>> Male: TheCUBE presents, UIPATH, Forward 5 brought to you by, UIPATH. >> Okay the party has started here at forward 5 UIPATH big customer event if you're watching the cube. We're wrapping up day one with the co-CE0 segment. Daniel Dines is here. He's the founder and Co-CEO of UIPATH and Rob Enslin, is co-CEO. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for spending some time with us. I know you're super busy. >> Thanks Dave. >> So I've been looking forward to this. Daniel you know I've followed the company for a long time. The really interesting path you took, to get to where you are today. How did you guys meet? And why did you decide to hire Rob? >> Male: (laughs) >> Rob: Well let me start. I uh, I was looking for a partner. Actually, in our work to your stand here, we are talking about how, how you feel in this job. You feel so alone. Because you are the center of all pressure points. And having a partner, having someone that has your back, it's kind of awesome. So I was looking for a partner. And our current friend, Carl Escenbach, he introduced us to each other, and we instantly clicked. And this is the type of job where it's uh either work well or it doesn't. It cannot be anything in the middle. >> Right, okay with Carl, we know Carl well. Awesome operator. Knows the business super well. So Rob, what attracted you to UIPATH? You had a great situation at google. You guys were growing like crazy. Why did you decide to come here? What did you see that attracted you? >> Yeah you know when I, when I went to google, I went to google because I really believed that data and AI was necessary for companies. And business is to be competitive in the future. And we did some great stuff at google cloud in the 3 years. But I knew UIPATH from a couple of years ago when they were mainly a RPA space. And I just felt that there was a place in time when automation was going expand. And as I sat down with Carl a couple of times, spoke to carl. And then I sat down with Daniel, I knew that there was something special with UIPATH, that could be a generational opportunity. Not any for myself but for the company in the future. And then I, you know I got to know Daniel. And at this stage of my career I was like, I'm pretty fussy about what I want to do and what I want and where I want to go. First of all, I want to go to a company that had great product, had a great culture, and I wanted to work with somebody that we could shake the future together and you know, Daniel and I just hit it off from the very first time we met. He got to meet my family, my dogs and we did the whole, we did the whole courting thing before we actually decided this was going to be a good thing for both of us. >> Dave: That's good. >> Rob: Yeah. >> Dave: You got to meet the family. That's very good. >> We just had, John Furrier and I just had, Mohit Aron and Sanjay Poonen into out studio. Cause Mohit, you know, formal google. Long time. And they decided to kind of split duties. Mohit's going into product, he didn't keep his CEO title. He walked. How are you guys splitting you time? What are each of you going to, responsible for? >> Daniel: Well its, its kind of similar. On a day by day operation I, I rely heavily on Rob. We do it together. Strategic decisions about the company's destiny. I'm doing mostly the product these days. Which is a big relief for me. And I think we also split a bit of customers visit. Which is great. I still enjoy meeting customers. I need, customers are food for my cause. >> Dave: (laughs) yeah and your awesome product visionary. You've been there since day one. Now Rob, you said in the key note today that you've seen around about a hundred customers. You've transverse the world. What did you learn from them that informed you? That gave you confidence that the the move to the internet platform, even though you had already started that. >> Male: Yeah. >> But you're really doubling down on that >> Rob: You know when I... >> from a stand point. >> Rob: You know Dave, when you think about it, like I was, I was so impressed that Daniel had the vision to create a platform 3 years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> All right. And as we went around the world. As I went around the world, and it was one of the very first things I've seen. I've got to understand how customers see UIPATH, from their advantage point. What are they looking for from us? Why is this company, why doe customers like this company so much? And as I went around the world. I went to Asia a couple, I went to Asia, Australia, Singapore, Japan. I was in Europe twice. We did the trip together. We went to visit customers. And it was very much the same thing. Helps us expand automation faster. And we are so surprise, at the break of your platform. We never knew that. And so it kind of just had, for me, it was conviction. It's like, this walls is the right decision you've made. There's so much opportunity there. And that's, you know that's kind of what I've learned through the last four five months. >> Dave: Now as you know Daniel, I've written a lot about your company. One of the things I've said is that, that start ups, if I can call you that back pre-IPO, typically don't have as much international exposure as UIPATH had. I mean you sort of, you sort of started as an international company and became more US centric. You said, in the, in the key note today, you're talking to Ray Wong about people may don't understand that challenges of FX. Point being, when you convert international dollars into US dollars there are less of them cause the dollars stronger. But still, I've always felt like that international footprint is an advantage. Rob you came from SAP, you know, again European based company. I don't, (stutters), do you regret that? Now? I mean I know it's technical, I'm sure you don't, but talk about that sort of international exposure? Why that's a long term benefit. >> Well, you, first of all, you expand faster. I think we expanded faster than our competition because our global footprint was larger. And we had the courage. Go in Japan, for instance. Everybody told me, it's impossible to make for such a small starter. It's impossible to make a business in Japan. But we didn't believe it. We're just crazy and we went there, and be built a very sizable business in Japan. Fifty-five percent of our revenue, even today, it's outside U.S. Now of course that has a down side. When uh, When the local currencies, you know, are losing the value compared to the dollars, we're impacted. As we go to... to investors, until now, so we are seeing like a (indistinct) in terms of ARI. It's huge. Only because (indistinct) and losing the business in Russia. But it still, it's the strength of our company. Things will come back. And then, you know, the growth engine will re-accelerate again. >> Dave: Yeah but when the dollars weakens that'll be in your favor. Rob I want to pick up on something you said today in your keynote. You went back and started, you know the cycles of ERP and you know, internet, et cetera. I kind of have a love hate with ERP. I have to be honest. >> Male: (laughing) >> But it, but but (chuckles) but if I go back to that. Late eighties nineties, you wouldn't have be able to pick SAP as the winner. And then SAP emerged. You know, very clearly. But the more interesting thing, is that the customers who are implementing ERP well. The practitioners did better than their peers, and dominated their industries. And their stocks went up. Their evaluations went up. Different worlds obviously but, do you see the same thing happening with RPA and automation? What gives you confidence that that's the case? >> I absolutely do see the same thing happening with automation and RPA being a part of, in being a part of that. The reason, the reason I believe that is speed is so critical. (stutters) And if you think about how hard it is for a CIO or a c level executive to consume