(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

>> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everyone we're here live in Washington D.C. for Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman our next guest is Dr. Swaine Chen, Senior Research Scientist of Infectious Disease, the Genome institute of Singapore. And also an assistant professor at The Medicinal National University of Singapore. Great to have you on, I know you've been super busy, you were on stage yesterday, we tried to get you on today, thanks for coming in and kind of bring it in to our two days of coverage here. >> Thank you for having me, I'm very excited to be here. >> So we were in between breaks here and we're talking about some of the work around DNA sequencing but, you know it's super fascinating. I know you've done some work there but, I want to talk first about your presence here at the Public Sector Summit. You were on stage, tell your story 'cause you have an very interesting presentation around some of the cool things you're doing in the cloud, take a minute to explain. >> That's right, so one of the big things that's happening in genomics is the rate of data acquisition is outstripping Moore's Law right? So for a single institute to try to keep up with compute for that, we really can't do it. So that really is the big driver for us to move to cloud, and why we're on AWS. And so then, of course once we can do that once we can sort of have this capacity, there's lots of things that my research is mostly on infection diseases, so one of the things where really you've got, all of a sudden, you've got a huge amount of data you need to process would be a case like an outbreak. And that just happens it happens unexpectedly. So we had one of these that happened that I talked about. And the keynote yesterday was on Group B Streptococcus. This is a totally unexpected disease. And so all of a sudden we had all this data we had to process, and try to figure out what was going on with that outbreak. And unfortunately we're pretty sure that there's going to be other outbreaks coming up in the future as well, and just, being able to be prepared for that. AWS helps us provide some of that capacity, and we're you know, continuously trying to upgrade our analytics for that as well. >> So give me an example of kind of where this kind of hits home for you, where it works. What is doing specifically? Is it changing the timeframe? Is it changing the analysis? Where is the impact for you? >> Yeah so it's all of this right? So it's all the sort of standard things that AWS is providing all of the other companies. So it's cheaper for us to just pay for what we use, especially when we have super spiky work loads. Like in the case of an outbreak right? If all of a sudden we need to sort of take over the cluster internally, well there's going to be a lot of people screaming about that, right? So we can kick that out to the cloud, just pay for what we use, we don't have to sort of requisition all the hardware to do that, so it really helps us along these things. And also gives us the capacity too think about you know as data just comes in more and more, we start to think about, lets just increase our scale. This is somethings that been happening, sort of incessantly in science, incessantly in genomics. So as just an example from my work and my lab we're studying infectious diseases we're studying mostly bacterial genomics. So the genomes of bacteria that cause infections. We've increased our scale 100x in the last four years in terms of the data sets that we're processing. And we see the samples coming in, we're going to do another 10x in the next two years. We just really wouldn't have been able to do that on our current hardware. >> Yeah, Dr. Chen, fascinating space. We love for years there was discussion of well oh how much it costs, to be able to do everything had gone down. But what has been fascinating is you've look, you've talked about that date and outstripping Moore's Law, and not only what you can do but in collaboration with others now, because there's many others around the globe that are doing this. 'Cause talk about that level of data, and how the cloud enables that. >> Yeah so that's actually another great point. So genomics is very strong into open source, especially in the academic community. Whenever we publish a paper, all the genomic data that's in that paper, it gets, uh oh (laughs). Whenever we, whenever we publish-- >> Mall's closing in three minutes. >> Three minutes cloud count. >> Three minutes, okay. Whenever we publish a paper, that data goes up and gets submitted to these public databases. So when I talk about 100x scale, that's really incorporating world wide globally all the data that's present for that species. So as an example, I talked about Group B Streptococcus, another bacteria we study a lot is E. coli, Escherichia coli. So that causes diarrhea, it causes urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections. When we pull down a data set locally, in Singapore, with 100, 200, 300 strains we can now integrate that with a global database of 10,000, 20,000 strains and just gain a global prospective on that. We get higher resolution, and really AWS helps us to pull in from these public databases, and gives the scale to burst out that processing of that many more strains. >> So the DNA piece of your work, does that tie into this at all? I mean obviously you've done a lot