everything in one system with one brain, versus a hundred systems with a hundred brains, work much better. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we always have the same issue that we've had, I think, since the industrial revolution, of what machines are going to take away my job. No, they're just going to make your job better. So I think that some of our customers are also grappling with that, like, "What do I do if the machines take over?" And of course, like we've said, the machines aren't taking over. They're going to do the benign work, you're going to do the interesting work. You should embrace it. >> When I think about your history as a technology pro, from Check Point, a couple of startups, one of the things that always frustrated you, is when when a larger company bought you out, you ended up getting sucked into the bureaucratic vortex. How do you avoid that at Palo Alto Networks? >> So first, you mean when we acquire company? >> Yes. >> The first thing is that, when we acquire companies, we always acquire for integration. Meaning, we don't just buy something and then leave it on the side, and try to sell it here and there. We integrate it into the core of our products. So that's very important, so that the technology lives, thrives and continues to grow as part of our bigger platform. And I think that the second thing that is very important, from past experience what we've learned, is to put the people that we acquire in key positions. Meaning, you don't buy a company and then put the leader of that company five levels below the CEO. You always put them in very senior positions. Almost always, we have the leaders of the companies that we acquire, be two levels below the CEO, so very senior in the company, so they can influence and make changes. >> So two questions related to that. One is, as you grow your team, can you be both integrated? And second part of the question, can you be both integrated and best of breed? Second part of the question is, do you even have to be? >> So I'll answer it in the third way, which is, I don't think you can be best of breed without being integrated in cybersecurity. And the reason is, again, this split brain that I've mentioned twice. When you have different products do a part of cybersecurity and they don't talk to each other, and they don't share a single brain, you always compromise. You start looking for things the wrong way. I can be a little bit technical here, but please. Take the example of, traditionally you would buy an IDS/IPS, separately from your filtering, separately from DNS security. One of the most important things we do in network security is to find combining control connections. Combining control connections where the adversaries controlling something behind your firewall and is now going around your network, is usually the key heel of the attack. That's why attacks like ransomware, that don't have a commanding control connection, are so difficult to deal with, by the way. So commanding control connections are a key seal of the attacks, and there are three different technologies that deal with it. Neural filtering for neural based commanding control, DNS security for DNS based commanding control, and IDS/IPS for general commanding control. If those are three different products, they'll be doing the wrong things. The oral filter will try to find things that it's not really good at, that the IPS really need to find, and the DN... It doesn't work. It works much better when it's one product doing everything. So I think the choice is not between best of breed and integrated. I think the only choice is integrated, because that's the only way to be best of breed. >> And behind that technology is some kind of realtime data store, I'll call it data lake, database. >> Yeah. >> Whatever. >> It's all driven by the same data. All the URLs, all the domain graph. Everything goes to one big data lake. We collect about... I think we collect about, a few petabytes per day. I don't write the exact number of data. It's all going to the same data lake, and all the intelligence is driven by that. >> So you mentioned in a cheeky comment about, why you founded the company, there weren't enough cybersecurity companies. >> Yeah. >> Clearly the term expansion strategy that Palo Alto Networks has done has been very successful. You've been, as you talked about, very focused on integration, not just from the technology perspective, but from the people perspective as well. >> Correct. >> So why are there still so many cybersecurity companies, and what are you thinking Palo Alto Networks can do to change that? >> So first, I think that there are a lot of cybersecurity companies out there, because there's a lot of money going into cybersecurity. If you look at the number of companies that have been really successful, it's a very small percentage of those cybersecurity companies. And also look, we're not going to be responsible for all the innovation in cybersecurity. We need other people to innovate. It's also... Look, always the question is, "Do you buy something or do you build it yourself?" Now we think we're the smartest people in the world. Of course, we can build everything, but it's not always true that we can build everything. Know that we're the smartest people in the world, for sure. You see, when you are a startup, you live and die by the thing that you build. Meaning if it's good, it works. If it's not good, you die. You run out of money, you shut down, and you just lost four years of your life to this, at least. >> At least. >> When you're a large company, yeah, I can go and find a hundred engineers and hire them. And especially nowadays, it becomes easier, as it became easier, and give them money, and have them go and build the same thing that the startup is building, but they're part of a bigger company, and they'll have more coffee breaks, and they'll be less incentive to go and do that, because the company will survive with or without them. So that's why startups can do things much better, sometimes than larger companies. We can do things better than startups, when it comes to being data driven because we have the data, and nobody can compete against the amount of data that we have. So we have a good combination of finding the right startups that have already built something, already proven that it works with some customers, and of course, building a lot of things internally that we cannot do outside. >> I heard you say in one of the, I dunno, dozens of videos I've listened to you talked to. The industry doesn't need or doesn't want another IoT stovepipe. Okay, I agree. So you got on-prem, AWS, Azure, Google, maybe Alibaba, IoT is going to be all over the place. So can you build, I call it the security super cloud, in other words, a consistent experience with the same policies and edicts across all my estates, irrespective of physical location? Is that technically feasible? Is it what you are trying to do? >> Certainly, what we're trying to do with Prisma Cloud, with our cloud security product, it works across all the clouds that you mentioned, and Oracle as well. It's almost entirely possible. >> Almost. >> Almost. Well, the things that... What you do is you normalize the language that the different cloud scale providers use, into one language. This cloud calls it a S3, and so, AWS calls it S3, and (indistinct) calls it GCS, and so on. So you normalize their terminology, and then build policy using a common terminology that your customers have to get used to. Of course, there are things that are different between the different cloud providers that cannot be normalized, and there, it has to be cloud specific. >> In that instance. So is that, in part, your strategy, is to actually build that? >> Of course. >> And does that necessitate running on all the major clouds? >> Of course. It's not just part of our strategy, it's a major part of our strategy. >> Compulsory. >> Look, as a standalone vendor that is not a cloud provider, we have two advantages. The first one is we're security product, security focused. So we can do much better than them when it comes to security. If you are a AWS, GCP, Azure, and so on, you're not going to put your best people on security, you're going to put them on the core business that you have. So we can do much better. Hey, that's interesting. >> Well, that's not how they talk. >> I don't care how they talk. >> Now that's interesting. >> When something is 4% of your business, you're not going to put it... You're not going to put your best people there. It's just, why would you? You put your best people on 96%. >> That's not driving their revenue. >> Look, it's simple. It's not what we- >> With all due respect. With all due respect. >> So I think we do security much better than them, and they become the good enough, and we become the premium. But certainly, the second thing that give us an advantage and the right to be a standalone security provider, is that we're multicloud, private cloud and all the major cloud providers. >> But they also have a different role. I mean, your role is not the security, the Nitro card or the Graviton chip, or is it? >> They are responsible for securing up to the operating system. We secure everything. >> They do a pretty good job of that. >> No, they do, certainly they have to. If they get bridged at that level, it's not just that one customer is going to suffer, the entire customer base. They have to spend a lot of time and money on it, and frankly, that's where they put their best security people. Securing the infrastructure, not building some cloud security feature. >> Absolutely. >> So Palo Alto Networks is, as we wrap here, on track to nearly double its revenues to nearly seven billion in FY '23, just compared to 2020, you were quoted in the press by saying, "We will be the first $100 billion cyber company." What is next for Palo Alto to achieve that? >> Yeah, so it was Nikesh, our CEO and chairman, that was quoted saying that, "We will double to a hundred billion." I don't think he gave it a timeframe, but what it takes is to double the sales, right? We're at 50 billion market cap right now, so we need to double sales. But in reality, you mentioned that we're growing the turn by doing more and more cybersecurity functions, and taking away pieces. Still, we have a relatively small, even though we're the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world, we have a very low market share that shows you how fragmented the market is. I would also like to point out something that is less known. Part of what we do with AI, is really take the part of the cybersecurity industry, which are service oriented, and that's about 50% of the cybersecurity industry services, and turn it into products. I mean, not all of it. But a good portion of what's provided today by people, and tens of billions of dollars are spent on that, can be done with products. And being one of the very, very few vendors that do that, I think we have a huge opportunity at turning those tens of billions of dollars in human services to AI. >> It's always been a good business taking human labor and translating into R and D, vendor R and D. >> Especially- >> It never fails if you do it well. >> Especially in difficult times, difficult economical times like we are probably experiencing right now around the world. We, not we, but we the world. >> Right, right. Well, congratulations. Coming up on the 18th anniversary. Tremendous amount of success. >> Thank you. >> Great vision, clear vision, STEM expansion strategy, really well underway. We are definitely going to continue to keep our eyes. >> Big company, a hundred billion, that's market capital, so that's a big company. You said you didn't want to work for a big company unless you founded it, is that... >> Unless it acts like a small company. >> There's the caveat. We'll keep our eye on that. >> Thank you very much. >> It's such a pleasure having you on. >> Thank you. >> Same here, thank you. >> All right, for our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We are live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand Hotel, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, covering our first time covering Palo Alto Ignite. 22 in person. Dave, we've had some great conversations so far. We've got two days of wall to wall coverage. We're gonna be talking with Palo Alto execs, leaders, customers, partners, and we're gonna be talking about the partner ecosystem >>Next. Wow. Super important. You know, it's funny you talk about for a minute, you didn't know where we were. I, I came to Vegas in May. I feel like I never left two weeks ago reinvent, which was I, I thought the most awesome reinvent ever. And it was really all about the ecosystem and the marketplace. So super excited to have that >>Conversation. Yeah, we've got Wet Whit Krump joining us, director of America's business development worldwide channels and customer programs at AWS marketplace. Wet, welcome to the Cube. Great to have >>You. Thanks for having me. Give >>Us a, you got a big title there. Give us a little bit of flavor of your scope of work at aws. >>Yeah, sure. So I, I've been with the marketplace team now almost eight years and originally founded our channel programs. And my scope has expanded to not just cover channels, but all things related to customers. So if you think about marketplace having sort of two sides, one being very focused on the isv, I tend to manage all things related to our in customer and our, our channel partners. >>What are some of the feedback that you're getting from customers and channel partners as the marketplace has has evolved so much? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's been interesting to watch over the course of the years, getting to see it start its infancy and grow up. One of the things that we hear often from customers and from our channel partners, and maybe not so directly, is it's not about finding the things they necessarily want to buy, although that's important, but it's the actual act of how they're able to purchase things and making that a much more streamlined process, especially in large enterprises where there's a lot of complexity. We wanna make that a lot simple, simpler for our customers. >>I mean, vendor management is such a hassle, right? But, so when I come into the marketplace, it's all there. I gotta console, it's integrated, I choose what I want. The billing is simplified. How has that capability evolved since the time that you've been at aws and where do you, where do you want to take it? >>Yeah, so when we, we first started Marketplace, it was really a pay as you go model customer come, they buy whatever, you know, whatever the, the whatever the solution was. And then it was, you know, charged by the hour and then the year. And one of the things that we discovered through customer and partner feedback was especially when they're dealing with large enterprise purchases, you know, they want to be able to instantiate those custom price and terms, you know, into that contract while enjoying the benefits of, of marketplace. And that's been, I think the biggest evolution started in 2017 with private offers, 2018 with consulting partner private offers. And then we've added things on over time to streamline procurement for, for >>Customers. So one of the hottest topics right now, everybody wants to talk about the macro and the headwinds and everything else, but when you talk to customers like, look, I gotta do more with less, less, that's the big theme. Yeah. And, and I wanna optimize my spend. Cloud allows me to do that because I can dial down, I can push storage to, to lower tiers. There's a lot of different things that I can do. Yeah. What are the techniques that people are using in the ecosystem Yeah. To bring in the partner cost optimization. Yeah. >>And so one of the key things that, that partners are, are, are doing for customers, they act as that trusted advisor. And, you know, when using marketplace either directly or through a partner, you know, customers are able to really save money through a licensing flexibility. They're also able to streamline their procurement. And then if there's an at-risk spin situation, they're able to, to manage that at-risk spend by combining marketplace and AWS spin into into one, you know, basically draws down their commitments to, to the company. >>And we talk about ask at-risk spend, you might talk about user or lose IT type of spend, right? Yeah. And so you, you increase the optionality in terms of where you can get value from your cloud spend. That's >>All right. Customers are thinking about their, their IT spend more strategically now more than ever. And so they're not just thinking about how do I buy infrastructure here and then software here, data services, they wanna combine this into one place. It's a lot less to keep up with a lot, a lot less overhead for them. But also just the simplification that you alluded to earlier around, you know, all the billing and vendor management is, and now in one, one streamlined, one streamlined process. Talk >>About that as a facilitator of organizations being able to reduce their risk profile. >>Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that, that came out earlier this year with Forrester was a to were total economic impact studies for both an ISV and for the end customer. But there was also a thought leadership study done where they surveyed over 700 customers worldwide to sort of get their thoughts on procurement and risk profile management. And, and one of the things that was really, you know, really surprising was is was that, you know, I guess it was like over 78% of of respondents DEF stated that they didn't feel like their, their companies had a really well-defined governance model and that over half of software and data purchases actually went outside of procurement. And so the companies aren't really able to, don't, they don't really have eyes on all of this spin and it's substantial >>And that's a, a huge risk for the organization. >>Yeah. Huge risk for the organization. And, and you know, half of the respondents stated outright that like they viewed marketplaces a way for them to reduce their risk profile because they, they were able to have a better governance model around that. >>So what's the business case can take us through that. How, how should a customer think about that? So, okay, I get that the procurement department likes it and the CFO probably likes it, but how, what, what's the dynamic around the business? So if I'm a, let's say I'm, I'm a bus, I'm a business person, I'm a, and running the process, I got my little, I get my procurement reach around. Yeah. What does the data suggest that what's in it from me, right? From a company wide standpoint, you know, what are the, maybe the Forester guys address this. So yeah, that overall business case I think is important. >>Yeah, I think, I think one of the big headlines for the end customer is because of license flexibility is that is is about a 10% cost savings in, in license cost. They're able to right size their purchases to buy the things they actually need. They're not gonna have these big overarching ELAs. There's gonna be a lot of other things in there that, that they don't, they don't really aren't gonna really directly use. You're talking about shelfware, you know, that sort of the classic term buy something, it never gets used, you know, also from just a, a getting things done perspective, big piece of feedback from customers is the contracting process takes a long time. It takes several months, especially for a large purchase. And a lot of those discussions are very repetitive. You know, you're talking about the same things over and over again. And we actually built a feature called standardized contract where we talked to a number of customers and ISVs distilled a contract down into a, a largely a set of terms that both sides already agreed to. And it cuts that, that contract time down by 90%. So if you're a legal team in a company, there's only so many of you and you have a lot of things to get done. If you can shave 90% off your time, that that's, that's now you can now work on a lot of other things for the, the corporation. Right. >>A lot of business impact there. You think faster time to value, faster time to market workforce optimization. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, you know, from an ISV standpoint, the measurement is they're, they're able to close deals about 40% faster, which is great for the isv. I mean obviously they love that. But if you're a customer, you're actually getting the innovative technologies you need 40% faster. So you can actually do the work you want to take it to your customers and drive the business. >>You guys recently launched, what is it, vendor Insights? Yeah. Talk a little bit about that, the value. What are some of the things that you're seeing with that? >>Yeah, so that goes into the, the onboarding value add of marketplaces. The number of things that go into, to cutting that time according to Forrester by 75%. But Vendor Insights was based on a key piece, offa impact from customers. So, you know, marketplace is used for, one of the reasons is discoverability by customers, Hey, what is the broader landscape? Look for example of security or storage partners, you know, trying to, trying to understand what is even available. And then the double click is, alright, well how does that company, or how does that vendor fit into my risk profile? You know, understanding what their compliance metrics are, things of that nature. And so historically they would have to, a customer would've to go to an ISV and say, all right, I want you to fill out this form, you know that my questionnaire. And so they would trade this back and forth as they have questions. Now with vendor insights, a customer can actually subscribe to this and they're able to actually see the risk profile of that vendor from the inside out, you know, from the inside of their SaaS application, what does it look like on a real time basis? And they can go back and look at that whenever they want. And you know, the, the, the feedback since the launch has been fantastic. And that, and I think that helps us double down on the already the, the onboarding benefits that we are providing customers. >>This, this, I wanna come back to this idea of cost optimization and, and try to tie it into predictability. You know, a lot of people, you know, complain, oh, I got surprised at the end of the month. So if I understand it wit by, by leveraging the marketplace and the breadth that you have in the marketplace, I can say, okay, look, I'm gonna spend X amount on tech. Yeah. And, and this approach allows me to say, all right, because right now procurement or historically procurement's been a bunch of stove pipes, I can't take from here and easily put it over there. Right. You're saying that this not only addresses the sort of cost optimization, does it also address the predictability challenge? >>Yeah, and I, I think another way to describe that is, is around cost controls. And you know, just from a reporting perspective, you know, we, we have what are called cost utilization reports or curve files. And we provide those to customers anytime they want and they can load those into Tableau, use whatever analysis tools that they want to be able to use. And so, and then you can actually tag usage in those reports. And what we're really talking about is helping customers adopt thin op practices. So, you know, develop directly for the cloud customers are able to understand, okay, who's using what, when and where. So everyone's informed that creates a really collaborative environment. It also holds people accountable for their spin. So that, you know, again, talking about shelfware, we bought things we're not gonna use or we're overusing people are using software that they probably don't really need to. And so that's, that adds to that predictable is everyone has great visibility into what's happening. And there's >>Another, I mean, of course saving money is, is, is in vogue right now because you know, the headwinds and the economics, et cetera. But there's also another side of the equation, which is, I mean, I see this a lot. You know, the CFO says financial people, why is our cloud bill so high? Well it's because we're actually driving all this revenue. And so, you know, you've seen it so many so often in companies, you know, the, the spreadsheet analysis says, oh, cut that. Well, what happens to revenue if you cut that? Right? Yeah. So with that visibility, the answer may be, well actually if we double down on that, yeah, we're actually gonna make more money cuz we actually have a margin on this and it's, it's got operating leverage. So if we double that, you know, we could, so that kind of cross organization communication to make better decisions, I think is another key factor. Yeah. >>Huge impact there. Talk ultimately about how the buyer's journey seems to have been really transformed >>The >>Correct. Right? So if you're, if you're a buyer, you know, initially to your point is, you know, I'm just looking for a point solution, right? And then you move on to the next one and the next one. And now, you know, working with our teams and using the platform, you know, and frankly customers are thinking more strategically about their IT spend holistically. The conversations that we're having with us is, it's not about how do I find the solution today, but here's my forward looking software spend, or I'm going through a migration, I wanna rationalize the software portfolio I have today as I'm gonna lift and shift it to aws. You know, what is going to make the trip? What are we gonna discard entirely because it's not really optimized for the cloud. Or there's that shelf wheel component, which is, hey, you know, maybe 15 to 25% of my portfolio, it's just not even getting utilized. And that, and that's a sunk cost to your point, which is, you know, that's, that's money I could be using on something that really impacts the bottom line in various areas of the business. Right. >>What would you say is the number one request you get or feedback you get from the end customers? And how is that different from what you hear from the channel partners? How aligned or Yeah. Are those >>Vectors? I would say from a customer perspective, one of the key things I hear about is around visibility of spin, right? And I was just talking about these reports and you know, using cost optimization tools, being able to use features like identity and access management, managing entitlements, private marketplaces. Basically them being able to have a stronger governance model in the cloud. For one thing, it's, it's, you know, keeping everybody on track like some of the points I was talking about earlier, but also cost, cost optimization around, you know, limiting vendor sprawl. Are we actually really using all the things that we need? And then from a channel partner perspective, you know, some of the things I talked about earlier about that 40% faster sales cycle, you know, that that TEI or the total economic impact study that was done by Forrester was, was built for the isv. >>But if you're a channel partner sitting between the customer and the isv, you kind of get to, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds, right? You're acting as that, you're acting as that that advisor. And so if you're a channel partner, the procurement streamlining is a huge benefit because the, you know, like you said, saving money is in vogue right now. You're trying to do more with less. So if you're thinking about 20, 27% faster win rates, 40% faster time to close, and you're the customer who's trying to impact the bottom line by, by innovating more, more quickly, those two pieces of feedback are really coming together and meeting in, in the middle >>Throughout 2021, or sorry, 2022, our survey partner, etr Enterprise Technology Research has asked their panel a question is what's your strategy for, you know, doing more with less? By far the number one response has been consolidating redundant vendors. Yes. And then optimizing cloud was, you know, second, but, but way, way lower than that. The number from last survey went from 34%. It's now up to 44% in the January survey, which is in the field, which they gave me a glimpse to last night. So you're seeing dramatic uptick Yeah. In that point. Yeah. And then you guys are helping, >>We, we definitely are. I mean, it, there's the reporting piece so they have a better visibility of what they're doing. And then you think about a, a feature like private marketplace and manage entitlements. So private marketplace enables a customer to create their own private marketplace as the name states where they can limit access to it for certain types of software to the actual in customer who needs to use that software. And so, you know, not everybody needs a license to software X, right? And so that helps with the sprawl comment to your point, that's, that's on the increase, right? Am I actually spending money on things that we need to use? >>But also on the consolidation front, you, we, we talked with nikesh an hour or so ago, he was mentioning on stage, if you, if you just think of this number of security tools or cybersecurity tools that an organization has on its network, 30 to 50. And we were talking about, well, how does Palo Alto Networks what's realistic in terms of consolidation? But it sounds like what you're doing in the marketplace is giving organizations the visibility, correct, for sure. Into what they're running, usage spend, et cetera, to help facilitate ultimately at some point facilitate a strategic consolidation. >>It's, that's exactly right. And if you, you think about cost optimization, our procurement features, you know, the, the practice that we're trying to help customers around, around finops, it's all about helping customers build a, a modern procurement practice and supply chain. And so that helps with, with that point exactly. The keynotes >>Point. Exactly. So last question for you. What, what's next? What can we expect? >>Oh, so what's next for me is, you know, I, I really want to, you know, my channel business for example, you know, I want to think about enabling new types of partners. So if we've worked really heavily with resellers, we worked very heavily with Palo Alto on the reseller community, how are we bringing in more services partners of various types? You know, the gsi, the distributors, cloud service providers, managed security service providers was in a keynote yesterday listening to Palo Alto talk about their five routes to market. And, you know, they had these bubbles. And so I was like, gosh, that's exactly how I'm thinking about the business is how am I expanding my own footprint to customers that have deeper, I mean, excuse me, to partners that have deeper levels of cloud knowledge, can be more of that advisor, help customers really understand how to maximize their business on aws. And, and you know, my job is to really help facilitate that, that innovative technology through those partners. >>So sounds like powerful force, that ecosystem. Exactly. Great alignment. AWS and Palo Alto, thank you so much for joining us with, we >>Appreciate, thanks for having >>With what's going on at aws, the partner network, the mp, and all that good stuff. That's really the value in it for customers, ISVs and channel partners. I like. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. >>Our guests and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Lee Leer in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

Upbeat music plays >> Voice Over: TheCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live at Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is the 10th annual Ignite. There's about 3,000 people here, excited to really see where this powerhouse organization is taking security. Dave, it's great to be here. Our first time covering Ignite. People are ready to be back. They.. and security is top. It's a board level conversation. >> It is the other Ignite, I like to call it cuz of course there's another big company has a conference name Ignite, so I'm really excited to be here. Palo Alto Networks, a company we've covered for a number of years, as we just wrote in our recent breaking analysis, we've called them the gold standard but it's not just our opinion, we've backed it up with data. The company's on track. We think to do close to 7 billion in revenue by 2023. That's double it's 2020 revenue. You can measure it with execution, market cap M and A prowess. I'm super excited to have the CEO here. >> We have the CEO here, Nikesh Arora joins us from Palo Alto Networks. Nikesh, great to have you on theCube. Thank you for joining us. >> Well thank you very much for having me Lisa and Dave >> Lisa: It was great to see your keynote this morning. You said that, you know fundamentally security is a data problem. Well these days every company has to be a data company. Grocery stores, gas stations, car dealers. How is Palo Alto networks making customers, these data companies, more secure? >> Well Lisa, you know, (coughs) I've only done cybersecurity for about four, four and a half years so when I came to the industry I was amazed to see how security is so reactive as opposed to proactive. We should be able to stop bad threats, right? as they're happening. But I think a lot of threats get through because we don't have the right infrastructure and the right tooling and right products in there. So I think we've been working hard for the last four and a half years to turn it around so we can have consistent data flow across an enterprise and then mine that data for threats and anomalous behavior and try and protect our customers. >> You know the problem, I wrote this, this weekend, the problem in cybersecurity is well understood, you put up that Optiv graph and it's like 8,000 companies >> Yes >> and I think you mentioned your keynote on average, you know 30 to 40 tools, maybe 50, at least 20, >> Yes. >> from the folks that I talked to. So, okay, great, but actually solving that problem is not trivial. To be a consolidator, I mean, everybody wants to consolidate tools. So in your three to four years and security as you well know, it's, you can't fake security. It's a really, really challenging topic. So when you joined Palo Alto Networks and you heard that strategy, I know you guys have been thinking about this for some time, what did you see as the challenges to actually executing on that and how is it that you've been able to sort of get through that knot hole. >> So Dave, you know, it's interesting if you look at the history of cybersecurity, I call them the flavor of the decade, a flare, you know a new threat vector gets created, very large market gets created, a solution comes through, people flock, you get four or five companies will chase that opportunity, and then they become leaders in that space whether it's firewalls or endpoints or identity. And then people stick to their swim lane. The problem is that's a very product centric approach to security. It's not a customer-centric approach. The customer wants a more secure enterprise. They don't want to solve 20 different solutions.. problems with 20 different point solutions. But that's kind of how the industry's grown up, and it's been impossible for a large security company in one category, to actually have a substantive presence in the next category. Now what we've been able to do in the last four and a half years is, you know, from our firewall base we had resources, we had intellectual capability from a security perspective and we had cash. So we used that to pay off our technical debt. We acquired a bunch of companies, we created capability. In the last three years, four years we've created three incremental businesses which are all on track to hit a billion dollars the next 12 to 18 months. >> Yeah, so it's interesting on Twitter last night we had a little conversation about acquirers and who was a good, who was not so good. It was, there was Oracle, they came up actually very high, they'd done pretty, pretty good Job, VMware was on the list, IBM, Cisco, ServiceNow. And if you look at IBM and Cisco's strategy, they tend to be very services heavy, >> Mm >> right? How is it that you have been able to, you mentioned get rid of your technical debt, you invested in that. I wonder if you could, was it the, the Cloud, even though a lot of the Cloud was your own Cloud, was that a difference in terms of your ability to integrate? Because so many companies have tried it in the past. Oracle I think has done a good job, but it took 'em 10 to 12 years, you know, to, to get there. What was the sort of secret sauce? Is it culture, is it just great engineering? >> Dave it's a.. thank you for that. I think, look, it's, it's a mix of everything. First and foremost, you know, there are certain categories we didn't play in so there was nothing to integrate. We built a capability in a category in automation. We didn't have a product, we acquired a company. It's a net new capability in instant response. We didn't have a capability. It was net new capability. So there was, there was, other than integrating culturally and into the organization into our core to market processes there was no technical integration needed. Most of our technical integration was needed in our Cloud platform, which we bought five or six companies, we integrated then we just bought one recently called cyber security as well, which is going to get integrated in the Cloud platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And the thing is like, the Cloud platform is net new in the industry. We.. nobody's created a Cloud security platform yet, so we're working hard to create it because we don't want to replicate the mistakes of the past, that were made in enterprise security, in Cloud security. So it's a combination of cultural integration it's a combination of technical integration. The two things we do differently I think, than most people in the industry is look, we have no pride of, you know of innovations. Like, if somebody else has done it, we respect it and we'll acquire it, but we always want to acquire number one or number two in their category. I don't want number three or four. There's three or four for a reason and there still leaves one or two out there to compete with. So we've always acquired one or two, one. And the second thing, which is as important is most of these companies are in the early stage of development. So it's very important for the founding team to be around. So we spend a lot of time making sure they stick around. We actually make our people work for them. My principle is, listen, if they beat us in the open market with all our resources and our people, then they deserve to run this as opposed to us. So most of our new product categories are run by founders of companies required. >> So a little bit of Jack Welch, a little bit of Franks Lubens is a, you know always deference to the founders. But go ahead Lisa. >> Speaking of cultural transformation, you were mentioning your keynote this morning, there's been a significant workforce transformation at Palo Alto Networks. >> Yeah >> Talk a little bit about that, cause that's a big challenge, for many organizations to achieve. Sounds like you've done it pretty well. >> Well you know, my old boss, Eric Schmidt, used to say, 'revenue solves all known problems'. Which kind of, you know, it is a part joking, part true, but you know as Dave mentioned, we've doubled or two and a half time the revenues in the last four and a half years. That allows you to grow, that allows you to increase headcount. So we've gone from four and a half thousand people to 14,000 people. Good news is that's 9,500 people are net new to the company. So you can hire a whole new set of people who have new skills, new capabilities and there's some attrition four and a half thousand, some part of that turns over in four and a half years, so we effectively have 80% net new people, and the people we have, who are there from before, are amazing because they've built a phenomenal firewall business. So it's kind of been right sized across the board. It's very hard to do this if you're not growing. So you got to focus on growing. >> Dave: It's like winning in sports. So speaking of firewalls, I got to ask you does self-driving cars need brakes? So if I got a shout out to my friend Zeus Cararvela so like that's his line about why you need firewalls, right? >> Nikesh: Yes. >> I mean you mentioned it in your keynote today. You said it's the number one question that you get. >> and I don't get it why P industry observers don't go back and say that's, this is ridiculous. The network traffic is doubling or tripling. (clears throat) In fact, I gave an interesting example. We shut down our data centers, as I said, we are all on Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud and then, you know our internal team comes in, we'd want a bigger firewall. I'm like, why do you want a bigger firewall? We shut down our data centers as well. The traffic coming in and out of our campus is doubled. We need a bigger firewall. So you still need a firewall even if you're in the Cloud. >> So I'm going to come back to >> Nikesh: (coughs) >> the M and A strategy. My question is, can you be both best of breed and develop a comprehensive suite number.. part one and part one A of that is do you even have to, because generally sweets win out over best of breed. But what, how do you, how do you respond? >> Well, you know, this is this age old debate and people get trapped in that, I think in my mind, and let me try and expand the analogy which I tried to do up in my keynote. You know, let's assume that Oracle, Microsoft, Dynamics and Salesforce did not exist, okay? And you were running a large company of 50,000 people and your job was to manage the customer process which easier to understand than security. And I said, okay, guess what? I have a quoting system and a lead system but the lead system doesn't talk to my coding system. So I get leads, but I don't know who those customers. And I write codes for a whole new set of customers and I have a customer database. Then when they come as purchase orders, I have a new database with all the customers who've bought something from me, and then when I go get them licensing I have a new database and when I go have customer support, I have a fifth database and there are customers in all five databases. You'll say Nikesh you're crazy, you should have one customer database, otherwise you're never going to be able to make this work. But security is the same problem. >> Dave: Mm I should.. I need consistency in data from suit to