the technology coming at them, plus all the changes in the world being thrown at them. It's compiling and compiling and compiling. We have an incredible solution, that can help companies. And there comes certain times, the love outcomes to the business. Like no one else gets. And when I see that, I view that as just like the beginning of what's going to happen in the future so, in many ways, and I've said this to many of my friends, it feels like 1992, 1993 to me. And it's interesting because no one really understood then why SAP would be great in 1992 and 93. And they got a couple of things right. They got the eco system right. Their new partners were important. And the knew they needed to drive business outcome for companies, in which they did. And so I feel like we are in a very similar place. Very different technology obviously. And the speed of change now is so dramatic, compared to what it was. And there's very few technology that can provide that level of speed and accomodation to their customers. >> All right, let's talk about priorities. You guys got a lot of work to do and you've, you've laid it out to the financial community. You've got to have profitable growth, because of FX, it part, you've lowered your forecast. But I think there's some conservative in their as well. Um, but you got to do that balance. You've given some guidance on gross margins. Cloud maybe brings that down a little bit. RnD I saw wide range. Thirteen to seventeen percent. I hope you keep spending on RnD. Big fan of that. You know stock buybacks and, RnD if in your position are going to be better. And the product priorities, continue to build that out. But question, let's start with the product. So you've got an on-prem stack and you've got a cloud stack that's emerging, how do you balance those out? How do you do the integration? You've done a great job with the integration. Does it, are you concerned about your ability to continue to work at that speed with two code bases? I wonder if you could address that? >> Daniel: We've become a cloud first company. We deliver all of our products first in the cloud. We've deliver on the two week (indistinct) in the cloud. So that helps us integrate quite fast. I think we made a very good business decision to build our cloud team in Seattle. In Bellevue to be specific. And we have access to great talent that knows how to build serious cloud service. Which is hard to find dollar. And uh, so, and also we, we have, we benef- one of our only benefits was, we have the really good architecture. We have an architecture that work easily on-prem and on the cloud. And even today, our work flow foundation, our local designers, were easy to modernize. So right now we are launching studio weapon. But behind the scene, it's the same workflow engine. Our customers don't have to rewrite anything. It just works. And it does the same to take our own brand product and brand it in the multicloud. So, it's, there is no friction at all. Actually cloud is just helping us accelerate. But we benefit then again of a really solid architectural foundation. >> Daniel: Architecture matters. We've seen that in this industry. We got the B52s rocking out in the background, I love it, but I've got so many questions for you guys. I want to talk about the go to market. Because Rob, it's obviously a strength of yours. You've come in. You've communicated to the street, that you're reshaping the sales floors. Are they lowering the ratios of sales? People, the customers at the high end, mid range as well, using digital. I mean the numbers are one to ten now. At the top. One to maybe fifty at the mid range. Where are you in terms of that journey? You've got to find people, you got to train them, how do you get the productivity out of those guys? Take us through your thinking there? >> Rob: Yeah firstly, I think we have enough resources. Having resources is not an issue. Um, we have an incredible vehicle to acquire customers inside the company. Our digital sales motion, it's probably the best I've seen. And so we have the ability to acquire customers really fast. And we get the first workload in really fast. The challenge is we need to, we need to be able to drive a (indistinct) model and we graduate customs when we acquire them into the direct sales floors. And then direct sales floors, we're not going to go one to thirty, we're talking one to ten for the direct sales floor. And even the high up in the pyramid, we want to have an even denser model than that. And the whole purpose is to drive the time to consumption much quicker, much faster. So we know exactly if we acquire a customer, will they spend? Do they have a (indistinct) spend? On what level do they have a (indistinct) spend? And therefore when we capture them, we can immediately surround them, and put the right resources so we can grow faster. We think this will have a significant impact on the organization. We'll start to implement certain pieces in the next quarter. Um, things like packaging solutions. Putting them in, enabling the sales organization. And buy the beginning of next year, we'll be ready to actually go full board, globally. We already put some pieces in place when I joined. Chris Weber, my chief business officer, did a great job doing some of those pieces. So we're on the journey already. >> Dave: Yeah and even before you guys were public and you weren't publishing your NRR numbers. Our ETR survey partner, we, we always thought you had very low churn. And I think you broke out just yesterday. The, the NRR for overseas vs U.S, U.S I think was 140 plus percent. >> Male: Yeah >> Very very strong. A little, a little less overseas but the churn is still very low. >> Male: Yep. >> Okay so that's super positive. Customer affinity, I was wanted to code these events. I listen to the key notes very carefully, and then interview customers on the cube, and I try to identify, is there alignment there? And I see very strong alignment, I have to say, and strong customer affinity. So that's in your favor. I have, Daniel, I got another question for you on product. What is Symantec automation? What the heck is that? Can you explain that? I don't understand >> Dave, have you seen the demo in my (indistinct)? >> Dave: You know, I had to leave and do interviews, so I, uh, I missed it. >> I think, I think that demo answer complete your question. So in the s-, you know there saying that great, you can not distinguish great technology by magic. I think technology should be simple. And we, we show today, one of the simplest demo that you can imagine. But it's so, such a complex technology behind the scene, that you also can not imagine. So what was demo? We show how one business user, without any technical skills, can build any type of document. Can be a passport, can be an invoice, can be a legal (indistinct), and just go, "I want to copy data from here, and I want to paste data there". Can be a spreadsheet, can be another obligation, and like a human user, without understanding, without having prior knowledge about data, document layout, about screens, screens layouts, nothing, we analyze real time. Document. We discover, we discover the meaning of the information. We analyze the screen. We understand the screen but we understand the meaning of the screen. And we understand how the information in one side relate to the other side. And we just connects the dots and we copy the information and we paste it. A job that you'll do as a human user, maybe three minutes, is done in ten seconds. This is powerful. >> Yeah that is powerful. Thank you for that. I mean, and you take the date, whether it's transaction data or unstructured data and and and bring meaning out of it. That's powerful. Last question and I'll let you guys go. Rob, you got traders, and you've got long term investors. All right traders going to be defensive, today. I get that. Make the case for UIPATH, for long term investors. >> Rob: I think we're going to be a multi-gern- multi-billion company and we're going to be a generational company of our time. And we will define enterprise automation. And it's going to be a long term game and we feel like really strong that we'll be the lead in that game. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Great show. Always fun at UiPath Forward. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. >> Thanks dave. >> Appreciate it as well. >> Okay wrap it up, day one, we're here tomorrow, first thing, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching, forward 5, Uipath big customer event, we'll see you tomorrow. (music)