of work with the DNA side, was that playing into this as well? >> The? >> The DNA work, you've done in the past? >> Yeah so all of the stuff that we're doing is DNA, basically. So there are other frontiers, that have been explored quite a lot. So looking at RNA and looking at proteins and carbohydrates and lipids, but at the Genome Institute in Singapore, we're very focused on the genetics, and mostly are doing DNA. >> How has the culture changed from academic communities with cloud computing. We're seeing sharing, certainly a key part of data sharing. Can you talk about that dynamic, and what's different now than it was say five to even 10 years ago? >> Huh, I'd say that the academic community has always been pretty open, the academic community right? It's always been a very strong open source compatible kind of community right? So data was always supposed to be submitted to public databases. Didn't always happen, but I think as the data scale goes up and we see the value of the sort of having a global perspective on infectious diseases and looking for the source of an outbreak, the imperative to share data right? That looking at outbreaks like Ebola, where in the past people might try to hold data back because they wanted to publish that. But from a public health point of view, the imperative to share that data immediately is much stronger now that we see the value of having that out there. So I would say that's one of the biggest changes is the imperative is there more. >> I agree I think academic people I talk to, they always want to share, it might be not uploaded fast enough. So time is key. But I got to ask you a personal question, of all the work you've done on, you've seen a lot of outbreaks. This is kind of like scary stuff. Have you had those aha moments, just like mind blowing moments where you go, oh my God we did that because of the cloud? I mean an you point to some examples where it's like that is awesome, that's great stuff. >> Well so we certainly have quite a few examples. I mean outbreaks are just unexpected. Figuring out any of them and being able to impact, or sort of say this is how this transmission is, or this is what the source is. This is how we should try to control this outbreak. I mean all of those are great stories. I would say that , you know, to be honest were still early in our transition to the cloud, and we're kind of running a hybrid environment right now. Like really when we need to burst out, then we'll do that with the cloud. But most of our examples, so far, you know we're still early in this for cloud. >> To the spiky is the key value for you, when the hits pipe out. >> So what excited you about the future of the technology that, do you believe we'll be able to do as we just accelerate, prices go down, access to more information, access to more. What do you think we're going to see in this field the next, you know, one to three years? >> Oh I think on of the biggest changes that's going to happen, is we're going to shift completely how we do, for example in outbreaks right? We're going to shift completely how we do outbreak detection. It's already happening in the U.S. and Europe. We're trying to implement this in Singapore as well. Basically the way we detect outbreaks right now, is we see a rise in the number of cases, you see it at the hospitals, you see a cluster of cases of people getting sick. And what defines a cluster? You kind of need enough of these cases that it sort of statistically goes above your base line. But we actually, when we look at genomic data we can tell, we can find clusters of outbreaks that are buried in the baseline. Because we just have higher resolution. We can see the same bacteria causing infections in groups of people. It might be a small outbreak, it might be self limited. But we can see this stuff happening, and it's buried below the baseline. So this is really what's going to happen, is instead of waiting until, a bunch of people get sick before you know that there's an outbreak. We're going to see that in the baseline or as it's coming up with two, three, five cases. We can save hundreds of infections. And that's one of the things that's super exciting about moving towards the future where sequencing is just going to be a lot cheaper. Sequencing will be faster. Yeah it's a super exciting time. >> And more researching is a flywheel. More researching come over the top. >> Yep, exactly, exactly. >> That's great work, Dr. Swaine Chen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate-- >> No thank you. >> Congratulations, great talk on the keynote yesterday, really appreciate it. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action here as we close down our reporting. They're going to shut us down. theCUBE will go on until they pull the plug, literally. Thanks for watching, I'm John Ferrier, Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante. Amazons Web Services Public Sector Summit, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017, a hundred thousand people. The Las Vegas Convention Center is packed. And it's everything you could ever want to get involved in video and media, and it' pretty crazy exciting. I hope, trying and get the guys from spending all of our budget money next year on new cameras. But, we're excited to have Brian Raleigh on. He's a VP post-production and production business intelligence at ABC Studios. Welcome. >> Thank you, I'm excited to be here, as well. >> Absolutely, so