nuts. If it's in Cloud, if you're writing code, I need to understand the security flaws before they go into deployment, before they go into production. We for somehow ridiculously have bought security like IT. Now the difference between IT and security is, IT is required to talk to each other, so a Dell server and HP server work very similarly but a Palo Alto firewall and a Checkpoint firewall Fortnight firewall work formally differently. And then how that transitions into endpoints is a whole different ball game. So you need consistency in data, as Lisa was saying earlier, it's a data problem. You need consistency as you traverse to the enterprise. And that's why that's the number one need. Now, when you say best of breed, (coughs) best of breed, if it's fine, if it's a specific problem that you're trying to solve. But if you're trying to make sure that's the data flow that happens, you need both best of breed, you know, technology that stops things and need integration on data. So what we are trying to do is we're trying to give people best to breed solutions in the categories they want because otherwise they won't buy us. But we're also trying to make sure we stitch the data. >> But that definition of best of breed is a little bit of nuance than different in security is what I'm hearing because that consistency >> Nikesh: (coughs) Yes, >> across products. What about across Cloud? You mentioned Google and Amazon. >> Yeah so that's great question. >> Dave: Are you building the security super Cloud, I call it, above the Cloud? >> It's, it's not, it's, less so a super Cloud, It's more like Switzerland and I used to work at Google for 10 years, not a secret. And we used to sell advertising and we decided to go into pub into display ads or publishing, right. Now we had no publishing platform so we had to be good at everybody else's publishing platform >> Dave: Mm >> but we never were able to search ads for everybody else because we only focus on our own platform. So part of it is when the Cloud guys they're busy solving security for their Cloud. Google is not doing anything about Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft's Azure, right? AWS is not doing anything about Google Cloud or Azure. So what we do is we don't have a Cloud. Our job in providing Cloud securities, be Switzerland make sure it works consistently across every Cloud. Now if you try to replicate what we offer Prisma Cloud, by using AWS, Azure and GCP, you'd have to first of all, have three panes of glass for all three of them. But even within them they have four panes of glass for the capabilities we offer. So you could end up with 12 different interfaces to manage a development process, we give you one. Now you tell me which is better. >> Dave: Sounds like a super Cloud to me Lisa (laughing) >> He's big on super Cloud >> Uber Cloud, there you >> Hey I like that, Uber Cloud. Well, so I want to understand Nikesh, what's realistic. You mentioned in your keynote Dave, brought it up that the average organization has 30 to 50 tools, security tools. >> Nikesh: Yes, yes >> On their network. What is realistic for from a consolidation perspective where Palo Alto can come in and say, let me make this consistent and simple for you. >> Well, I'll give you your own example, right? (clears throat) We're probably sub 10 substantively, right? There may be small things here and there we do. But on a substantive protecting the enterprise perspective you be should be down to eight or 10 vendors, and that is not perfect but it's a lot better than 50, >> Lisa: Right? >> because don't forget 50 tools means you have to have capability to understand what those 50 tools are doing. You have to have the capability to upgrade them on a constant basis, learn about their new capabilities. And I just can't imagine why customers have two sets of firewalls right. Now you got to learn both the files on how to deploy both them. That's silly because that's why we need 7 million more people. You need people to understand, so all these tools, who work for companies. If you had less tools, we need less people. >> Do you think, you know I wrote about this as well, that the security industry is anomalous and that the leader has, you know, single digit, low single digit >> Yes >> market shares. Do you think that you can change that? >> Well, you know, when I started that was exactly the observation I had Dave, which you highlighted in your article. We were the largest by revenue, by small margin. And we were one and half percent of the industry. Now we're closer to three, three to four percent and we're still at, you know, like you said, going to be around $7 billion. So I see a path for us to double from here and then double from there, and hopefully as we keep doubling and some point in time, you know, I'd like to get to double digits to start with. >> One of the things that I think has to happen is this has to grow dramatically, the ecosystem. I wonder if you could talk about the ecosystem and your strategy there. >> Well, you know, it's a matter of perspective. I think we have to get more penetrated in our largest customers. So we have, you know, 1800 of the top 2000 customers in the world are Palo Alto customers. But we're not fully penetrated with all our capabilities and the same customers set, so yes the ecosystem needs to grow, but the pandemic has taught us the ecosystem can grow wherever they are without having to come to Vegas. Which I don't think is a bad thing to be honest. So the ecosystem is growing. You are seeing new players come to the ecosystem. Five years ago you didn't see a lot of systems integrators and security. You didn't see security offshoots of telecom companies. You didn't see the Optivs, the WWTs, the (indistinct) of the world (coughs) make a concerted shift towards consolidation or services and all that is happening >> Dave: Mm >> as we speak today in the audience you will find people from Google, Amazon Microsoft are sitting in the audience. People from telecom companies are sitting in the audience. These people weren't there five years ago. So you are seeing >> Dave: Mm >> the ecosystem's adapting. They're, they want to be front and center of solving the customer's problem around security and they want to consolidate capability, they need. They don't want to go work with a hundred vendors because you know, it's like, it's hard. >> And the global system integrators are key. I always say they like to eat at the trough and there's a lot of money in security. >> Yes. >> Dave: (laughs) >> Well speaking of the ecosystem, you had Thomas Curry and Google Cloud CEO in your fireside chat in the keynote. Talk a little bit about how Google Cloud plus Palo Alto Networks, the Zero Trust Partnership and what it's enable customers to achieve. >> Lisa, that's a great question. (clears his throat) Thank you for bringing it up. Look, you know the, one of the most fundamental shifts that is happening is obviously the shift to the Cloud. Now when that shift fully, sort of, takes shape you will realize if your network has changed and you're delivering everything to the Cloud you need to go figure out how to bring the traffic to the Cloud. You don't have to bring it back to your data center you can bring it straight to the Cloud. So in that context, you know we use Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud, to be able to carry our traffic. We're going from a product company to a services company in addition, right? Cuz when we go from firewalls to SASE we're not carrying your traffic. When we carry our traffic, we need to make sure we have underlying capability which is world class. We think GCP and AWS and Azure run some of the biggest and best networks in the world. So our partnership with Google is such that we use their public Cloud, we sit on top of their Cloud, they give us increased enhanced functionality so that our customers SASE traffic gets delivered in priority anywhere in the world. They give us tooling to make sure that there's high reliability. So you know, we partner, they have Beyond Corp which is their version of Zero Trust which allows you to take unmanaged devices with browsers. We have SASE, which allows you to have managed devices. So the combination gives our collective customers the ability for Zero Trust. >> Do you feel like there has to be more collaboration within the ecosystem, the security, you know, landscape even amongst competitors? I mean I think about Google acquires Mandiant. You guys have Unit 42. Should and will, like, Wendy Whitmore and maybe they already are, Kevin Mandia talk more and share more data. If security's a data problem is all this data >> Nikesh: Yeah look I think the industry shares threat data, both in private organizations as well as public and private context, so that's not a problem. You know the challenge with too much collaboration in security is you never know. Like you know, the moment you start sharing your stuff at third parties, you go out of Secure Zone. >> Lisa: Mm >> Our biggest challenge is, you know, I can't trust a third party competitor partner product. I have to treat it with as much suspicion as anything else out there because the only way I can deliver Zero Trust is to not trust anything. So collaboration in Zero Trust are a bit of odds with each other. >> Sounds like another problem you can solve >> (laughs) >> Nikesh last question for you. >> Yes >> Favorite customer or example that you think really articulates the value of what Palo Alto was delivering? >> Look you know, it's a great question, Lisa. I had this seminal conversation with a customer and I explained all those things we were talking about and the customer said to me, great, okay so what do I need to do? I said, fun, you got to trust me because you know, we are on a journey, because in the past, customers have had to take the onus on themselves of integrating everything because they weren't sure a small startup will be independent, be bought by another cybersecurity company or a large cybersecurity company won't get gobbled up and split into pieces by private equity because every one of the cybersecurity companies have had a shelf life. So you know, our aspiration is to be the evergreen cybersecurity company. We will always be around and we will always tackle innovation and be on the front line. So the customer understood what we're doing. Over the last three years we've been working on a transformation journey with them. We're trying to bring them, or we have brought them along the path of Zero Trust and we're trying to work with them to deliver this notion of reducing their meantime to remediate from days to minutes. Now that's an outcome based approach that's a partnership based approach and we'd like, love to have more and more customers of that kind. I think we weren't ready to be honest as a company four and a half years ago, but I think today we're ready. Hence my keynote was called The Perfect Storm. I think we're at the right time in the industry with the right capabilities and the right ecosystem to be able to deliver what the industry needs. >> The perfect storm, partners, customers, investors, employees. Nikesh, it's been such a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you for coming to talk to Dave and me right after your keynote. We appreciate that and we look forward to two days of great coverage from your executives, your customers, and your partners. Thank you. >> Well, thank you for having me, Lisa and Dave and thank you >> Dave: Pleasure >> for what you guys do for our industry. >> Our pleasure. For Nikesh Arora and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Palo Alto Ignite 22. Stick around Dave and I will be joined by our next guest in just a minute. (cheerful music plays out)

foreign welcome back to re invent 2022 we're wrapping up four days well one evening and three solid days wall-to-wall of cube coverage I'm Dave vellante John furrier's birthday is today he's on a plane to London to go see his nephew get married his his great Sister Janet awesome family the furriers uh spanning the globe and uh and John I know you wanted to be here you're watching in Newark or you were waiting to uh to get in the plane so all the best to you happy birthday one year the Amazon PR people brought a cake out to celebrate John's birthday because he's always here at AWS re invented his birthday so I'm really pleased to have two really special guests uh former Cube host Cube Alum great wikibon contributor Stu miniman now with red hat still good to see you again great to be here Dave yeah I was here for that cake uh the twitterverse uh was uh really helping to celebrate John's birthday today and uh you know always great to be here with you and then with this you know Awesome event this week and friend of the cube of many time Cube often Cube contributor as here's a cube analyst this week as his own consultancy sarbj johal great to see you thanks for coming on good to see you Dave uh great to see you stu I'm always happy to participate in these discussions and um I enjoy the discussion every time so this is kind of cool because you know usually the last day is a getaway day and this is a getaway day but this place is still packed I mean it's I mean yeah it's definitely lighter you can at least walk and not get slammed but I subjit I'm going to start with you I I wanted to have you as the the tail end here because cause you participated in the analyst sessions you've been watching this event from from the first moment and now you've got four days of the Kool-Aid injection but you're also talking to customers developers Partners the ecosystem where do you want to go what's your big takeaways I think big takeaways that Amazon sort of innovation machine is chugging along they are I was listening to some of the accessions and when I was back to my room at nine so they're filling the holes in some areas but in some areas they're moving forward there's a lot to fix still it doesn't seem like that it seems like we are done with the cloud or The Innovation is done now we are building at the millisecond level so where do you go next there's a lot of room to grow on the storage side on the network side uh the improvements we need and and also making sure that the software which is you know which fits the hardware like there's a specialized software um sorry specialized hardware for certain software you know so there was a lot of talk around that and I attended some of those sessions where I asked the questions around like we have a specialized database for each kind of workload specialized processes processors for each kind of workload yeah the graviton section and actually the the one interesting before I forget that the arbitration was I asked that like why there are so many so many databases and IRS for the egress costs and all that stuff can you are you guys thinking about reducing that you know um the answer was no egress cost is not a big big sort of uh um show stopper for many of the customers but but the from all that sort of little discussion with with the folks sitting who build these products over there was that the plethora of choice is given to the customers to to make them feel that there's no vendor lock-in so if you are using some open source you know um soft software it can be on the you know platform side or can be database side you have database site you have that option at AWS so this is a lot there because I always thought that that AWS is the mother of all lock-ins but it's got an ecosystem and we're going to talk about exactly we'll talk about Stu what's working within AWS when you talk to customers and where are the challenges yeah I I got a comment on open source Dave of course there because I mean look we criticized to Amazon for years about their lack of contribution they've gotten better they're doing more in open source but is Amazon the mother of all lock-ins many times absolutely there's certain people inside Amazon I'm saying you know many of us talk Cloud native they're like well let's do Amazon native which means you're like full stack is things from Amazon and do things the way that we want to do things and you know I talk to a lot of customers they use more than one Cloud Dave and therefore certain things absolutely I want to Leverage The Innovation that Amazon has brought I do think we're past building all the main building blocks in many ways we are like in day two yes Amazon is fanatically customer focused and will always stay that way but you know there wasn't anything that jumped out at me last year or this year that was like Wow new category whole new way of thinking about something we're in a vocals last year Dave said you know we have over 200 services and if we listen to you the customer we'd have over two thousand his session this week actually got some great buzz from my friends in the serverless ecosystem they love some of the things tying together we're using data the next flywheel that we're going to see for the next 10 years Amazon's at the center of the cloud ecosystem in the IT world so you know there's a lot of good things here and to your point Dave the ecosystem one of the things I always look at is you know was there a booth that they're all going to be crying in their beer after Amazon made an announcement there was not a tech vendor that I saw this week that was like oh gosh there was an announcement and all of a sudden our business is gone where I did hear some rumbling is Amazon might be the next GSI to really move forward and we've seen all the gsis pushing really deep into supporting Cloud bringing workloads to the cloud and there's a little bit of rumbling as to that balance between what Amazon will do and their uh their go to market so a couple things so I think I think we all agree that a lot of the the announcements here today were taping seams right I call it and as it relates to the mother of all lock-in the reason why I say that it's it's obviously very much a pejorative compare Oracle company you know really well with Amazon's lock-in for Amazon's lock-in is about bringing this ecosystem together so that you actually have Choice Within the the house so you don't have to leave you know there's a there's a lot to eat at the table yeah you look at oracle's ecosystem it's like yeah you know oracle is oracle's ecosystem so so that is how I think they do lock in customers by incenting them not to leave because there's so much Choice Dave I agree with you a thousand I mean I'm here I'm a I'm a good partner of AWS and all of the partners here want to be successful with Amazon and Amazon is open to that it's not our way or get out which Oracle tries how much do you extract from the overall I.T budget you know are you a YouTube where you give the people that help you create a large sum of the money YouTube hasn't been all that profitable Amazon I think is doing a good balance of the ecosystem makes money you know we used to talk Dave about you know how much dollars does VMware make versus there um I think you know Amazon is a much bigger you know VMware 2.0 we used to think talk about all the time that VMware for every dollar spent on VMware licenses 15 or or 12 or 20 were spent in the ecosystem I would think the ratio is even higher here sarbji and an Oracle I would say it's I don't know yeah actually 1 to 0.5 maybe I don't know but I want to pick on your discussion about the the ecosystem the the partner ecosystem is so it's it's robust strong because it's wider I was I was not saying that there's no lock-in with with Amazon right AWS there's lock-in there's lock-in with everything there's lock-in with open source as well but but the point is that they're they're the the circle is so big you don't feel like locked in but they're playing smart as well they're bringing in the software the the platforms from the open source they're picking up those packages and saying we'll bring it in and cater that to you through AWS make it better perform better and also throw in their custom chips on top of that hey this MySQL runs better here so like what do you do I said oh Oracle because it's oracle's product if you will right so they are I think think they're filing or not slenders from their go to market strategy from their engineering and they listen to they're listening to customers like very closely and that has sort of side effects as well listening to customers creates a sprawl of services they have so many services and I criticized them last year for calling everything a new service I said don't call it a new service it's a feature of a existing service sure a lot of features a lot of features this is egress our egress costs a real problem or is it just the the on-prem guys picking at the the scab I mean what do you hear from customers so I mean Dave you know I I look at what Corey Quinn talks about all the time and Amazon charges on that are more expensive than any other Cloud the cloud providers and partly because Amazon is you know probably not a word they'd use they are dominant when it comes to the infrastructure space and therefore they do want to make it a little bit harder to do that they can get away with it um because um yeah you know we've seen some of the cloud providers have special Partnerships where you can actually you know leave and you're not going to be charged and Amazon they've been a little bit more flexible but absolutely I've heard customers say that they wish