>>Hi, we're back day two of Falcon, 2022. We're live from the area in Las Vegas, Silicon angles, the queue. My name is Dave Lanta and Rob Picard is here. He's the security lead for Vanta a company that CrowdStrike just made an investment in. Rob. Thanks for coming to the cube. >>Thank you very much. Happy to be here. So >>That's big news. You know, you got a, a big name, like CrowdStrike strategic investment. Tell us about that. >>Yeah, it's very exciting because CrowdStrike obviously is, you know, a major name in the security space and Vanta is a really leading the way in a lot of the compliance automation, but being able to sort of dip into that, that security space more and more having crowd strike behind us is huge. >>What is compliant? Compliance automation. Tell us more about what Vanta does. Yeah. >>So Vanta ultimately is a tool that gives you an automatic way to prepare for your SOC two audit or your ISO 27 0 1 audit or, you know, insert long list of dozens of standards we're working on here. But in the olden days you would provide a thousand screenshots to an auditor that proves that for the past year, past six months, you've been doing what you say you're doing, Banta just plugs directly into your systems and proves that evidence to them without the need for all of >>That. Okay. So software's a service and you yeah. Software charge monthly or okay. >>Yeah, something like that. >>Educate me if I'm cloud first or cloud only can't I just pull a SOC report off of AWS and send that to the auditors and say, here you go, >>That'll help. Right? Like if you, if you do that, if you're in AWS and you pull their, you know, I think their security hub, you can pull some of these controls in. Right. But the question is, what do you do then about your endpoints, right? What do you do about, Hey, did we off board everybody from all of the systems we have enabled, right? All of the SAS systems we use. And so what van does is we integrate with AWS, but we also integrate with every other system you're using, including your HR system and your identity provider, to make sure that, Hey, you know, all of these things are, are working in sync to ensure your compliance. So >>You're relatively new parent, but you ever, you know, the book, if you give a mouse, a cookie, you will, you will, the whole thing is you give a mouse, a cookie, and then 8 million things happen, all these other dependencies. And it goes around and around and around. Yes. He's gonna want some milk. Okay. I feel like it's the same thing in your world, right? I mean, there is, is, is there an end, when do you know you're done? >>Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you know, you're done when the O auditor hands you, your sock to report, you know, you have your at stage, you say, Hey, I'm sock too compliant. Or, you know, your ISO cert, but even then it's gonna keep going. Right. I think the tricky part is there are some key systems that you, you want to have, you know, your eyes on and you wanna be monitoring and making sure that Hey, in a year from now, when that audit happens, I'm not gonna be surprised at what they find. Right. And those are gonna be your cloud provider. Right. Those are gonna be your HR system telling you when people joined, when people left, and those are gonna be your identity provider and your endpoints, right. >>Are you guys obviously compliance experts? Is, is it really a matter of sort of codifying that expertise? Or is there a machine intelligence component involved, you know, discovery? How does it work? >>That's a great question, actually. And I think part of it is, you know, encoding that expertise in the product and making sure that, you know, there's not necessarily, you know, if you ask any given sock to auditor for like, Hey, what controls should I be using that you're gonna audit me against? And it's your job to come up with the control. So they'll provide you some, you know, their set, but it's gonna be different between them, right? The standard itself is not a list of controls, but what we can do is we can provide you that list of controls and say like, Hey, we've actually worked with a ton of auditors and they've worked with us and we can say, this is what you need to do to get started here. And then if you have custom controls to add later, you want you, you can do that. >>But so there's part of that's encoding the expertise, but then part of it is just understanding the world of, of the auditors enough that we can help guide you through it. Because, you know, like you said, you can go to AWS, you can get download a report, right. That says, look, I have, you know, these, so two controls past right now, but the question is, you know, you still have to then go hand that to an auditor, have conversations with them, get through all of their questions back to you. And that can get really, really in the weeds. So we have like teams of experts who sit on calls with auditors and customers and help them through this stuff when needed. Right. And hopefully it's not needed as much when you're, you know, automating most of it. So >>That's a, a component of your offering is, is a services capability. Is that part of the offering? Is that a for pay service? >>Yeah. So, you know, you have to talk to the sales team to understand how they bundle it all, but, you know, essentially we have these professional services teams and these partners that jump in, I think a lot of times it really is just, Hey, like the auditor asks this question. We don't know how to answer it. We'll send somebody to jump on, >>Let's jump on a call. Exactly. But if you need more intense, you >>Know, work services, then maybe that's available. Yeah. >>Okay. And, and is there a privacy aspect of your software? >>Yeah. So Vanta software does actually also support GDPR and CCPA to kind of help you. You know, it's hard to get your head around that stuff. You wanna talk about like encoding expertise, you know, having people inside Vanta who can talk through the product and say like, Hey, this is what we need to test for in a customer's environment. And this is what we need to point to that maybe, you know, you can't automatically test for, but we can give them some template policies or, or procedures for them to have in their company. And we can provide all of that to try to, to help you feel good about, Hey, we're, we're compliant with GDPR or we're compliant with CCPA and we're not gonna have problems here. And, >>And da is data, data sovereignty I presume is, is part of that. Like, >>You know, data sovereignty, man. I'm not the expert on data sovereignty. I'll tell you that. But I know that is definitely a part of that. I don't know, you know, how deep it goes when it comes to, you know, the requirements of any given company. >>Well, it's tricky because a lot of it hasn't been tested in the, in courts of law. That's just sort of guidelines there. Yeah. And then a lot of times you don't, how do you really know where the data is? Right. I mean, you kind of can infer it, but, >>And you can get real clever. You can start encrypting data that sits somewhere here, but you have the keys over here and say, no, no, no, the keys are in the right country. You know, that counts, >>Right. It gets real tricky. It's not really been tested that the logic of that, what are the hard parts of what you guys do and, and, and what makes you different from everybody else out there? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I'd say a couple things are, are really hard about what we do, right. One is maintaining good reputations with auditors because the goal is ultimately that an auditor sees Vanta and they say, okay, Vanta says that checkbox is checked. I don't have to worry about it. And that's where we are with so many auditors today. Right. But that wasn't like that in the beginning, in the beginning, it was, you know, Hey, we're showing you the code that actually looks and checks that box. Right. But the other hard part is just integrating with the long tail of systems that every customer needs, right? Like if you use a certain HR system and we don't support it, then that's gonna really dampen your value that you get outta the product. So the engineering challenges, maintaining a reliable set of both high quality tests and high quality integrations with these surfaces, >>What are the synergies with, with CrowdStrike kind of, you know, it's, maybe it seems obvious, but explain where you pick up and where they leave off. >>Yeah. I think that's a, that's a great point. So, you know, we have a very, like a very, a very simple agent that will run. If you need something on your laptop that says, Hey, look, this laptop, the disc is encrypted, right? The screen lock is set appropriately for my controls, right? So we have some, some basic capabilities it's based on OS query for, for those interested, but it's not a full fledged endpoint protection platform. Right. And that's where something like CrowdStrike can come in where we can integrate with them and say, okay, Hey, if you're ready to move on to something, that's, that's a little bit more full-fledged and a little bit more of a, you know, gonna protect you against malware and that sort of thing. Then you can move onto CrowdStrike and we can integrate directly with them and we can pull all the information we need and we can check all those boxes for you that say, Hey, you have appropriate malware protection, you have discs encrypted, you have whatever it may be. Right. We can pull that information from them. And we can also help you make sure that the people have access to CrowdStrike itself in your company are the right set of people. >>Who do you sell to, do you sell to the audit function within a company? Or do you sell directly to big auditors? Both. >>So it's, we're mainly selling to the whoever's responsible for getting that. So to getting that ISO, getting GDPR, you know, all these sorts of things at a company, right? So for a small business, right, a startup that's like two people could >>Be the developer >>Team. Exactly. We're selling either to the founders or developers or something like that. And we're saying, Hey, you don't wanna think about this at all. We can get you like 80% of the way there without having to send a single screenshot. And then there's like 20% of like, all right, we'll help you, you know, partner you with the right auditor. That's good for your company and, and get you over the line. But then as we go and we sell to a mid-market company, or, you know, even potentially an enterprise, we're talking to people who have very specific expertise in either security or compliance, who also don't wanna have to do all this manual work. >>And it's a pure SAS model. It runs in the cloud. How does it work? I just pointed at whatever software I want to, to, to, to get, you know, certified >>That's exactly right. It's, it's pure SAS. You go to, you know, the app do vanda.com. You log in and then you go to the integrations page, right. You're, you're starting fresh. And you say, okay, well, AWS, here's how you integrate AWS. Right? We use there assume role functionality and stuff like that to pull in, you know, read only data from AWS. And then you can also go to your Okta and you can say, okay, well, I can connect here through Okta, through, you know, an Okta app or I can connect to my Google through an oof that has the right permissions. So we try to just limit the amount of permissions we have or the scope of our, our, you know, roles. But really it's just, you know, it's all API based integrations that we then just pull the data. We need to prove that you're doing what you say you're doing all >>Well, Rob, congratulations on the funding and the activity here at, at CrowdStrike. Good show. So, you know, good luck to you in the future. >>Thank you very much. All right. >>You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there, Dave. Valante for the cube. We'll be right back, but right after this strip break from Falcon 22, live from the area in Las Vegas,

>>Welcome back to a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. We're here with Rob Emsley. Who's the director of product marketing for data protection and cyber security. Rob. Good to see you a new role. >>Yeah. Good to be back, Dave. Good to see you. Yeah, it's been a while since we chatted last and you know, one of the changes in, in my world is that I've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing, to also focus on cyber security marketing specifically for our infrastructure solutions group. So certainly that's, you know, something that really has driven us to, you know, to come and have this conversation with you today. >>So data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cyber security space. I, I don't think necessarily of, you know, traditional backup and recovery as security it's to me, it's an adjacency. I know some companies have said, oh yeah, now we're a security company. They're kind of chasing the valuation for sure. Bubble. Dell's interesting because you, you have, you know, data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management, but you also have security, you know, direct security capabilities. So you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to, to connect those, those dots. Is that right? >>Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that the reality is, is that security is a, a multi-layer discipline. I think the, the days of thinking that it's one or another technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure long gone. I mean, certainly you actually correct. If you think about the backup and recovery space, I mean, people have been doing that for years, you know, certainly backup and recovery. It's all about the recovery. It's all about getting yourself backup and running when bad things happen. And one of the realities, unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks. You know, ransomware, malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today. And that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space, because if you have a copy, a good copy of your data, then that is really the, the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack. >>And that's why it's so important. The reality is is that unfortunately the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter. I don't know how it happens, but one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have, they go after your, your backup data as well. So over the last half a decade, Dell technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery volts. And that is really the, you know, we've had many conversations about that over the years. Yeah. And that's really a big tenant of what we do in the debt protection portfolio. >>So this idea of, of cybersecurity resilience, that definition is evolving. What does it mean to you? >>Yeah, I think the, the analyst team over at Gartner, they wrote a, a very insightful paper called you will be hacked, embraced the breach. And the whole basis of this analysis is so much money's been spent on prevention is that what's outta balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience and cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked. You have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business. You know, and that's really where cyber resiliency is very, very different than cyber security and prevention, you know, and I think that balance of get your security disciplines well funded, get your defenses as good as you can get them, but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan, it's really the basis of any good solid data protection backup from recovery philosophy. >>So if I had to do a SWOT analysis, we don't have to do the w OT, but let's focus on the S what would you say are Dell's strengths in this, you know, cybersecurity space, as it relates to data protection. >>One is we've been doing it a long time. You know, we talk a lot about Dell's data protection being proven and modern. You know, certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't, as I mentioned to you, one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduce a little over five years ago, five, six years, power protect cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt on top of their investment in Dell technologies, data protection, you know, the, the unique elements of our solution already threefold, and it's, we call them the three eyes. It's isolation, it's a mutability and its intelligence. And the, the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data. >>You know, you need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it. And that really is the, the, the, the essence of a cyber recovery vault. Interestingly enough, you're starting to see the market throw out that word, you know, from many other places, but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised insofar as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault, you know, allowing it to be controlled by your backup application. Our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure. It uses it, but it controls its own security. And that is so, so important. It's like having a, a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside, you know, and think about that. If you think about, you know, vaults in banks or vaults in your home, normally you have a keypad on the outside, think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault. >>So nobody can get in, nothing can get in unless it's already in. And if it's already in, then it's trusted. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So isolation's the key. And then you, you mentioned immutability is the second piece. >>Yeah, so I, mutability is, is also something which has been around for a long time. People talk about backup mutability or immutable backup copies. So immutability is just the, the, the additional technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable, you know, but again, that immutability, you know, your mileage varies, you know, when you look across the, the different offers that are out there in the market, especially in the backup industry, you make a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seem to be security, washing their marketing messages. I mean, everybody is leaning into the ever present danger of cyber security, not a bad thing, but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up, you know, quite literally, >>Yeah, yeah, no pun intended. Right. And then actually pun intended. Now what about the intelligence piece of it? That's that's AI ML, where does that fit >>For sure. So the intelligence piece is delivered by a solution called cyber sense. And cyber sense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery volt is a good clean copy of data. So it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber volt, and it's looking for anomalies. So it's not looking for signatures of malware. You know, that's what your antivirus software does. That's what your endpoint protection software does. That's on the prevention side of the equation. But what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good, and that when you get a request to restore and recover your business, you go right, let's go and do it. And you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised. >>So cyber sense is really a, a unique analytics solution in the market, based upon the fact that it, it, isn't looking at at cursory indicators of, of, of, of, of malware infection or, or, or ransomware introduction it's doing full content analytics, you know, looking at, you know, has the data in any way changed, has it suddenly become encrypted? Has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan? So that anomaly detection is very, very different. It's looking for, you know, like different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on. And of course, if it sees it, you immediately get flagged. But the good news is, is that you always have in the vault, the previous copy of good known data, which now becomes your restore point. >>So we're talking to Rob Emsley about how data protection fits into what Dell calls DT, I, Dell trusted infrastructure. And, and I'm, I want to come back Rob to this notion of, and, or cuz I think a lot of people are skeptical. Like how can I have great security and not introduce friction into my organization? Is that an automation play? How, how does Dell tackle that problem? >>I mean, I think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is, is security has to be built in, I mean, intrinsic security within our servers, within our storage devices, within our elements of our backup infrastructure. I mean, security, multifactor authentication, you know, elements that make the overall infrastructure secure. You know, we have capabilities that, you know, allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed. You know, we'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment, but the, the essence is, is security is not, not a Bolton. It has to be part of the overall infrastructure. And that's so true, certainly in the data protection space, >>Give us the, the, the bottom line on, on how you see Dell's key differentiators. Maybe you could talk about Dell, of course always talks about its portfolio, but, but why should customers, you know, lead in to Dell in, in this whole cyber resilience space, >>You know, staying on the data protection space. As I mentioned, the, the, the work we've been doing to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for debt protection is in our opinion, as good as it gets, you know, the, you know, you've spoken to a number of our, of our best customers, whether it be Bob bender from founders, federal, or more recently at Delta arches world, you spoke to Tony Bryson yep. From the town of Gilbert. And these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery volts. And at the end of the day, they can now sleep at night. You know, that's really the, the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from Dell cyber recovery vault a para protect cyber recovery solution, gives them, you know, really allows them to, you know, just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom if they have a, an insider threat issue. And you know, all the way down to data deletion is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from. >>Great, well, Rob, congratulations on the new scope of responsibility. I like how you know, your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding. As we said, data protection becoming an adjacency to, to security, not security in and of itself. A key component of a comprehensive security strategy. Rob Emsley. Thank you for coming back in the cube. Good to see you again. >>You too, Dave. Thanks. >>All right. In a moment, I'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. You watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to a Blueprint For Trusted Infrastructure. We're here with Rob Emsley. Who's the director of product marketing for data protection and cyber security. Rob, good to see you. A new