first impressions of the show. You said you haven't been that many times. As you walk around, what strikes you? >> Yeah, this is only my second time here. I will say I've seen plenty of booths that have the words Ingestion, Transcode, Archival, Distribution, there certainly is a lot of distribution out here, the broadcasting convention. >> Jeff: Right. >> Which makes sense. >> But you're involved in that pesky little process between what comes off the camera and what goes out to distribution. >> Yeah, exactly. We're prior to broadcast, right. So my world is really production and post-production, and the production management systems we use within them. >> Right. So love to hear, kind of, how is that world evolved? It used to be you had an artist on a machine, with local files doing the editing and all this stuff, and clearly that world is long, long gone. >> Yeah, most of our production and post-production workflow is in the cloud. >> Jeff: Right. >> Or however you want to call it. And very recently, what we've done, is we've tried to move on from the kind of, email-based world and saving everything on your desktop-based world, a lot of it revolves around the push to move off of that revolves around security. >> Jeff: Right. >> Efficiencies, better distribution, better control over who has access to what. So my role is really to introduce digital production management systems. Digital daily systems, digital purchase order systems. Digital scheduling systems. >> Jeff: Right. >> Kind of take us into more of like a wholistic, one-way world that covers both the production side as well as the studio side. >> And where would you say you are on that journey? >> Year one, is what I would say. >> Year one. Early in year one, early days. >> So our department is called, the Production Business Intelligence Department, but that's really, I would say we have more enthusiasm for business intelligence than we do have knowledge of business intelligence. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So phase one is really getting our systems rolled out. To get these digital systems in use, with 100% adoption, on all of our shows, and all of our studio and network users. Once we have that piece done, we can actually start to collect the data and make some use out of it. >> Right, right And how has kind of the efficiency in the workflow, I know you're still early days, how do you anticipate it really being impacted by moving to more cloud-based systems versus local, on your hard drive controlled? >> Yeah, so security is a hundred times better than it was before, right? Just because everything is hidden behind a password now. Access is much more controlled. Efficiency has increased many times over, as well. I'll say that we project, over the course of our first year with these systems, we will have reduced our email count, just within the studio, by 650,000. >> Well, who doesn't love that. >> Right, exactly. I keep telling them it's good. >> Jeff: Golly. >> Everything is more searchable now. >> Jeff: Right. >> Higher quality. We're getting things faster. Our PAs are no longer burning thousands of DVDs and distributing them all across town, so it's improved our world in many ways. >> Right, and how do you kind of boil that ocean. Is it kind of by department, is it by show, is it one little slice kind of spread really, really wide? I mean, that's a big roll out. You guys are a huge studio. >> When the department, that used to be called the Production Technology Department, and when it started eight, nine years ago, the approach was really like, let's build everything in house, and try to piece it out one by one. What we have learned is, that doesn't really work. It's really difficult to get adoption and it was going to take a huge workforce in order to build what we needed. >> Jeff: Right. >> So we started to go with the Best in Breed approach, with these applications. And what came with them was 24/7 support and kind of white glove training and admin services. >> Jeff: Right. >> So because I have a really small centralized team, they can focus on just the training administration. And we have really this third-party service team that comes with each one of these production management systems that we use. >> Right. >> So we've been able boil the ocean because we have a lot of help. >> Right. And the other nice thing is just because of the nature of the studios, teams kind of form around shows, right? So now you can onboard a new team around your infrastructure piece. They do the show for one season, two seasons, however many season. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Then they go away. >> Yeah, what's been really good is even though it's a huge training endeavor, for sure, with our production teams, because we have something like, 8,000 people on our freelance production teams at any time. And they're a transient workforce. They go from studio to studio and show to show. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I think something like 60 to 70% of the people that we hire, we've hired before. >> Jeff: Okay. >> So the good news is once we've trained them once, there's a good likelihood that we won't need to train them again. >> Right. And, so there's kind of the application centric piece of it, and then there's kind of the infrastructure piece behind the application. I mean, good news is, you didn't have it eight years ago, but I mean the development's on the infrastructure side around storage and bandwidth and CPU. Huge change from where it was before. I mean, could you even have done what you were hoping to do eight years, kind of compared to where you are today? No, I don't think, the companies just didn't exist at that point. That's right. So the companies weren't there because the technology wasn't there. >> Jeff: Right. >> Now they've both kind of aligned, and aligned at a good time, right? When I think people are ready to hear that we need to modernize the studio. There's so much competition out there, that we need to make sure that we're doing things as good or better than everyone else. >> Right. And you said security a bunch of times. >> Brian: Yeah. >> So was the security, was it a security hole? Was it people forgetting their laptop at the coffee shop? >> Brian: Yeah. >> I mean what were some of your main security concerns that you've now been able to address? >> It's interesting. So we're ABC Studios, but we do a lot of co-productions with Marvel Studios. And Marvel Studios culture is very security centric. And because we worked so hand-in-hand with them, we've been very cognizant of the security abilities of these applications as we bring them in. So I will say, we didn't have any big outbreaks, right? We didn't have, we had shows like Lost, that people were really concerned about. >> Right. >> Scripts getting out, but more recently, we haven't had these huge high security titles, but now that Marvel is onboard, it's made us very security conscious. >> Okay. And it's more early leaks that people getting access to the assets-- >> Yeah, mostly we're worried about scripts. >> Right, right. Really, mostly scripts, as opposed to images, or-- >> Well, you're right. Scripts and rough cuts, I would say. >> Right, right, right. Okay, so that's kind of the bat, the stick. In terms of a carrot, what were some of the benefits that you hoped to achieve or you are really starting to achieve on the carrot side of the equation? >> Well, so we're still in phase one, as I said, in kind of rolling out these applications. >> Right, we'll let you talk about this in private. We will not hold you to whatever you say that's being, actually in production. >> The carrot, is so we're now called production business intelligence, but we don't have much intelligence, at this point, so, now that we're seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, in terms of rolling out these systems, the hope is, the carrot is, we're going to be able to find some really great business insights from the data we collect. The kinds of questions we want to be able to answer are things like, which of our directors that are hire are costing us the most in production staff overtime. When an editor's cut delivers, and it delivers 11 minutes long, how does that correlate with the length and complexity of the script? You start to learn these things, and the hope will be that what was going to be a nine-day production schedule, we really can do it in eight. >> Jeff: Right. >> We'll have the data, not just anecdotally, but like real data to back that up. >> Right. Now I wonder, and don't tell me if you can't, but within kind of the whole budget of a movie, production, post-production, distribution, promotion, what piece is post-production? I mean, I just think of the complexity of it. It can be just a sinkhole, if it's not managed well. >> Yeah, as a part of the production, well it depends on the show, right? >> Right, right, you know, kind of a general-- >> The variance is in visual effects, right, but I would say 10 to 20% of the budget is post-production. >> Jeff: Okay. >> And the systems piece of it is much, much less. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> One, maybe one percent. >> Right. So you could make a pretty significant impact >> Yeah. >> On the budget by being more efficient. >> For sure. >> And leveraging that intelligence. >> Well, below the line, which is what these systems really do impact, so not just post-production but production, as well as two-thirds of the budget. So absolutely, I mean that's many millions of dollars. >> Right, right. Okay, so as you look forward, have you got any insights that are kind of helping you drive to the next place, or are you just kind of working down a road map as you look at 2017, I know we're a third of the way through, which I find really hard to believe. What's kind of on your agenda, what's next, where are you going next? >> I'd say we're still working down the roadmap. We have, like I said, we have documents figured out, we have digital dailies figured out, we have production purchase orders figured out, now we're going to start looking at asset management. And we're going to start looking at scheduling. In hopes that ultimately we can really, I guess the real vision here is that we can have kind of a production ratio, right? We can start to rate our productions against each other based on all of this information that we have, but it requires some additional systems first. >> All right, Brian. Well, I wish you, at least you've got 650,000 less emails. >> I know it's a good start. >> I mean that should free up a ton of time. >> Brian: Yes. >> That's a great start. All right, he's Brian Raleigh from ABC, I'm Jeff Frick. Again, thanks for stopping by. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, you're watching theCUBE, from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching. (techno music)