some good tunning and tongue-in-cheek stuff what else you got we lay it on us so do our players okay this year I think the focus was on the upside it's shifting gradually this was more focused on offside there were less talk of of developers from the main stage from from all sort of quadrants if you will from all Keynotes right so even Werner this morning he had a little bit for he was talking about he he was talking he he's job is to Rally up the builders right yeah so he talks about the go build right AWS pipes I thought was kind of cool then I said like I'm making glue easier I thought that was good you know I know some folks don't use that I I couldn't attend the whole session but but I heard in between right so it is really adopt or die you know I am Cloud Pro for last you know 10 years and I think it's the best model for a technology consumption right um because of economies of scale but more importantly because of division of labor because of specialization because you can't afford to hire the best security people the best you know the arm chip designers uh you can't you know there's one actually I came up with a bumper sticker you guys talked about bumper sticker I came up with that like last couple of weeks The Innovation favorite scale they have scale they have Innovation so that's where the Innovation is and it's it's not there again they actually say the market sets the price Market you as a customer don't set the price the vendor doesn't set the price Market sets the price so if somebody's complaining about their margins or egress and all that I think that's BS um yeah I I have a few more notes on the the partner if you you concur yeah Dave you know with just coming back to some of this commentary about like can Amazon actually enable something we used to call like Community clouds uh your companies like you know Goldman and NASDAQ and the like where Industries will actually be able to share data uh and you know expand the usage and you know Amazon's going to help drive that API economy forward some so it's good to see those things because you know we all know you know all of us are smarter than just any uh single company together so again some of that's open source but some of that is you know I think Amazon is is you know allowing Innovation to thrive I think the word you're looking for is super cloud there well yeah I mean it it's uh Dave if you want to go there with the super cloud because you know there's a metaphor for exactly what you described NASDAQ Goldman Sachs we you know and and you know a number of other companies that are few weeks at the Berkeley Sky Computing paper yeah you know that's a former supercloud Dave Linthicum calls it metacloud I'm not really careful I mean you know I go back to the the challenge we've been you know working at for a decade is the distributed architecture you know if you talk about AI architectures you know what lives in the cloud what lives at the edge where do we train things where do we do inferences um locations should matter a lot less Amazon you know I I didn't hear a lot about it this show but when they came out with like local zones and oh my gosh out you know all the things that Amazon is building to push out to the edge and also enabling that technology and software and the partner ecosystem helps expand that and Pull It in it's no longer you know Dave it was Hotel California all of the data eventually is going to end up in the public cloud and lock it in it's like I don't think that's going to be the case we know that there will be so much data out at the edge Amazon absolutely is super important um there some of those examples we're giving it's not necessarily multi-cloud but there's collaboration happening like in the healthcare world you know universities and hospitals can all share what they're doing uh regardless of you know where they live well Stephen Armstrong in the analyst session did say that you know we're going to talk about multi-cloud we're not going to lead with it necessarily but we are going to actually talk about it and that's different to your points too than in the fullness of time all the data will be in the cloud that's a new narrative but go ahead yeah actually Amazon is a leader in the cloud so if they push the cloud even if they don't say AWS or Amazon with it they benefit from it right and and the narrative is that way there's the proof is there right so again Innovation favorite scale there are chips which are being made for high scale their software being tweaked for high scale you as a Bank of America or for the Chrysler as a typical Enterprise you cannot afford to do those things in-house what cloud providers can I'm not saying just AWS Google cloud is there Azure guys are there and few others who are behind them and and you guys are there as well so IBM has IBM by the way congratulations to your red hat I know but IBM won the award um right you know very good partner and yeah but yeah people are dragging their feet people usually do on the change and they are in denial denial they they drag their feet and they came in IBM director feed the cave Den Dell drag their feed the cave in yeah you mean by Dragon vs cloud deniers cloud deniers right so server Huggers I call them but they they actually are sitting in Amazon Cloud Marketplace everybody is buying stuff from there the marketplace is the new model OKAY Amazon created the marketplace for b2c they are leading the marketplace of B2B as well on the technology side and other people are copying it so there are multiple marketplaces now so now actually it's like if you're in in a mobile app development there are two main platforms Android and Apple you first write the application for Apple right then for Android hex same here as a technology provider as and I I and and I actually you put your stuff to AWS first then you go anywhere else yeah they are later yeah the Enterprise app store is what we've wanted for a long time the question is is Amazon alone the Enterprise app store or are they partner of a of a larger portfolio because there's a lot of SAS companies out there uh that that play into yeah what we need well and this is what you're talking about the future but I just want to make a point about the past you talking about dragging their feet because the Cube's been following this and Stu you remember this in 2013 IBM actually you know got in a big fight with with Amazon over the CIA deal you know and it all became public judge wheeler eviscerated you know IBM and it ended up IBM ended up buying you know soft layer and then we know what happened there and it Joe Tucci thought the cloud was Mosey right so it's just amazing to see we have booksellers you know VMware called them books I wasn't not all of them are like talking about how great Partnerships they are it's amazing like you said sub GC and IBM uh with the the GSI you know Partnership of the year but what you guys were just talking about was the future and that's what I wanted to get to is because you know Amazon's been leading the way I I was listening to Werner this morning and that just reminded me of back in the days when we used to listen to IBM educate us give us a master class on system design and decoupled systems and and IO and everything else now Amazon is you know the master educator and it got me thinking how long will that last you know will they go the way of you know the other you know incumbents will they be disrupted or will they you know keep innovating maybe it's going to take 10 or 20 years I don't know yeah I mean Dave you actually you did some research I believe it was a year or so ago yeah but what will stop Amazon and the one thing that worries me a little bit um is the two Pizza teams when you have over 202 Pizza teams the amount of things that each one of those groups needs to take care of was more than any human could take care of people burn out they run out of people how many amazonians only last two or three years and then leave because it is tough I bumped into plenty of friends of mine that have been you know six ten years at Amazon and love it but it is a tough culture and they are driving werner's keynote I thought did look to from a product standpoint you could say tape over some of the seams some of those solutions to bring Beyond just a single product and bring them together and leverage data so there are some signs that they might be able to get past some of those limitations but I still worry structurally culturally there could be some challenges for Amazon to keep the momentum going especially with the global economic impact that we are likely to see in the next year bring us home I think the future side like we could talk about the vendors all day right to serve the community out there I think we should talk about how what's the future of technology consumption from the consumer side so from the supplier side just a quick note I think the only danger AWS has has that that you know Fred's going after them you know too big you know like we will break you up and that can cause some disruption there other than that I think they they have some more steam to go for a few more years at least before we start thinking about like oh this thing is falling apart or anything like that so they have a lot more they have momentum and it's continuing so okay from the I think game is on retail by the way is going to get disrupted before AWS yeah go ahead from the buyer's side I think um the the future of the sort of Technology consumption is based on the paper uh use and they actually are turning all their services to uh they are sort of becoming serverless behind the scenes right all analytics service they had one service left they they did that this year so every service is serverless so that means you pay exactly for the amount you use the compute the iops the the storage so all these three layers of course Network we talked about the egress stuff and that's a problem there because of the network design mainly because Google has a flatter design and they have lower cost so so they are actually squeezing the their their designing this their services in a way that you don't waste any resources as a buyer so for example very simple example when early earlier In This Cloud you will get a VM right in Cloud that's how we started so and you can get 20 use 20 percent of the VM 80 is getting wasted that's not happening now that that has been reduced to the most extent so now your VM grows as you grow the usage and if you go higher than the tier you picked they will charge you otherwise they will not charge you extra so that's why there's still a lot of instances like many different types you have to pick one I think the future is that those instances will go away the the instance will be formed for you on the fly so that is the future serverless all right give us bumper sticker Stu and then Serb G I'll give you my quick one and then we'll wrap yeah so just Dave to play off of sharp G and to wrap it up you actually wrote about it on your preview post for here uh serverless we're talking about how developers think about things um and you know Amazon in many ways you know is the new default server uh you know for the cloud um and containerization fits into the whole serverless Paradigm uh it's the space that I live in uh you know every day here and you know I was happy to see the last few years serverless and containers there's a blurring a line and you know subject we're still going to see VMS for a long time yeah yeah we will see that so give us give us your book Instagram my number six is innovation favorite scale that's my bumper sticker and and Amazon has that but also I I want everybody else to like the viewers to take a look at the the Google Cloud as well as well as IBM with others like maybe you have a better price to Performance there for certain workloads and by the way one vendor cannot do it alone we know that for sure the market is so big there's a lot of room for uh Red Hats of the world and and and Microsoft's the world to innovate so keep an eye on them they we need the competition actually and that's why competition Will Keep Us to a place where Market sets the price one vendor doesn't so the only only danger is if if AWS is a monopoly then I will be worried I think ecosystems are the Hallmark of a great Cloud company and Amazon's got the the biggest and baddest ecosystem and I think the other thing to watch for is Industries building on top of the cloud you mentioned the Goldman Sachs NASDAQ Capital One and Warner media these all these industries are building their own clouds and that's where the real money is going to be made in the latter half of the 2020s all right we're a wrap this is Dave Valente I want to first of all thank thanks to our great sponsors AWS for for having us here this is our 10th year at the cube AMD you know sponsoring as well the the the cube here Accenture sponsor to third set upstairs upstairs on the fifth floor all the ecosystem partners that came on the cube this week and supported our mission for free content our content is always free we try to give more to the community and we we take back so go to thecube.net and you'll see all these videos go to siliconangle com for all the news wikibon.com I publish weekly a breaking analysis series I want to thank our amazing crew here you guys we have probably 30 35 people unbelievable our awesome last session John Walls uh Paul Gillen Lisa Martin Savannah Peterson John Furrier who's on a plane we appreciate Andrew and Leonard in our ear and all of our our crew Palo Alto Boston and across the country thank you so much really appreciate it all right we are a wrap AWS re invent 2022 we'll see you in two weeks we'll see you two weeks at Palo Alto ignite back here in Vegas thanks for watching thecube the leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

(intro music) >> Hi everybody. Dave Vellante, back with Day Two coverage, we're live at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas for fal.con '22. Several thousand people here today. The keynote was, it was a little light. I think people were out late last night, but the keynote was outstanding and it's still going on. We had to break early because we have to strike early today, but we're really excited to have Stephan Goldberg here, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Claroty. And we're going to talk about an extremely important topic, which is the internet of things, the edge, we talk about it a lot. We haven't covered securing the edge here at theCUBE this week. And so Stephan really excited to have you on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Tell us more about Claroty, C-L-A-R-O-T-Y, a very interesting spelling, but what's it all about? >> Claroty is cybersecurity company that specializes in cyber physical systems, also known as operational technology systems and the extended internet of things. The difference between the traditional IoT and what what everyone calls an IoT in the cyber physical system is that an IoT device has anything connected on the network that traditionally cannot carry an agent, a security camera, a card reader. A cyber physical system is a system that has influence and operates in the physical world but is controlled from the cyberspace. An example would be a controller, a turbine, a robotic arm, or an MRI machine. >> Yeah, so those are really high-end systems, run, are looked after by engineers, not necessarily consumers. So what's what's happening in that world? I mean, we've talked a lot on theCUBE about the schism between OT and IT, they haven't really talked a lot, but in the last several years, they've started to talk more. You look at the ecosystem of IoT providers. I mean, it's companies like Hitachi and PTC and Siemens. I mean, it's the different names than we're used to in IT. What are the big trends that you're seeing the macro? >> So, first of all, traditionally, most manufacturers and environments that were heavy on operations, operational technology, they had the networks air-gapped, completely separated. You had your IT network for business administration, you had the OT network to actually build stuff. Today with emerging technologies and even modern switching architecture everything is being converged. You have the same physical infrastructure in terms of networking, that carries both networks. Sometimes a human error, sometimes a business logic that needs to interconnect these networks to transmit data from the OT side of the house, to the IT side of the house, exposes the OT environment to cyber threats. >> Was that air-gap by design or was it just that there wasn't connectivity? >> It was air-gap by design, due to security and operational reasons, and also ownership in these organizations. The IT-managed space was completely separate from the OT-managed space. So whoever built a network for the controllers to build a car, for example, was an automation engineer and the vendors, that have built these networks, were automation vendors, unlike the traditional Ciscos of the world, that we're specializing in IT. Today we're seeing the IT vendors on the OT side, and the OT vendors, they're worried about the IT side. >> But I mean, tradition, I mean, engineers are control freaks. No offense, but, I'm glad they are, I'm thankful for that. So there must have been some initial reticence to them connecting up these air-gap systems. They went wanted to make sure that they were secure, that they did it right, and presumably that's where you guys come in. What are the exposures and risks of these, of this critical infrastructure that we should be aware of? >> So you're completely right. And from an operational perspective let let's call it change control is very rigorous. So they did not want to go on the internet and just, we're seeing it with adoption of cloud technologies, for example. Cloud as in industry four ago, five ago, cloud as in cyber security. We all heard Amol's keynote from this morning talking about critical infrastructures and we'll touch upon our partnership in a second, but CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike being considered and deployed within these environments is a new thing. It's a new thing because the OT operation managers and the chief information security officers, they understand that air-gap is no longer a valid strategy. From a business perspective, these networks are already connected. We're seeing the trends of cyber attacks, IT cyber attacks, like not Patreon, I'm not talking about the Stoxnet, the targeted OT. I'm talking about WannaCry, EternalBlue, IT vulnerabilities that did not target OT, but due to the outdated and the specification of OT posture on the networks, they hit healthcare, they hit OT much harder than they did IT. >> Was Log4J, did that sleep into OT, or any IT that. >> So, absolutely. >> So Log4J right, which was so pervasive, like so many of these malwares. >> All these vulnerabilities that, it's a windows vulnerability, it has nothing to do with OT. But then when you stop and you say, hold on, my human machine interface workstation, although it has some proprietary software by Rockwell or Siemens running on it, what is the underlying operating system? Oh, hold on, it's Windows. We haven't updated that for like eight years. We were focused on updating the software but not the underlying operating system. The vulnerabilities exist to a greater extent on the OT side of the house because of the same characteristic of operational technology environments. >> So the brute force air-gap approach was no longer viable because the business imperative came in and said, no, we have to connect these systems to digitally transform, or advance our business, there's opportunities to monetize, whatever it was. The business laid that out as an imperative. So now OT engineers have to rethink how they secure it. So what are the steps that they're taking and how does Claroty help? Is there a sort of a playbook, a sequential playbook? >> Absolutely, so before we discussed the maturity curve of adopting an CPS security, or OT security technology, let's touch upon the characteristic of the space and what it led vendors like Claroty to build. So you have the rigorous chain control. You have the security in mind, operations, lowered the risk state of mind. That led vendors, likes of Claroty, to build a solution. And I'm talking about seven, eight years ago, to be passive, mostly passive or passive only to inspect network and to analyze network and focus on detection rather than taking action like response or preventative maintenance. >> Um-hmm. >> It made vendors to build on-prem solutions because of the cloud-averse state of mind of this industry. And because OT is very specific, it led vendors to focus only on OT devices, overlooking what we discussed as IoT, Unfortunately, besides HMI and PLC, the controller in the plant, you also have the security camera. So when you install an OT security solution I'm talking about the traditional ones, they traditionally overlook the security camera or anything that is not considered traditional OT. These three observations, although they were necessary in the beginning, you understand the shortcomings of it today. >> Um-hmm. >> So cloud-averse led to on-prem which leads to war security. It's like comparing CrowdStrike and one of its traditional competitors in the antivirus space. What CrowdStrike innovated is