role. >> Yeah. Good to be back, Dave. Good to see you. Yeah, it's been a while since we chatted last and, you know, one of the changes in my world is that I've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing to also focus on cybersecurity marketing specifically for our infrastructure solutions group. So certainly that's, you know, something that really has driven us, you know, to come and have this conversation with you today. >> So data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cyber security space. I don't think necessarily of, you know, traditional backup and recovery as security, to me, it's an adjacency. I know some companies have said, oh, yeah. Now we're a security company. They're kind of chasing the valuation bubble. >> For sure. >> Dell's interesting because you have, you know, data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management, but you also have security, you know, direct security capabilities. So you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to connect those dots. Is that right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that the reality is is that security is a multi-layer discipline. I think the days of thinking that it's one or another technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure are long gone. I mean, certainly you actually correct. If you think about the backup and recovery space, I mean, people have been doing that for years, you know, certainly backup and recovery, it's all about the recovery. It's all about getting yourself backup and running when bad things happen. And one of the realities, unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks. You know, ransomware, malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today. And that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space because if you have a copy, a good copy of your data, then that is really the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack. And that's why it's so important. The reality is is that unfortunately the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter. I don't know how it happens, but one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have, they go after your backup data as well. So over the last half a decade, Dell Technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery vaults. We've had many conversations about that over the years and that's really a big tenant of what we do in the data protection portfolio. >> So this idea of cybersecurity resilience that definition is evolving. What does it mean to you? >> Yeah, I think the analyst team over at Gartner, they wrote a very insightful paper called you will be hacked embrace the breach. And the whole basis of this analysis is so much money's been spent on prevention is that what's out of balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience and cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked. You have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business. You know, and that's really where cyber resiliency is very, very different than cyber security and prevention, you know, and I think that balance of get your security disciplines well funded, get your defenses as good as you can get them but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan, it's really the basis of any good, solid data protection backup from recovery philosophy. >> So if I had to do a SWOT analysis, we don't have to do the WOT, but let's focus on the S. What would you say are Dell's strengths in this, you know, cyber security space as it relates to data protection? >> One is we've been doing it a long time. You know, we talk a lot about Dell's data protection being proven and modern. You know, certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't. As I mentioned to you, one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduce a little over five years ago, five, six years. Power protect cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt on top of their investment in Dell Technologies data protection, you know, the unique elements of our solution already threefold, and we call them the three Is. It's isolation, it's a immutability and it's intelligence. And the, the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data. You know, you need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it. And that really is the essence of a cyber recovery vault. Interestingly enough, you're starting to see the market throw out that word, you know, from many other places, but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised insofar as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault, you know, allowing it to be controlled by your backup application. Our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure. It uses it, but it controls its own security. And that is so, so important. It's like having a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside, you know, and think about that. If you think about, you know, vaults in banks or vaults in your home, normally you have a key pad on the outside. Think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault. >> So nobody can get in, nothing can get in unless it's already in. And if it's already in, then it's trusted. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Yeah. So isolation's the key. And then you mentioned immutability is the second piece. >> Yeah, so immutability is also something which has been around for a long time. People talk about backup mutability or immutable backup copies. So I mutability is just the additional technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable, you know, but again that immutability, you know, your mileage varies, you know, when you look across the different offers that are out there in the market especially in the backup industry. You made a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seem to be security washing their marketing messages. I mean, everybody is leaning into the ever present danger of cybersecurity, not a bad thing, but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up, you know, quite literally >> Yeah, no pun intended. Right. Actually pun intended. Now what about the intelligence piece of it? That's that's AI, ML, where does that fit? >> For sure. So the intelligence piece is delivered by a solution called CyberSense. And CyberSense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery vault is a good clean copy of data. So it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber vault, and it's looking for anomalies. So it's not looking for signatures of malware. You know, that's what your antivirus software does. That's what your endpoint protection software does. That's on the prevention side of the equation. But what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good and that when you get a request to restore and recover your business, you go, right, let's go and do it. And you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised. So cyber sense is really a unique analytic solution in the market based upon the fact that it isn't looking at at cursory indicators of malware infection or ransomware introduction, it's doing full content analytics, you know, looking at, you know, has the data in any way changed, has it suddenly become encrypted? Has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan? So that anomaly detection is very, very different. It's looking for, you know, like different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on. And, of course, if it sees it, you immediately get flagged. But the good news is is that you always have in the vault the previous copy of good known data which now becomes your restore point. >> So we're talking to Rob Emsley about how data protection fits into what Dell calls DTI, Dell Trusted Infrastructure. And I want to come back, Rob, to this notion of, and not or cause I think a lot of people are skeptical. Like how can I have great security and not introduce friction into my organization? Is that an automation play? How does Dell tackle that problem? >> I mean, I think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is is security has to be built in, I mean, intrinsic security within our servers, within our storage devices, within our elements of our backup infrastructure. I mean, security, multifactor authentication, you know, elements that make the overall infrastructure secure. You know, we have capabilities that, you know, allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed. You know, we'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment, but the essence is security is not a Bolton. It has to be part of the overall infrastructure. And that's so true, certainly in the data protection space >> Give us the bottom line on how you see Dell's key differentiators. Maybe you could talk about Dell, of course, always talks about its portfolio, but why should customers, you know, lead in to Dell in this whole cyber resilience space? >> You know, staying on the data protection space as I mentioned, the work we've been doing to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for data protection is in our opinion, as good as it gets. You know, you've spoken to a number of our best customers whether it be Bob Bender from Founders Federal or more recently at (indistinct) you spoke to Tony Bryson from the Town of Gilbert. And these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery vaults. And at the end of the day, they can now sleep at night. You know, that's really the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from Dell cyber recovery vault, a power protect cyber recovery solution gives them, you know, really allows them to, you know, just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom. If they have an insider threat issue and, you know, all the way down to data deletion is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from. >> Great. Well, Rob, congratulations on the new scope of responsibility. I like how, you know, your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding. As we said, data protection becoming an adjacency to security, not security in and of itself. A key component of a comprehensive security strategy. Rob Emsley, thank you for coming back in theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> You too, Dave. Thanks. >> All right, in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. You are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(calm electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here live in New York City for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, but a great conversation here as the day winds down. First of all, 10,000 plus people, this is a big event, just New York City. So sign of the times that some headwinds are happening? I don't think so, not in the cloud enterprise innovation game. Lot going on, this innovation conversation we're going to have now is about the confluence of cloud scale integration data and the future of how FinTech and other markets are going to change with technology. We got Chris Thomas, the CTO of Slalom, and Rob Krugman, chief digital officer at Broadridge. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we had a talk before we came on camera about your firm, what you guys do, take a quick minute to just give the scope and size of your firm and what you guys work on. >> Yeah, so Broadridge is a global financial FinTech company. We work on, part of our business is capital markets and wealth, and that's about a third of our business, about $7 trillion a day clearing through our platforms. And then the other side of our business is communications where we help all different types of organizations communicate with their shareholders, communicate with their customers across a variety of different digital channels and capabilities. >> Yeah, and Slalom, give a quick one minute on Slalom. I know you guys, but for the folks that don't know you. >> Yeah, no problem. So Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. And me personally, I'm part of the element lab, which is focused on forward thinking technology and disruptive technology in the next five to 10 years. >> Awesome, and that's the scope of this conversation. The next five to 10 years, you guys are working on a project together, you're kind of customer partners. You're building something. What are you guys working on? I can't wait to jump into it, explain. >> Sure, so similar to Chris, at Broadridge, we've created innovation capability, innovation incubation capability, and one of the first areas we're experimenting in is digital assets. So what we're looking to do is we're looking at a variety of different areas where we think consolidation network effects that we could bring can add a significant amount of value. And so the area we're working on is this concept of a wallet of wallets. How do we actually consolidate assets that are held across a variety of different wallets, maybe traditional locations- >> Digital wallets. >> Digital wallets, but maybe even traditional accounts, bring that together and then give control back to the consumer of who they want to share that information with, how they want their transactions to be able to control. So the idea of, people talk about Web 3 being the internet of value. I often think about it as the internet of control. How do you return control back to the individual so that they can make decisions about how and who has access to their information and assets? >> It's interesting, I totally like the value angle, but your point is what's the chicken and the egg here, the cart before the horse, you can look at it both ways and say, okay, control is going to drive the value. This is an interesting nuance, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> So in this architectural world, they thought about the data plane and the control plane. Everyone's trying to go old school, middleware thinking. Let's own the data plane, we'll win everything. Not going to happen if it goes decentralized, right, Chris? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're building a decentralized application, but it really is built on top of AWS. We have a serverless architecture that scales as our business scales built on top of things like S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and of course using those security principles like Cognito and AWS Gateway, API Gateway. So we're really building an architecture of Web 3 on top of the Web 2 basics in the cloud. >> I mean, all evolutions are abstractions on top of each other, IG, DNS, Key, it goes the whole nine yards. In digital, at least, that's the way. Question about serverless real quick. I saw that Redshift just launched general availability of serverless in Redshift? >> Yes. >> You're starting to see the serverless now part of almost all the services in AWS. Is that enabling that abstraction, because most people don't see it that way. They go, oh, well, Amazon's not Web 3. They got databases, you could use that stuff. So how do you connect the dots and cross the bridge to the future with the idea that I might not think Web 2 or cloud is Web 3? >> I'll jump in quick. I mean, I think it's the decentralize. If you think about decentralization. serverless and decentralization, you could argue are the same way of, they're saying the same thing in different ways. One is thinking about it from a technology perspective. One is thinking about it from an ecosystem perspective and how things come together. You need serverless components that can talk to each other and communicate with each other to actually really reach the promise of what Web 3 is supposed to be. >> So digital bits or digital assets, I call it digital bits, 'cause I think zero ones. If you digitize everything and everything has value or now control drives the value. I could be a soccer team. I have apparel, I have value in my logos, I have photos, I have CUBE videos. I mean some say that this should be an NFT. Yeah, right, maybe, but digital assets have to be protected, but owned. So ownership drives it too, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how does that fit in, how do you explain that? 