the SaaS first, cloud-native solution that is continuously being updated and provide the best in cloud security, right? And that is very much like what Claroty's building. We decided to go SaaS first and cloud-native solution. >> So, because of cloud-aversion, the industry shows somewhat outdated deployment models, on-prem, which limited scale and created greater diversity, more stovepipes, all the problems that we always talk about. Okay, and so is the answer to that, just becoming more cloud, having more of an affinity to cloud? That was a starting point, right. >> This is exactly it. Air-gap is perceived as secured, but you don't get updates and you don't really know what's going on in your network. If you have a Claroty or a crosswork installer, you have much higher probability detecting fast and responding fast. If you don't have it, you are just blind. You will be bridged, that's the. >> I was going to say, plus, air-gap, it's true, but people can get through air-gaps, too. I mean, it's harder, but Stoxnet. Yeah, look at Stoxnet right, oh, it's mopping the floor, boom, or however it happened, but so yeah. >> Correct. >> So, but the point being, you know, assume that breach, even though I know CrowdStrike thinks that the unstoppable breach is a myth, but you know, you talk to people like Kevin Mandia, it's like, we assume you're going to get breached, right? Let's make that assumption. Yeah, okay, and so that means you've got to have visibility into the network. So what are those steps that you would, what's that maturity model that you referenced before? >> So on top of these underlying principles, which is cloud-native, comprehensive, not OT only, but XIoT, and then bring that the verticalization and OT specificity. On top of that, you're exactly right. There is a maturity curve. You cannot boil the ocean, deploy protections, and change the environment within one day. It starts with discovering everything that is connected to your network. Everything from the traditional workstations to the cameras, and of course ending up with the cyber physical systems on the network. That discovery cannot be only a high level profile, it needs to be in depth to the level you need to know application versions of these devices. If you cannot tell the application version you cannot correlate it to a vulnerability, right? Just knowing that's an HMI or that's a PLC by Siemens is insufficient. You need to know the app version, then you can correlate to vulnerability, then you can correlate to risk. This is the next step, risk assessment. You need to put up a score basically, on each one of these devices. A vulnerability score, risk score, in order to prioritize action. >> Um-hmm. >> These two steps are discovery and thinking about the environment. The next two steps are taking action. After we have the prioritized devices discovered on your network, our approach is that you need to ladle in and deploy protections from a preventative perspective. Claroty delivers recommended policies in the form of access control lists or rules. >> Right. >> That can leverage existing infrastructure without touching a device without patching it, just to protect it. The next step would be detection and response. Once you have these policies deployed you also can leverage them to spot policy deviations. >> And that's where CrowdStrike comes in. So talk about how you guys partner with CrowdStrike, what that integration looks like and what the differentiation is. >> So actually the integration with CrowdStrike crosses the the entire customer journey. It starts with visibility. CrowdStrike and us exchange data on the asset level. With the announcement during FalCon, with Falcon Discover for IoT, we are really, really proud working on that with CrowdStrike. Traditionally CrowdStrike discovered and provided data about the IT assets. And we did the same thing with CPS and OT. Today with Falcon Discover for IoT, and us expanding to the XIoT space, both of us look at all devices but we can discover different things. When you merge these data sets you have an unparalleled visibility into any environment, and specifically OT. The integrations continue, and maybe the second spotlight I'll put, but without diminishing the other ones, is detection and response. It's the XDR Alliance. Claroty is very proud to be one of the first partners, XDR Alliance partners, for CrowdStrike, fitting in to the XDR, to CrowdStrike's XDR, the data that is needed to mitigate and respond and get more context about breaches in these OT environments, but also take action. Also trigger action, via Claroty and leverage Claroty's network-centric capabilities to respond. >> We hear a lot. We heard a lot in today's keynote note about the data, the importance of data, of the graph database. How unique is this Stephan, in the industry, in your view? >> The uniqueness of what exactly? >> Of this joint solution, if you will, this capability. >> I told my counterparts from CrowdStrike yesterday, the go-to market ones and the product management ones. If we are successful with Falcon Discover for IoT, and that product matures, as we plan for it to mature, it will change the industry, the OT security industry, for all of us. Not only for Claroty, for all players in this space. And this is why it's so important for us to stay coordinated and support this amazing company to enter this space and provide better security to organizations that really support our lives. >> We got to leave it there, but this is such an important topic. We're seeing in the war in Ukraine, there's a cyber component in the future of war. >> Yes. >> Today. And what do they do? They go after critical infrastructure. So protecting that critical infrastructure is so important, especially for a country like the United States, which has so much critical infrastructure and a lot to lose. So Stephan, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> For the work that you're doing. It was great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll be right back from fal.con '22. We're live from the ARIA in Las Vegas. (techno music)

>> We're back in Las Vegas at the ARIA for Fal.Con 22, CrowdStrike's big user conference. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube. Sven Krasser is here as the senior vice president and chief scientist at CrowdStrike and we're going to get a masterclass in AI for security, Sven. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I love the title. I just, I'm excited to have you on, I understand you were like employee number two or, you know, really early on >> Among the initial nine. Yeah. >> 11 years ago and I think two days you started. >> Yes. >> What was that like? You know, was that, you know, did you know George beforehand or you kind of? >> Yeah, I, I knew I knew George before, like not as well as I know him now. >> Yeah. >> And it, it sounded like a pretty good proposition about what he was having in mind. Like things security wise didn't really work that well back in the day. And we wanted to try something new, like cloud native, data driven, AI, and use that to stop, to stop breaches. So yeah, like it was very exciting. Like you go there, you have nothing there. First day, you open your laptop and you try to reinvent security. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I know he never, he talks about this. I never said we're going to be an AV company. But of course, you know, you start with antivirus and when at an endpoint and known malware, okay. But unknown malware at the time wasn't really being addressed. And if I understand it you guys brought in machine intelligence from the start. Explain that. >> That's that's right. And like, the way we, we looked at it is like, back then we said, you don't have a malware problem. You have an adversary problem. Just like recognizing that it's not malware but there's people behind it that act on objectives that you need to, that you need to counter and you don't want to run after them. You want to be ahead of them. Like that was, that was the approach, like at a very high level that we were taking and you know, now we have it a little bit more summed up and we say, we stop breaches. So like, that's, that's the end result. >> So how do you specifically leverage AI? Which parts of the portfolio, is it across the portfolio and you know, where did it start? How did it evolve? >> Yeah, we are very, we're very data driven. So we are working hard to use the, the proper tools to work with data wherever we can. And AI being one of these, these tools that we like to bring to bear. The, the cloud, the CrowdStrike security cloud at the moment we're doing about roughly 2 trillion events, with a T, per day. Like that, that volume of data, like going through our platform, that that's not something that you can, that you can work with manually, right? So we need, we need to bring the heavy machinery, like that's, that's how we're bringing AI to bear. >> 2 trillion events per day. I mean, there aren't a lot of organizations that see that many events a day. I mean, maybe, maybe some of the hyperscalers possibly. I don't know. That's a... >> Yeah. I think, I think it really allows us to get unprecedented insights into what's actually going on out there in the, in, in the landscape. And, you know, it's, it's like, it's like with a camera or a telescope, the bigger your aperture the fainter signals you can detect. And that's why like, that's why the volume is, is critical. And that's why we, that's why we from the get go, set out to build a cloud native platform so that we can actually aggregate this type of data and analyze it in one spot, basically where where everything comes together that we can draw these connections. >> Will we ever see security without humans? >> I don't, I don't think so. This, this, this notion that machine intelligence is so intelligent that it just takes these jobs over. To me it's more like a tool, right? Like these, these algorithms, they do need to learn from something they need to learn from human expertise. The way at CrowdStrike we have things set up is like our, our human teams our threat hunters, our MDR staff, our incident responders, like whatever they do, we, we are taking these insights and we're feeding them into the AI algorithms. So if there's, if there's a new type of attack and we have an incident response team on the ground and they find something, that gets leveraged put into a database and our AI can learn from that. I, I, I really like that in the keynote, Kevin Mandia actually talked to that, you know. Like get the incident responders out there, get their knowledge, bake it into products. And that that's, that's the approach that we're taking with, with with our AI. >> So in my head, I'm thinking okay, what do humans do better than machines? I mean, humans are creative, right? Machines really aren't creative, right? I mean, and adversaries are very creative. So, so I guess flip side question, what is, what does AI do? What does the machine intelligence do that that humans can't do? Is it scale? Is it just massive volumes? Help us understand what humans do well and machines do well and how they compliment each other. >> Yeah. So AI is, is very good at working with extremely large amounts of data. Again, like cloud native platform, like that's where you get this AI advantage. It can work with data that is a lot more complex like more facets of data. So we talked about XDR here at Fal.Con a lot, right? Like you get data from all these different products, from all these different angles. Like the more different facets you add to that like it becomes overwhelming for the human mind. It's just like so much complexity that a human can put together in their brain. With AI you don't have these limitations. It's just math. It's just like multiplying big matrices and you can work with a lot larger data sets, like those 2 trillion events that we do per day on the on the CrowdStrike security cloud. But also data that is a lot more complex, that has more facets, looks at the problem from different angles. That's where AI is especially useful. >> I want to ask you as a topic I haven't asked anybody this week and I've been meaning to, is, you know there's this concept of, of living off the land, right? Using your own tools against you. How are you able to detect that? Is that cuz of lateral movement or, I mean I'm sure there are many, many factors, but but how are you addressing that problem? That kind of stealthy using your tools against you? >> Yeah, so adversaries, this is, again there's motivated humans behind that. They figured if they drop a malware file on the machine that's an artifact, an indicator of compromise, right? And that can be detected. So they're avoiding dropping files on disc that could be detected or to bring their to bring their own tools. They try to work with the tools that they find on the machines. They need to act on objective though. There's something they want to accomplish. Like they're not, they're not logging in just to, you know, like do nothing. And this is where indicators of attack come in, right? Like we know what their objectives are and we're trying to capture this. We're describing this in an abstract way. What is it that they try to accomplish? That's what indicators of attack describe and when they act on these objectives then we can catch them. >> So I, I think that the the term indicators of attack, I, I, you may have coined it. I'm, I'm not sure. I think it was you announcement at, at black hat. Those indicators are not static, right? To your point, the humans on the other end are motivated. Are you a can, can AI help predict future indicators of attack maybe working with, with humans? >> Yeah, this is, this is something that we recently rolled out where we are connecting our AI intelligence to our indicator of attack framework. Where basically the AI crunches the big data and then the indicators, the, the knowledge that the AI generates, understanding the context of the situation, can feed into the indicators of attack that we're evaluating to see if an adversary is acting on a specific objective. And then if an IOA triggers, that can feed back into the AI and the AI can use that information to derive for more precise results. We have a good feedback loop between these two, these two systems and they're more tightly integrated now. >> As a, as an AI expert, I want to ask you, is is the intelligence, is AI actually artificial? Or is it, is it real? >> Well, it, it is artificial cause I guess we, we build it right? Like it's a human made. I, I think a lot of people get hung up on the term intelligent and it, it's not really intelligent in the say, in the sense that it acts on agency with, with agency like you would look at a problem, right? It's good at solving specific types of tasks and problems that we can define in ways that these algorithms work on it. But it is not the same level of creative thinking that a human brings to the problem. And this is, going back to the beginning of the conversation, this is where we like to have humans involved in the teaching of the AI. The AI connect autonomously in real time stopping threats. But there's humans that take a look at what is going on to give the AI input and feedback and, and improvements because we are up against other humans, right? You don't want to have a human kind of press the buttons of the AI until they found a way around it. But that's called adversarial machine learning. Very real threat as well. Like we are, we're looking at the problem as humans against humans. Like what, what tools do we need to bring to the battle to keep the adversaries out of our customer's networks? >> Okay. So my follow up is, but there are systems of agency for our detection is a, as an example. But your, I think your point is that that never would've been possible without humans. Is that right? Or... >> Yeah, like on, on the one hand, these systems get trained with human knowledge. On the other hand, there, there are humans that take a look at, if the systems give the right responses. Like there, there isn't like if you talk to your smart speaker, like, like for me, like I'm, I'm asking my smart speaker to turn a specific light on in my living room and it, it, half the time doesn't work, right? Like that, that wouldn't happen with a human. There's like a lot more context and understanding and humans are more robust. Like it's, it's harder to fool a human. The limitation that we humans have is complexity, complexity and volume. So we're trying to make like a peanut butter and cookie approach, a peanut butter and chocolate approach rather, where we want to use the human creativity alongside the AI, which can handle scale complexity and volume at unprecedented, unprecedented scales. >> And when you bring it out to the edge, we, we were just talking to Stefan Goldberg about IOT and extended IOT. When you think about, you know, AI, a lot of lot of AI today is modeling that's done in the cloud and then applied. But when you go out to the edge, you you're starting to see more AI inferencing and near realtime, or even real time. Will that change the equation? What's the future of, of, of AI and cyber look like? >> I think, I, I think it would be pervasively applied. So we are using it already on the edge, on our sensors, but also in the cloud, right? On the sensor, we want to be able to act very quickly on the endpoint, want to be able to act very quickly without any delay with local inflammation. Or if the system is offline for a period of time, right? So we have AI models running there. In the cloud, we have the advantage of being able to work with vast amounts of data without slowing down our customer's machines. So like models will be applied everywhere where there's data, like that's kind of the name of the game. Like let's bring, let's bring this, this type of artificial intelligence, this type of, of like refined digested expertise, wherever the data sits on the end point, in the clouds, where you have it. >> And CrowdStrike doesn't care, right? I mean, it's... >> We care about stopping the breaches. >> Yeah. But you're agnostic to the physical location of >> That, that's correct. >> The activity. So last question is, how should we as humans prepare for the future of AI in, in cyber? >> That's a, that's a good question. I, I would say like, stay, stay creative and like figure out how we can get that knowledge that you have like formalized into, into databases, right? AI, the way I look at it is an amplifier of human expertise. You do something at a small scale as a human, the AI system can do it at a big scale, right? Like it's kind of like digging with a spoon whether it's digging with an excavator, with a, with a backhoe. So I I'd say stay, stay creative and see how we can take things that we do as humans in the small scale and let's do it in the cloud, like with with large data volumes. >> Great advice, creativity, I think is, is a key. Sven, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. Listen, by, by the way, I meant to to tell our audience a lot of resources at siliconangle.com, thecube.net, wikibon.com, has a ton of research all available at for no charge. No, no, no password needed. Just access that. Check it out. We're live from the ARIA hotel in Las Vegas, Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante for the cube. We'll be back after this short break. (calming xylophone music)

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the bellagio Hotel >>in Las Vegas. >>It's the >>cube covering >>Ui Path forward. >>Four brought to >>you by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is here. We've been here for two days covering Ui Path Forward for lisa martin here with David Monty. We've talked about automation and many industries. Now this segment is going to focus on automation and healthcare. We've got two guests joining us Jim Petrosea Cto of Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Gadget. Dhaliwal. The global C. I. O. Industry lead at you. I pass guys welcome to the program. Thank you. So let's start unpacking from the CTO level and the ceo level the agenda for automation. Jim let's start with you. What does that look like >>for us. It's actually pretty strategic and part of as we think about digital and what digital transformation means, it actually plays a pretty key role. Um There are a lot of processes that can be very manual within a big organization like Blue cross and Blue shield and to be able to streamline that and take away kind of what I would call the mundane work. Right? The the you know, going through a spreadsheet and then typing it into the screen, there are a lot of processes like that that are legacy. But what if you could take that away um and actually create a better work experience for the people that work there right? And and focus on higher value type uh type things and it's really key. And it really It goes down to our our business folks right? There are a lot of things we can drive with automation. We started a program um in 2019. Um that's been quite successful. We now have 250 box, we measure what we call annualized efficiency gains. So how much efficiency are we getting by these bots? So the bots are doing um this repetitive work that people would do. Um And what we're finding is, you know, we've got about $11 million in any wise efficiency gain through the process and we're just getting started. Um But we're all we're not stopping there too though, we're enabling citizen developers. So we're saying, hey business, if you want to automate, you know, parts of your job, we're gonna help you do that. So we've got about 60 people that were training. Um We run bad Ethan's where they come together and they actually create bots uh And it's really really creating some some impact and buzz in our business >>anywhere from your lens, where does automation fit within the C. I. O. S. Agenda? And how do you work together in unison with the C. T. O. To help roll this out across the enterprise? >>Yeah, no, definitely. And in fact as a part of introduction, I can actually share that. How I'm wearing a Ceo had within your path since I'm just joining join path and I'm actually now helping a client ceos in their automation strategy but I was a deputy ceo in my prior role at L. A. County where actually I ran the automation strategy. So if we look at from our organization perspective B complex as L. A County which is such a Federated organization. From a Ceo perspective, the way we look at the strategy is it's always driven by the business goals of the city or a county and we typically drive into three different areas. One is how we can transform our operational processes so that we can save the tax dollars. It's all about doing more with the less dollars. And then second is about how we can transform our residents experience because end of the day it is all about how we can improve the quality of life for our residents. So we've got 10 million people for L. A. County, the largest populous county in us. So it was an uphill task to serve that such a diverse population need and that the third area is about how to transform the new business models because as we are moving away from a government centric approach to the residents centric approach, you really need to come up with a new digital solutions. And Ceo is in the center of all these three elements when you look at it. So it's a very appear to us to keep keep improving your efficiency and then at a time keep adding the new digital solutions and that's where automation strategy is kind of a horizontal strategy which enables all these components. So what I hear from >>that is alignment with the business. Yeah. Right. Change management. Absolutely. That's like really fundamental and then see IOS this this agent of transformation uh you can see or she has a horizontal purview across the organization now now jim the cto role is the automation at blue cross blue shield lead by you or you there to make sure the technology plugs into your enterprise architecture. What's your shoulder? >>You know? Uh my my role is really to drive uh what I'll call technology enabled business change. Right. So I actually uh started our our automation journey uh at hc sc and I did that by partnering with our business. Um There was actually a lot of buzz around automation and there were actually some small pockets of it, none of it was enterprise scale. Um Right. And we really wanted to go big in this and and working with the business sponsors, they saw value in it. Um and we've you know, we've generated um a lot of uh efficiency, better quality of work because of it but but I very closely had a partner with our business, we have a committee that is lead of business folks that I facilitate. So I view my role as an enabler, um we have to communicate the change management pieces is huge. Uh the education just having a common vernacular on what is automation mean, Right, because everybody interpreted it differently um and then being able to do it at an enterprise scale is quite challenging. Um You know, I I really enjoyed um one of the key notes, I don't know if you had a chance to see shankar by Duncan from the hidden brain, right? But he talked a lot about the brain aspect and how do you get people to change? And and that's a large part of it. There's a lot about technology, but there's really a lot about being a change agent um and and really working very closely with your business, >>how does one measure? I'm hearing a lot time saved. Our saved. How does one measure that and quantify the dollar impact, which by the way, I'm on record as saying the soft dollars are way bigger. And but when you're talking to the, you know, the bottom line CFO and it's all about, you know, the cash flow, whatever is, how do you measure that? >>I can take it. So we, what we do is as we define these use cases right? We we go through an actual structure product process where we we gather them. Um we then rate them and we actually prioritize them based on those that are going to have the greatest impact. Um and we can tell based on, you know, what is the manual effort today. So we understand there are X number of people that do this X number of days and we think this body can take that some load off of them. Right? Um So we we go in with the business case. Um And then the Ui Path platform actually allows us to measure well, how much is that pot running? Right. So we can actually sit there and say, well we wanted that thing to run 10 hours a day and it did and it's generated this kind of efficiency because otherwise the human would have had to do that work. >>So the business case is kind of redeploying >>human. It really is is really maximizing human capital and make and and you know really using because the bots do repetitive stuff really well. They don't do higher level thinking and and we don't view it as replacing people, we view it as augmenting and actually making them more efficient and more effective at what, how do you get the dollars out of that? Well, a couple of ways. Right. And so one of the things we've we've done is we we create and measure the efficiency our business users and financed by the way is one of our bigger ones. And the CFO is one of the sponsors of the program, um can decide how to reinvest it in a lot of cases it is actually cost avoidance as we grow, literally being able to grow without adding staff. I mean that's very measurable. Um in some cases it is actually taking, you know cost out um in in certain cases, but a lot of times that's just through attrition, right? You don't back fill positions, you let it happen naturally. Um and and then there's just things that happen to your business that you have to respond to give you a great example, state of texas, um passes what's the equivalent of the no surprise attack. But they did it there before the federal government did it. Um but it requires a lot of processes to be put in place, because now you have providers and payers having to deal with disputes, right? It actually generates a boatload of work. And we thought there might be, you know, 5000 of these in the first year, where there were 21,000 in the first year. And so far this year we're doubling that amount, right. We were able to use automation to respond to that without having to add a bunch of stuff. If we had to add staff for that, it would have literally been, you know, maybe hundreds of people, right? And but now, you know, there's, you can clearly put a value on it and it's millions of dollars a year, that we would have otherwise had to expect. >>The reason I'm harping on this lease is because I've been through a lot of cycles, as you know, and after the dot com boom, the the cost avoidance meant not writing the check to the software company, right? And that's what nick Carr wrote this, i. T matter. And then, and then, you know, post the financial crisis, we've entered uh a decade plus of awareness on the impact of technology. And I wonder if it's, I think this, I think this the cycle is changing I think. And I wonder if you have an opinion here where people, I think organizations are going to look at Technology completely different than they did like in the early 2000s when it was just easy to cut. >>No, I think the other point I will add to it. I agree with the gym. So we typically look at our away but it doesn't always have to be the cost. Right? If you look from the outcomes of the value, there are other measures also right? If you look at the how automation was able to help in the Covid generate. It was never about costs at that time. It was about a human lives. So you always may not be able to quantify it what you look at. Okay. What how are we maximizing the value or what kind of situations where we are and where we may not even have a human power to do that work. And we are running against the time. It could be the compliance needs. I'll give example of our covid use case which was pretty big success uh within L. A. County we deployed bots for the covid contact tracing program. So we were actually interviewing all the people who were testing positive so that we actually can keep track of them and then bring back that data within our HR so that our criminologists actually can look at the trends and see how we are doing as a county as compared to other counties and nationally. And we were in the peak, we were interviewing about 5000 people a day And we had to process that data manually into our nature and we deployed 15 members to do that. And they were doing like about 600 interviews a day. So every day we had a backlog of 2500 interviews. So it is not about a cost saving or a dollar value here because nobody planned for these unplanned events and now we don't have a time and money to find more data entry operators and parts were able to actually clear up all the backlog. So the value which we were able to bring it is way beyond the cost element. >>I I believe that 100% and I've been fighting this battle for a long time and it's easier to fight now because we're in this economic cycle even despite the pandemic, but I think it can be quantified. I honestly believe it can be tied to the income statement or in the case of a public sector, it could be tied to the budget and the mission how that budget supports the mission of the company. But I really believe it. And and I've always said that those soft factors are dwarf the cost savings, but sometimes, you know, sometimes the CFO doesn't listen, you know, because he or she has to cut. I think automation could change that >>for public sector. We look at how we can do more about it. So it's because we don't look at bottom line, it's about the tax dollars, we have limited dollars, but how we can maximize the value which we are giving to residents, it is not about a profit for us. We look at the different lens when it comes to the commercial >>Side, it's similar for us. So as a as a health care pair, because we're a mutual right? Our members and we have 17 million of them are really the folks that own the company and we're very purpose driven. Our our purpose is to do everything in our power to stand by members in sickness and in health. So how do you get the highest quality, cost effective health care for them? So if automation allows you to be more effective and actually keep that cost down, that means you can cover more people and provide higher quality care to our members. So that's really the driver for mission driven, >>I was gonna ask you as a member as one of your 17 million members, what are some of the ways in which automation is benefiting me? >>Um you know, a number of different ways. First off, you know, um it lowers our administrative costs, right? So that means we can actually lower our rights as as we go out and and and work with folks? That's probably the the the the bottom line impact, but we're also automating processes uh to to make it easier for the member. Right? Uh the example I used earlier was the equivalent of no surprises. Right. How do we take the member out of the middle of this dispute between, you know, out of network providers and the payer and just make it go away. Right, and we take care of it. Um but that that creates potentially administrative burden on our side, but we want to keep their costs down and we do it efficiently using it. So there's a number of use cases that we've we've done across, you know, different parts of our business. We automate a lot of our customer service, right? When you call um there's bots in the background that are helping that that agent do their job. And what that means is you're on the show, you're on the phone a lot shorter of a period of time. And that agent can be more concise and more accurate in answering your question. >>So your employee experience is dramatically improved, as is the member experience? >>Yes, they go hand in hand. They do go hand, unhappy members means unhappy employees, 100% >>mentioned scale before, you said you can't scale in this particular, the departmental pockets. Talk about scale a little bit. I'm curious as to how important cloud is to scale. Is it not matter. Can you scale without cloud? What are the other dimensions of scale? >>Well, you know, especially with my CTO had, we're we're pushing very heavily to cloud. We view ourselves as a cloud first. We want to do things in a cloud versus our own data centers, partially because of the scale that it gives us. But because we're healthcare, we have to do it very securely. So. We are very meticulous about guarding our data, how we encrypt information um, not only in our data center but in the cloud and controlling the keys and having all the controls in place. You know, the C. So and I are probably the best friends right now in the company because we have to do it together and you have to take that that security mind set up front. Right cloud first. Put security first with it. Um, so we're moving what we can to the cloud because we think it's just going to give us better scale as we grow and better economics overall, >>Any thoughts on that? I think a similar thoughts but if we look from L. A. county because of the sheer volume itself because the data which we are talking about. We had 40 departments within the county. Each department is serving a different business purpose for the resident beit voting or B justice or being social services and all and the amount of data which we are generating for 10 million residents and the amount of duplicate asi which it comes out because it's a very government centering model. You have a different systems and they may not be talking to each other. The amount of diplomacy and identity delicacy which we are creating and as we are enabling the interoperability between these functions to give us seamless experience keeping security in mind so fully agree on that because the end of the day we have to ensure that customer guarantee but it's a sheer volume that as and when we are adding these data sets and the patient's data as well as the residents data and now we have started adding a machine data because we have deployed so many IOT solutions so the data which is coming from those machines, the logs and all its exponential so that's where the scale comes into picture and how we can ensure that we are future ready for the upscale which we need and that's where cloud ability definitely helps a lot. >>What do you mean by future ready? >>So if you look at from a future smart city or a smart community perspective, imagine when machines are everywhere machines and IOT solutions are deployed, beat even healthcare, your bad information, you're even patient information, everything is interconnected and amount of data which is getting generated in that your automobile they're going to start talking to entertainment or we have to potentially track a single resident might be going same person going to the justice or maybe same person might be having a mental health issues, A same person might be looking for a social services, how we're going to connect those dots and what all systems they are touching. So all that interconnections needs to happen. So that exponential increase of data is a future readiness, which I'm talking about. Are we future ready from a technology perspective? Are we future ready from the other ecosystem perspective and how and how we're gonna manage those situations? Uh, so those are the things which we >>look at it and it's a it's a multiplier to, right? We all have this influx of information and you need to figure out what to do with it. Right. This is where artificial intelligence, machine learning is so important. But you also have interoperability standards that are coming. So now we're we have this massive data that each of our organizations have. But now you have interoperability which is a good thing for the member saying now I need to be able to share that data. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about >>that because a lot of changes in health care, um, are meaningful use. You have to show that to get paid but the standards weren't mature. Right? And so now that's changing what role does automation play in facilitating those standards. >>So, you know, we're big, big supporters of the fire standard that's out there um to in order to be able to support the standards and and create a P. I. S. And and pull together the information. What what will happen sometimes in the background is there's actually um artificial intelligence, machine learning models that create algorithms right? The output of that though often has to be active. Now a person can do something with that information or a vodka. Right? So when you start taking the ideal of artificial intelligence and now you have a robotic process that can use that to pull together the information and assimilated in a way to make it higher quality. But now it's available. It's kind of in the background. You don't see it but it's there helping. >>What are some of the things that you see? I know we're out of time but I just have a couple more questions. Some of the things that you see here we are you I path forward for we're in person. This is a bold company that's growing very quickly. Some of the announcements that were made, what are what are some of your reaction to that? And how do you see it helping move blue crush blue shield forward even >>faster. Well you know a lot of the announcements in terms of some of the features that that they've added around their robotics processing are great right? The fact that they're in the cloud and and some of the capabilities and and and better ability to to support that the process mining is key. Right. In order for abouts to be effective, you have to understand your process and you just don't want to necessarily automate the bad practices. Right? So you want to take a look at those processes to figure out how you can automate things smartly. Um and some of their capabilities around that are very interesting. We're going to explore that quite a bit but but I think they're the ambition here is beyond robotics. Right. It's actually creating um you know, applications that actually are using bots in the background which is very intriguing and has a lot of potential potentially to drive even more digital transformation. This can really affect all of our workers and allow us to take digital solutions out to the market a lot faster >>and to see what was going to ask you, you are here for four weeks at UI Path, you got to meet a lot of your colleagues, which is great. But what about this company attracted you to leave your former role and come over here to the technology vendor side. >>Well, I think I was able to achieve the similar role within L. A. County, able to establish the automation practice and achieve the maturity, able to stand up things and I feel that this is the same practitioner activity which I can actually take it back to the other clients ceos because of one thing which I really like about your hypothesis. RP is just a small component of it. I really want to change that mindset that we have to start looking ui path as an end to end full automation enterprise solution and it is not only the business automation, it's the idea automation and it's a plus combination and whether we are developing a new industry solutions with our partners to help the different industry segments and we actually helping Ceo in the center of it because Ceo is the one who is driving the automation, enabling the business automation and actually managing the automation ceo and the governess. So CEO is in left and center of it and my role is to ensure that I actually help those Ceos to make successful and get that maturity and you will path as a platform is giving that ability of length and breath and that's what is really fascinating me and I'm really looking forward that how that spectrum is changing that we are getting matured in a process mining area and how we are expanding our horizons to look at the whole automation suit, not just the R. P. Product and that's something which I'm really looking forward and seeing that how we're going to continue expanding other magic quadrants and we're actually going to give the seamless experience so the client doesn't have to worry about okay for this, I have to pick this and further, I have to pick something else >>that's seamless experience is absolutely table stakes these days. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining. David me, talking about automation and health care. Your recommendations for best practices, how to go about doing that and and the change management piece. That's a critical piece. We appreciate your time. >>Thanks for having. Thank >>you. Our pleasure for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas. The cubes coverage of you a path forward for continues next. Mhm. Mhm mm.

Upbeat Music >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day 2 of our coverage. We've been getting a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting, significantly, every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Amed, the corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials. He's going to talk us through why you have a why-can't-we-automate-it-all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation automation led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically, it was so well thought out. And then, when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. >> Yes. >> Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you're aiming to do and how quickly you're expecting to see change. >> Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, the company had doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double again. We were honest with ourselves, with the CFO and the finance leadership team, could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? We knew we had to do something, not just more things but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years. Set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So, we basically set some very ambitious goals. Which is, the key KPI that we set at our true north is, we're going to get 50 % of finance work effort, all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that. But that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. And the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it. To pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said, "This is possible now." And that's- >> I think we have to set the table here with your industry. Because you started your journey to PA automation in 2019. >> Yes. >> You participate in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging, industry on the planet. >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders but everybody else missed, absolutely no, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic, right? And now, chips are every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, "Oh, sell Applied Materials. Sell every semiconductor company." And then they realized, "Oh wow," kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade long transition to, maybe this never ending demand, who knows? So that's the backdrop of your business. That was driving it. What was it like inside your company? >> So Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic. We could see long term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company? We went all in on AI. Right? We believed in that growth, at a time when I think not everyone was so convinced. Okay, is this going to be- How strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is another big computing wave. The next big wave of computing. Coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So yes, that's a bet, a successful bet, the company made. No one could foresee what would the pandemic do but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth, that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. So we quickly organized and got finance, our organization well positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then, you know what we did? We accelerated. >> So your move to automation was an offensive move- >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. >> Hundred percent. What do investors want? Operating leverage. Operating leverage. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, right now all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity. Okay, you need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We wanted to be ahead. >> Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120+ Billion dollar market cap. You've got a 20+ Billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. >> Extremely. >> And then a 5X revenue multiple. That's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean that's, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. >> Yes and but the bar keeps moving. You've got to stay ahead, right? You've got to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset, I would say, in the company and our leadership team, that really propelled us towards this. The leadership of our CFO, Dan Durn, who invested. He made a bet. No one, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. >> You created the playbook. >> We created the playbook. >> Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership, talk to me about the appetite to be able to be able to transform so quickly. Such that when, as Dave said, you're on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to. How did you do that? >> I have to say, it is challenging. And it's at time's it feels counter-intuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay and we're transforming finance. And we're a resource constrained organization. Then you tell your people, "We've got more work to do. Transformation." And you're like, "Is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave?" But when you dig deep, you say, "How do you get mind share?" How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value and then you have to make sure you do it fast enough, where they want to stick around. It's counter-intuitive. "Hey, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and half years. All right everyone, we're going to do this." What happens? People are like, in-out. Okay yeah, it'll come, we'll deal with it. Then instead, you say, "Hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely. Top to bottom. 10 months. We're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands- Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months, all right? Oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want?" Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, "I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting and you get to have input on what you really want." Now people get excited. Like, "Oh, I'm going to work 25% more but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months." >> So, the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. "Oh, that's bad for Applied Materials." The exact opposite happened. You know, ARM changed the model, WAYFA volume's going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona. Which is, you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. >> Well, if you think about it, the fundamental demand isn't changing. Capacity has to go in. People think, wait a second, so and so is going to build less or whatever, The capacity, maybe geographically, is going to get dispersed out but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement. Then, how does automation play into- I just thing that the fundamental nature and pace of business is changing. For us. And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be more reactive, we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization. All the way deep into finance analyst forecasting, right? So, if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow. Too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old. It's stale. We're moving into a time and era where everything happens realtime. It always happened realtime but we just never had the tools to react realtime. Now, we have realtime business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Any minute of the day you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle everything firms up but it's not the big crank, right? You're fine tuning the knobs now. Which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't. What is the North Star of forecasting? Give me as much options as- viable options and then let me decide. Because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan. But you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together. So you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Viable plans. We're changing all of that. >> This might be out of your swim lane but you had a slide up today and it had the IT in the middle- >> Yes. >> So technology's fundamental. And then, you had the elephant. The Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, actionable insights. I remember reading about it, it's like you're collecting data across all the estate. So I'm like, wow this is a data company. Becoming a data company. So we've been talking a lot and of course the CFO purview is the reporting and I get that. The close, daily close, virtual close, all that. But then there's this whole line-of-business data play. >> Yes. >> And I'm wondering how automation fits there. I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. >> Yeah. Now, I can't speak to the capabilities you're talking to but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have amazing IT organization. I have to say, we within Applied, we're a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there is so much AI work being done. So we had the benefit of leveraging some of their capabilities for finance, when we launched Agile Finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing these RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay. And now, IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, they're taking it to sales. So it will have a role. Hundred percent. But they're obviously starting, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, for sure but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. >> But you addressed the dynamic. Which is, it started in a quick wind part of the company, finance. >> Yes. >> Which is logical. That's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago. A CFO conference, right? Then that now applies to the rest of the business. They're talking about operating leverage- >> Fundamental. Yeah. Hundred percent. >> How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance, such that IT becomes a catalyst in all these downstream reactions to get this going across the company? >> Important question. >> Well they work for you. >> They don't. >> Oh they don't. >> They don't work for us. They work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. >> Okay. >> The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're going to do it is the CIO. Okay, so you ask how do you get IT bought in? Well first thing, you have to get them in the tent. This is not about, "Oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that?" Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is such a, it's a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're going to learn together. This is a must have for finance. We believe strongly this is going to become a must have for the enterprise but we're going to make the investment. In that must have for the enterprise, IT has to play the roll, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in our being able to get to scale in 12 months. >> How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? >> Yeah. So we created, established an RPA COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes. Then, obviously there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that have to vet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOX compliant, we have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So, multiple parties have to engage but engage in an efficient way. >> We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella, emerge as an innovator. I see this all of the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. So you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge, that are technology savvy, they understand the operating leverage, we've used that term several times today, that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book Does IT Matter. It seems like technology has never been more important. Along with people and process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. >> I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All these SaaS platforms in the market place, right? What did they design for? Business users. Of course IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it. But the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT. Okay. Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that. Where, "Hey wait, I can do this. I can do this by myself." Okay. IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, analyze on the fly, in the moment. And they need to do it alone. >> Self serve, yeah. >> That's it. >> Self serve in realtime. I think one of the things, you mentioned it this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic, that realtime and access to realtime data is no longer a nice-to-have. >> Yes. >> It's really a business critical element of any industry. >> Hundred percent. >> When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I ask all the CFOs. >> He's been asking everyone that. >> There's an easy answer. I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. >> That's a good answer. >> That's good. >> Junaid, thank you so much for joining us. Talking to us about the transformation at Applied Materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple years. >> Great story. >> Of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Day two of our coverage. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>from the bellagio hotel in Las Vegas >>it's the >>cube >>covering Ui >>Path Forward four brought to you >>by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to las Vegas. The cube is live with you. I Path forward four at the bellagio lisa martin with Dave Volonte. We're gonna be talking about you I Path integration suite, we have a couple of guests joining us here. Mark Jeannie is here the GM of Ui Path, formerly the co founder and Ceo of cloud elements and Peter Villeroy also joins us Director of Global I. T. Automation practice at UI Path guys welcome to the program. >>Thanks lisa. Great to hear. >>So Mark, let's go ahead and start with you. The Cloud elements acquisition was done in about the last six months. Talk to us about why you chose to be acquired by Ui Path and where things are today. Some big announcements yesterday. >>Yeah absolutely. So yeah if you go back six months ago um you know we have been in conversations with you I Path for for quite a while and um you know as we were looking at our opportunities as an api integration platform. So cloud elements just to step back a little bit um was a leader in helping companies take a P. I. S integrate applications together and bed that into their into their apps and um you know I Path approached us about the combination of what's happening in the automation world and you know these these have been a society as the marine Fleming from I. D. C. Mentioned this morning integration and DARPA have been separate swim lanes and what we saw and what you I. Path approaches with was ability to combine these together and really be the first company to take and take ui automation and seamlessly connected together with A. P. I. Automation or api integration >>Peter What's been some of the feedback? We know you guys are more than 9000 customers strong now we've had a whole bunch of amount yesterday and today. What's been the feedback so far on the cloud elements acquisition? So >>there's a huge amount of interest. We've had very positive feedback on that lisa the combination of Ui driven automation and A. P. I. Uh Native Integrations is is key especially to the I. T. Leadership that I work with. Um some of whom have traditionally compartmentalized you ipads platform in the Ui space and legitimately think about their own internal processes as being having very little to do with the user interface right. And so combining Ui driven automation together with uh api integration really helps too pick them up where they are and show them the power of that kind of a hyper automation platform that can deliver value in a number of spaces. And you guys ever >>see the movie Blindside? All right. You know what I'm talking about with joe. Theismann gets hit from the blind side and then his career is over and and that's when people realized oh my gosh the left tackle for right handed quarterback is so important and it's subsequent drafts when somebody would pick a left tackle like a good left all the rest went and that's what's happening in in the automation business today. You guys took the lead, you you set the trend. People said wow this is actually going to be a huge market. And then now we're seeing all this gonna occur. And a lot of it from these big software companies who believe every dollar of software should go to them saying hey we can actually profit from this within our own vertical stacks. So what do you make of all the M. And A. That's going on in particular? There was one recently where private equity firm is mashing together a long time R. P. A vendor with a long time integration firm. So it looks like you guys, you know on the right >>side of history in this regard. Your thoughts. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean if you think about automation right you've got to obviously help people do their jobs better. But if you're going to automate a process and a department you needed connect the applications that they use that those people use otherwise you can't accomplish it. And where ap is fit in as is automation and ui automation has become more and more mission critical and it's become bigger and bigger part of enterprise I. T. Wants to get involved. And so enterprise gets involved and what's their stack. It's api based their technology stack is how you connect back is through api so more and more companies are seeing what you I path saw is that if you're gonna automate every process and every department for every person you need to connect to every application that they're using and that's why this is now becoming right. Three companies now just recently have done these types of acquisitions of bringing an integration platform in and combining them together are trying to combine them together. >>All mps are not created equally as we know. Some are sort of half baked lot of them. Many of them don't have decent documentation so there's sort of a spectrum there. How do you, how do you think about prioritizing? How do you think about the landscape? Do you just kind of ignore the stuff that's not well documented and eventually that will take care of itself. How should we think about there have always >>been layers of integration right. Especially working with the ICTy organizations. So you've got our native integrations would make it easy to drag and drop activities and then you've got the A. P. I. Is that we can consume with various activities. That area has really grown through the acquisition of cloud elements and then you've got that third layer where when all else fails, you go on to the user interface and interact with the application like a human does and what you see is that our our interaction with college elements really enables a great enhancement of that lower base level um which is mildly interesting to the lines of business very important. I Yeah, for sure. >>So the reason I asked that question is I was talking to one of your customers this big ASAP customers said I love you ipad. The problem I have is I got so many custom mods and so it's just you know orally documented and I can't I wanna put automation in there but I can't. So to those parts of the tech stack become like the main frame of you know what I mean? And just sort of they live there and they just keep doing their thing but there's so much innovation that pops up around it. How do you how do you see that? >>Well that's part of the agility that comes with the platform like you ipads is that you can interact with the very clean uh swagger documented restful aPI s and you can interact with SCP on their proprietary ages old A. P. I. S. Um Those are things that we've traditionally done decently well, but again through this acquisition we could do that on a grander scale um with bidirectional triggering and all the goodness that you >>solve that problem today that your customer and this is a couple of years ago, you can solve that problem with cloud elements. Is that right? >>Yeah, absolutely. The the ability to integrate too these enterprise platforms like ASAP you need multiple tools to do the job. Right. So ui automation is great but if you've customized ui significantly or other things like that then the A. P. I can be a great structure for it and other cases where um that api provides a resiliency in a in a scale to it that um opens up new processes as well to those corporate systems. Right? So the balance of being able to bring these two worlds together is where you can unlock more because you got >>east west automation >>that's very good overhead and now >>you're going north south with cloud elements is deeper. Right, >>bottom line from the VP of its point of view, the more that can be done from a machine to machine communication the better. So sure. >>What's the opportunity for the existing cloud elements customers to take advantage of here? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um We've continued to support, brought our customers over with us. Uh Part of our customer base has actually been a significant number of software customers. Uh cos S. A. P. S. One of them doc you sign gain site, you know, so household names in the world of software as well as large financial services institutions like US Bank and Capital One and american Express, all of them had that common need where um they wanted to have an api centric approach to being able to connect to customers and partners and leverage our platform to do that. So we will continue to support that extend that. But we see opportunities where again we couldn't automate everything for our customers just threw a PS And uh you know for example one of our major financial services institutions were working with wants to take um and provide a robot for their uh customers and commercial payments to be able to automatically kick off in A. P. I. And so that seamless integration where we can combine that automation with robots leveraging and kicking off a P. I. S automatically takes us further into automating those processes for those >>customers. So you guys six months right. Uh talk about how that integration api integration company better gone smoothly. But what was that like you guys are getting the knack of M and a talk about that, what you learn maybe what you would do differently to even accelerate further, How'd it go? Uh >>That's the best answer from you having been on the >>acquisition side. Um Well we how well it went is six months later, which I think is really unheard of in the technology world, we're introducing our combined offering you I Path integration service that essentially takes what cloud elements built embeds it right into automation. Cloud studio in the Ui Path products. We and uh it's been a global effort. Right? So we had the Ui Path team was based in Hyderabad Denver and Dallas and then we've got um Ui Path engineers working with that cloud elements team that are in Bucharest Bellevue and bangalore and with the miracles of zoom and uh that type of thing, never meeting anyone in person, we were able to integrate the product together and launch it here today >>six months is a fast turnaround time frame was how much of that was accelerated by the, by the fact of the global situation that we're in. >>Yeah, well you know in some respects that that helped right? Because we um um we didn't have to waste time traveling and we could hop on zoom calls instantly. We spent a lot of time even over zoom making sure there was a cultural fit. You I path has a, you know, not only the humble, bold and type of values but it's a very collaborative environment, very open and collaborative environment as Brent can attest to. And that collaboration, I think in that spirit of collaboration really helped us feel welcome and move quickly to pull this together. And also >>the necessity is the mother of innovation right. Uh you ipad traditionally being popular in the CFOs organization were becoming the C I O s best friend and the timing was right to introduce this kind of capability to combine with what we traditionally do well and really move into their picking up like I said the customer where they are and leading them into that fully end to end automation capability and this was integral. So it wasn't time to kick the tires but to get moving >>and my right, there's a governance play here as well because I. T. Is kind of generally responsible for governance if you make it easier for them to whatever governance systems they're using >>governance privacy >>security that now you can just connect. They don't have to rip and replace. Is there an angle there? >>Sure, yeah. So nothing is more important than I. T. Than than control and governments and change management and half of the uh conversations we're having out there on the floor are around that right um uh ensuring that all of the good governance is in place um and we have a lot of the uh integrations and frameworks necessary to help that through your devops pipeline and doing proper ci cd and test automation um and you know introducing that integration layer in addition to what we already have just helps all of that to uh move more smoothly and bring more value to our customers. >>Mark talk to me about some of the feedback from customers that you mentioned, doc Watson. S A P probably I imagine joint customers with you. I path now there you're working together, what's the what's in it for them? >>Yeah, no the feedback has been tremendous. Right, so um api automation is not new to you. I path but customers have been asking for more capability. So one of them is in that governance area that we were just talking about, right, the ability to create connections centrally enable them disable them. Right? You got mission critical corporate applications. You want to be able to make sure that those applications are being controlled and monitored. Right? So that was one aspect. And by bringing this as a cloud based service, we can accomplish that. Um the other area is that this eventing capability, the ability to kick off workflows and processes based on changes to corporate applications, a new employees added in workday. I want to kick off a process to onboard that new employee and that triggered eventing service has been really well received and then um yeah, so that I'd say with the ability to also create new connections more simply was the third big factor. Uh we created a standardized authentication service. So no matter where you are in the UI Path product line, you get a consistent way to create a new connection, whether it's a personal connection by a business user too, you know, google docs or Microsoft office or your C O E R I T. Creating a connection to uh an important corporate system. >>How about the partner? I know you guys had partner day here leading into forward for they must be stoked about this gives you a lever to even add new partners. What was those >>conversations like? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. The partners are excited about those same features but um they're also excited about something in our roadmap which we expect to be previewing early next year and that's a connector builder. So the ability for partners to uh more quickly than ever create their own connectors. That'll work just like first party connectors that we ui Path build and add them into catalogs, share them in the market place. So there's new revenue opportunities, new opportunities for partners to create reusable assets that they can leverage and yeah so um lots of things, lots of work to continue to do, right? It's only been six months and uh but that's that's gonna be a big initiative going forward. >>So integration service as you mentioned, announced at this conference, we know that that's the first step obviously accomplished as we also talked about very quickly in a six month time period. But what does the future hold for api automation and integration service? >>So um one of the key areas just continue to expose the integration service um more broadly in the Ui Path product portfolio. Now that we have this service, more Ui Path products will be able to leverage it. Right? We're starting off with studio and orchestrator but that we can all use and share that common common capability. Um The other is to make access to complex business systems easier. So you think about it right. A uh to get a purchase order from net suite might take five or six api calls to do. Well, a citizen developer doesn't know what those five or six things you have to do. So we'll be creating these business activities or just get me open purchase orders that will work seamlessly in the studio product. And behind the scenes. Well, chain together those 56 aPI calls to make that a simple process. Right? So taking the integration service and making it even more powerful tool for that citizen developer than nontechnical user as well. So that's >>development work you're going to do. >>That's what we're gonna do as well as enable partners to do as well. So it's a key part of our road map over time. Because >>yeah I mean the partner pieces key because when net suite changes how it you're creating that abstraction layer. So but that's value add for the partners. >>Absolutely. And they have that domain expertise, right. They can create assets, leveraging the UI path automation capabilities but also bring their knowledge about A. S. A. P. Or workday and those oracle ebs and those core business systems and then combine that together into assets that enhance integration service that they build and I can I can share with their customers and share with our market >>because the work workday developer is going to know about that well ahead of time. No, >>it's coming and they know better than we do. Right. That's their business. That's what they know really well. >>Nice nice value at opportunity, peter >>One of the things that you iPad has been known for is its being very and I've said this on the program the last two days, that's being a good use case for land and expand. You guys have 70% of revenue that comes from existing customers. Talk to me about the cloud elements acquisition as a facilitator of because you kind of mentioned, you know, we're used to be really in bed with the cfos now we're going to see us and we've heard from a number of your customers where they started in finance and it's now Enterprise White, how is this going to help facilitate that? Even more? >>It really helps, you know, touching on what Mark just mentioned about the citizen developer, right, just as one of many examples, the empowerment of end users to automate things for themselves um is critical to that land and expand um successes that we've been seeing and where from an I. T standpoint, the frustration with the citizen developer is, you know, maybe what they're building isn't so top notch right? It works for themselves. What we can't replicate that, but put making it easy to make api integration part of what they do in studio X is so key to enhancing also the reusability of what's coming out of there. So that c uh C O E S can replicate that across teams are globally within their organization and that's part of land and expand because you may find something that's valuable in one line of business replicates easily into another line of business if the tool set is in place >>pretty powerful model lisa >>it is guys. Thanks so much for joining us today, talking about the club elements acquisition, what you're uh, doing with integration service, What's to come the opportunities in it for both sides and your partners? We appreciate your time. >>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. I >>appreciate it. Thank you for >>David Want I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cube live in las Vegas at the bellagio Ui Path forward for stick around. We'll be right back. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante, we are with UiPath at FORWARD IV. The next topic of conversation is going to be a good one. And that's because it's automation for good. I've got two guests here joining Dave and me. James Droskoski, strategic account exec at UiPath joins us, and Brian Klochkoff, head of automation at Dentsu. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah. Happy to be here. >> We're going to, we're going to dig into automation for good, which is going to be a really feel good conversation. We're going to get into what you're doing. But Brian, I wanted you to give the audience an overview of Dentsu as an organization. Who are you? What do you guys do? >> Sure. So Dentsu is a large network of advertising agencies. We're about 45,000 people large, $10 billion plus in revenue, going across about 125 markets. So we're a large enterprise advertising media, creative CXM type business. We're really focused on helping to elevate our clients' value when it comes to the value proposition around marketing, advertising, and media. >> So you think about that as a, as a, as a, a business that maybe, you know, it's hard to understand where automation might fit in. On the other hand, it's like a lot of moving parts, a lot of arms and legs. >> Brian: Mm-hmm. So how are you applying automation to the business? >> Sure. So when we first started doing proof of concepts level approaches, we approached things in a traditional, Hey, let's go look at the shared services groups. Why are we having invoice processing delays? Things like that. And we started being a bit more prescriptive and proactive about how we were applying the limited POC budget we had to go after these problems. And we started doing some root cause analysis to understand the interaction between the back office functions and the mid-office functions. And what we uncovered was that we could actually be really good custodians of budget and enable people at the same time by solving for problems at a root cause analysis level. So what I mean by that is maybe an invoice is coming down the pipe, and it's not getting processed because it's missing critical information that could be easily added six processes upstream. So what really helped elevate the conversation that we're having around automation for good and be a catalyst for we're going to talk about a bit later is we just started connecting people from the mid-office to the back office, helping them understand, Hey, if we actually follow a process properly, put the right controls in place with RPA to generate critical data elements on those invoices, Shaler in the back office doesn't have to work the weekends because there's not a pipeline back load of invoices for him to process. So we actually connected those mid-office people with the back office people, and it really drove that human connection to drive the change management within our automation journey. And that's kind of been the crux of what we've wanted to do over the past four years, finding ways to elevate our people's potential by integrating automation and AI into their actual day-to-day work. >> Hmm. So tech for good is a theme that you hear a lot and as a, as a media company, that, that, that kind of, we're not gotcha media, you know, we more want to tell the story of tech athletes, and I think we've done a pretty good job of that over the past decade, but so it goes to tech's under fire constantly, especially big tech. We hear the Facebook hearings today and so forth, but so automation kind of early days, oh, you're going to take away my job. I think generally speaking with the fatigue of Zoom and the perpetual workday, people begin to understand that, Hey, maybe automation is a good thing. But automation for good, what, what is that, James? >> Yeah, well, it's, it's not doing technology for the sake of technology. You know? At the end of the day, when we implement solutions with our customers like Dentsu, it's about, what's the impact, what's the change, what's the benefit? And what's unique about Dentsu is because they've grown through acquisition and there are lots of different companies come together, you have to focus on the people first because there is no one process or one system that we can look and just automate that system or process. So automation for good is about focusing on the people, and how do we take the solutions and the programs and the technologies we have and make an impact so that somebody's day is better. Their, their, their job is better. The process they're doing is easier and they can focus on more of the things that make them different. You know? Specifically as we'll uncover in the conversation, you know, we looked at a program that Dentsu is doing around working with different types of people, as far as people with autism, and what was the impact we could do there? And that's uncovered a journey that we've been together for the last two years around seeing how we can make an impact with those types of folks who might not get the same types of opportunities as everybody else. >> Brian, talk about the, the catalyst for that program at Dentsu a couple years ago. >> Sure. So it goes back to that foundational layer of elevating people's potential. So the testimonial that we had from our own employees around applying automation in meaningful ways to progress their day-to-day came from an employee in the mid-office who said, I didn't go $160,000 in student debt to copy paste stuff from Excel into this proprietary platform that we use for media. And that really resonated with us, as leaders in this space, and with our executive leadership, because there was a gap between what our peoples' skills were and what they were actually doing. They wanted to do Mad Men type stuff. They want it to be the Don Drapers and the Peggy Olsons of our industry. And they were losing that opportunity because we weren't tapping into the skills that they had to drive human centric solutions for our clients. So taking that concept, we looked at the partnerships that we have with our outsourcing providers and Autonomy Works, which we're going to doing a session later tomorrow with the CEO, Dave Friedman, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about how the unique skill sets of that company and those people can actually elevate them to do more tech enabled work, but also enabling our own team to focus on building solutions with the skills that we have by allowing them to use the skills that they have to do the machine learning training of models and things like that, which they really excel at from a detail oriented perspective. And that's not only a feel good story, but it's, it's great for our business because the resources on my immediate team are building product, they're building solutions, and we can rely on an excellent partner in them to help us with the maintenance overhead that we're creating through those solutions. And eventually through automation cloud, driving better outcomes through positive, negative reinforcement within machine learning. >> And there are specific examples with individuals with autism. Correct? >> Correct. That's right. >> Yeah. >> Add some color to that. What is that all about? >> Yeah. Let me tell you a little story. So when, when they first brought the conversation to me, I was terrified because I, the type of work that they were outsourcing was very repetitive rule-based. And I'm like, this is perfect for automate. This is exactly what we automate. I was terrified that the program we were going to work on together was going to eliminate the program. And so I was, you know, cautiously, you know, approached it. >> How ironic. >> Yeah. I was like, Hey, that sounds like a great idea. And I hung up. I was like, oh, how are we going to, how am I going to figure out this one? But through the conversation, and we just started, you know, brainstorming and putting our heads together. What was interesting is because of the way that automations work, as far as being very structured and repetitive, it lends itself well to workers with autism. It's exactly the way they think. And what we actually found after kind of coming up with the collaborative ideas, hey, wait a second. We were already doing these kind of botathon hackathon type programs with the Dentsu employees, teaching them the skills, how to build automations for themselves. What if we kind of modified it and adjusted it to cater to these types of individuals who learn differently, and we have to approach it differently. And we went through the program, we adjusted everything. And what was incredible to see was they thrived with the ability to learn how to work this way. They built things that made them more productive, that created more capacity. They could do more with less now, work with more customers, do more work for, for their, for their customers because they had this almost assistant that was kind of like them. And it was, it was just so rewarding. You know, we talk about, again, what's automation for good all about? It's about that personal reward. >> Brian: Yeah. >> I mean, for me, you know, we didn't sell any more licenses or it wasn't about the commercial transaction. It was about, you know, catering to the segment of the workforce that, first of all, it was very educate, enlightening to me to see how many folks are out there that are unemployed. And I got to meet these first 15 individuals that couldn't have been more amazing and more smart and more diligent and hardworking. And the numbers are something in the lines of between 50% and 90% unemployed because they just don't get the same opportunities as people without autism. It's kind of the world's set up for us. So to know that we could do this kind of program together to go have an impact in this community, was the reward in and of itself. And, you know, we've since been working together on how we continue to expand that, how do we, you know, take that forward and, and bring that everywhere. Cause that's, the end of the day, I think beyond, you know, revenue, this is the stuff that really matters, especially in an organization at Dentsu that this is important. >> Yeah. And I think building on the missed opportunity piece around 50% to 90% being unemployed, that's a missed opportunity for business as well. So those skills are so niche and they're so necessary for us to thrive within an environment that's moving as rapidly as we are. Because we just can't keep pace with the change of feature sets that are being released coupled with maintaining existing solutions that we've built. So it's in cross enabling people to really complement each other's unique skills and strengths based off of strong, true partnership. So it really became a beautiful three-way partnership between Dentsu, Autonomy Works and UiPath that we continue to evolve as UiPath makes additional releases with emerging tech that we're officially hearing about right now. So we have a ton of different ideas of how we can bring that into the fold. And what resonates with us the most is hearing different perspectives on how to apply that coming from that working group. So just a different way of thinking about things and the diversity of thought really resonates with, Hey, are we actually applying this thing the right way? Should we be thinking about this differently? Because you get a lot of yes people, you know, when we come and talk to people about how to apply this technology. And when you have somebody with a different perspective, it's able to help us figure out what our long-term strategy is actually going to look like, by taking advantage of the resources and partnerships that we already have in place. >> In terms of that strategic vision, how do you think this three-way partnership that you mentioned is going to influence that percentage of those, these individuals who are unemployed? What are you, any predictions on how much you can bring that down with automation? >> I think that depends on Dave's staffing plan. But, but the goal is to grow, right? So I mean this, this is a, a startup out of Chicago that has, you know, a healthy amount of staff. But finding ways to apply those skills in new ways with technology that's emerging, the horizon is your, is your end point. Right? And I think with the advent of low-code no-code machine learning coming into this type of a platform, it's, it's only opportunistic. There's only, there's only things ahead of us to do that. We just have to make sure that we train people properly and give them that opportunity because they're going to run with it with the right leadership and those skills. >> Yeah. What's exciting also is, is, you know, what started as an idea and a conversation that's now turned into a pilot program and a little bit of expansion of the stuff we're working on together, we've taken some of the excitement and spread it beyond that now. So we've got partners like ENY and PWC and Revature that are saying, and Special Eastern and Automatic, who helped in the initial program saying, how can we help? What can we do? How can we broaden this? And how can we go out to the larger community and make a bigger impact? So, you know, I think it's exciting. We know, we can see how fast RPA and these types of technologies are causing change. And we've got to make sure that people don't get left behind. Especially, you know, someone as this important part of a segment of a workforce. If we can equip them with these skills to be relevant to their current employers or future employers, I think it's, it's critical. You know, another like moment for me during this process was I took for granted, you know, what working actually means, right? It creates independence for us, right? So you get a job, you get paid and generate income. You have the independence now to go live on your own, provide for yourself. A lot of these individuals, I learned, are still living with their parents because they can't get employment. They don't have that independence that we take for granted. So I think, again, that's the essence of what automation for good is all about, is, is being able to go make an impact like that, to that community. And it's, you know, we talk about cultures and brands and you know, it's also great to work with an organization like Dentsu cause they get it, right? Their product is ideas. It's human capital is their, their main ingredient of what they generate value for their customers. And so be able to take that and help people is just, I think what it's all about. >> You're lucky both to be in a business that the incentives are aligned. >> Yeah. >> You're not in businesses that are designed to appropriate data and push ads in front of our face. >> Yeah. >> In a lot of big companies, it's almost like, okay, we got to do this. I don't mean to overstate this, but we have to do this because we're big and we're rich. >> Yeah. >> And so, and if we don't, we're going to get attacked. >> Yeah. Okay. And it's sort of more like a check, check box and to put somebody in charge of it. >> Yep. >> You know, oftentimes a woman or a person of color. And I shouldn't be negative on that. >> Yeah. >> That's fine. That's good to do. But it just seems like there's a nice alignment with automation. AI could be similar because I mean, AI could be used for really bad. Automation. Okay, it maybe takes, the perception is it takes jobs away, but it's a really nice alignment that you can point at a lot of different initiatives. >> Yeah. >> So I think that's really a fortunate dynamic. >> And that's, you know, that's what defines a partnership, right? It's that alignment of long-term interests that, you know, you make the investments now and the sacrifices now to drive that. It's not just commercial. It's not just transactional. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean, we were talking about the opportunities for these types of people and for us as a customer and for UiPath. It's it exists within that AI conversation that you were just talking about >> Dave: Yeah. >> Because from a technical perspective, you want to mitigate as much algorithmic bias within your training models. That's what these people are doing. It's helping to train models much more rapidly and effectively and objectively than we could have done otherwise. And that's, having that as part of our extended partnership within our network is going to accelerate the type of work that we want to do within the releases that we're seeing coming out of this conference. Because we don't have to worry about, oh, well, we've got to focus on tax forms and training the models to notice a signature. Because Autonomy Works has us covered there. They're enabling us to do more. We're enabling them to do a little more. And that's, that's the beauty of this intersection between the partners. >> Brian, I presume you talk with prospective customers of UiPath. And I presume also that you probably looked at some of their competitors. If you think about what differentiates this fast moving company, they talked this morning about the cadence of releases. Woo. Very fast. >> Brian: Yeah, it's a lot. >> Why UiPath for Dentsu? >> UiPath has been a tremendous partner for us since about 2017. And we've been able to move on that journey with UiPath. We've been able to help understand the products roadmaps and move at a similar pace as each other. So we're really lucky in that we have the flexibility as an advertising and media company that we're not beholden to internal audits, external audits, and really defined regulatory bodies. So we made a decision, I don't know what, six, seven months ago to collapse six UiPath on-prem instances and migrate to cloud with the sponsorship of our global CTO and our America CTO, just because it was the right thing to do. And because it would enable this type of partnership with external providers. So being able to move at that similar pace from a release cycle, but also from a feature adoption perspective, it's, it just makes the most sense for us. And we have that liberty to go to go do those things as we need to. >> Yeah. So the move to the cloud, you get, you're able to take advantage much faster. >> Yeah. >> Because what did we hear this morning? You release every six months. >> James: Yep. >> Yes. Which is typical for an on-prem. >> James: Yeah. >> And then, but you got to prepare for that. >> James: Yeah. >> I don't know how many N minus ones you support, but it's not infinite. >> James: Yeah. >> You got to move people along, so people have to prep. Whereas now in the cloud, there's the feature. Boom. >> Yeah. >> So being invested in automation for good topic, it's not, it's about automation for good across people in general, within internally to us and externally to us. For our clients, for our employees, and for our partners. The automation cloud enables that to happen much more seamlessly because we don't have the technical debt in place that requires people to VPN into our network and go through the bureaucracy of security, legal, and privacy. Which we've already done by the way, but those conversations bureaucratically still need to happen. With automation cloud, we're able to spin up Autonomy Works employees in real-time and give them the right set of access to go pursue the use cases that they want to, and that we need them to. So that, that technical debt release that we've experienced through the automation cloud is what's enabling us to do this type of good work. >> That makes sense. A bit more, less friction, obviously greater scale. >> Yeah. >> Easier to experiment. >> Yeah. >> Fail fast. >> We went from 12 separate programs to one program in a matter of a couple of months. >> It was wild. >> Yeah. >> And I imagine you're only really scratching the surface here with what you're doing with automation, that really, the horizon is the limit, as you said. Guys, thank you for joining us, talking about automation for good, what you're doing at Dentsu RPA with autistic adults. There's probably so many other great use cases that will come from this. Guys, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thanks, you guys. >> Awesome. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from Vegas UiPath FORWARD IV. (upbeat music plays)