'Cause I'm trying to tie the dots here, connect the dots and tie it together. What do I get if I go down this road that you guys are building? >> So I think one of the challenges of digital assets right now is that it's a closed community. And I think the people that play in it, they're really into it. And so you look at things like NFTs and you look at some of the other activities that are happening and there are certain naysayers that look at it and say, this stuff is not based upon value. It's a bunch of artwork, it can't be worth this. Well, how about we do a time out there and we actually look at the underlying technology that's supporting this, the blockchain, and the potential ramifications of that across the entire financial ecosystem, and frankly, all different types of ecosystems of having this immutable record, where information gets stored and gets sent and the ability to go back to it at all times, that's where the real power is. So I think we're starting to see. We've hit a bit of a hiccup, if you will, in the cryptocurrencies. They're going to continue to be there. They won't all be there. A lot of them will probably disappear, but they'll be a finite number. >> What percentage of stuff do you think is vapor BS? If you had to pick an order of magnitude number. >> (laughs) I would say at least 75% of it. (John laughs) >> I mean, there's quite a few projects that are failing right now, but it's interesting in that in the crypto markets, they're failing gracefully. Because it's on the blockchain and it's all very transparent. Things are checked, you know immediately which companies are insolvent and which opportunities are still working. So it's very, very interesting in my opinion. >> Well, and I think the ones that don't have valid premises are the ones that are failing. Like Terra and some of these other ones, if you actually really looked at it, the entire industry knew these things were no good. But then you look at stable coins. And you look at what's going on with CBDCs. These are backed by real underlying assets that people can be comfortable with. And there's not a question of, is this going to happen? The question is, how quickly is it going to happen and how quickly are we going to be using digital currencies? >> It's interesting, we always talk about software, software as money now, money is software and gold and oil's moving over to that crypto. How do you guys see software? 'Cause we were just arguing in the queue, Dave Vellante and I, before you guys came on that the software industry pretty much does not exist anymore, it's open source. So everything's open source as an industry, but the value is integration, innovation. So it's not just software, it's the free. So you got to, it's integration. So how do you guys see this software driving crypto? Because it is software defined money at the end of the day. It's a token. >> No, I think that's absolutely one of the strengths of the crypto markets and the Web 3 market is it's governed by software. And because of that, you can build a trust framework. Everybody knows it's on the public blockchain. Everybody's aware of the software that's driving the rules and the rules of engagement in this blockchain. And it creates that trust network that says, hey, I can transact with you even though I don't know anything about you and I don't need a middleman to tell me I can trust you. Because this software drives that trust framework. >> Lot of disruption, lot of companies go out of business as a middleman in these markets. >> Listen, the intermediaries either have to disrupt themselves or they will be disrupted. I think that's what we're going to learn here. And it's going to start in financial services, but it's going to go to a lot of different places. I think the interesting thing that's happening now is for the first time, you're starting to see the regulators start to get involved. Which is actually a really good thing for the market. Because to Chris's point, transparency is here, how do you actually present that transparency and that trust back to consumers so they feel comfortable once that problem is solved. And I think everyone in the industry welcomes it. All of a sudden you have this ecosystem that people can play in, they can build and they can start to actually create real value. >> Every structural change that I've been involved in my 30 plus year career has been around inflection points. There was always some sort of underbelly. So I'm not going to judge crypto. It's been in the market for a while, but it's a good sign there's innovation happening. So as now, clarity comes into what's real. I think you guys are talking a conversation I think is refreshing because you're saying, okay, cloud is real, Lambda, serverless, all these tools. So Web 3 is certainly real because it's a future architecture, but it's attracting the young, it's a cultural shift. And it's also cooler than boring Web 2 and cloud. So I think the cultural shift, the fact that it's got data involved, there's some disruption around middleman and intermediaries, makes it very attractive to tech geeks. You look at, I read a stat, I heard a stat from a friend in the Bay Area that 30% of Cal computer science students are dropping out and jumping into crypto. So it's attracting the technical nerds, alpha geeks. It's a cultural revolution and there's some cool stuff going on from a business model standpoint. >> There's one thing missing. The thing that's missing, it's what we're trying to work on, I think is experience. I think if you're being honest about the entire marketplace, what you would agree is that this stuff is not easy to use today, and that's got to be satisfied. You need to do something that if it's the 85 year old grandma that wants to actually participate in these markets that not only can they feel comfortable, but they actually know how to do it. You can't use these crazy tools where you use these terms. And I think the industry, as it grows up, will satisfy a lot of those issues. >> And I think this is why I want to tie back and get your reaction to this. I think that's why you guys talking about building on top of AWS is refreshing, 'cause it's not dogmatic. Well, we can't use Amazon, it's not really Web 3. Well, a database could be used when you need it. You don't need to write everything through the blockchain. Databases are a very valuable capability, you get serverless. So all these things now can work together. So what do you guys see for companies that want to be Web 3 for all the good reasons and how do they leverage cloud specifically to get there? What are some things that you guys have learned that you can point to and share, you want to start? >> Well, I think not everything has to be open and public to everybody. You're going to want to have some things that are secret. You're going to want to encrypt some things. You're going to want to put some things within your own walls. And that's where AWS really excels. I think you can have the best of both worlds. So that's my perspective on it. >> The only thing I would add to it, so my view is it's 2022. I actually was joking earlier. I think I was at the first re:Invent. And I remember walking in and this was a new industry. >> It was tiny. >> This is foundational. Like cloud is not a, I don't view like, we shouldn't be having that conversation anymore. Of course you should build this stuff on top of the cloud. Of course you should build it on top of AWS. It just makes sense. And we should, instead of worrying about those challenges, what we should be worrying about are how do we make these applications easier to use? How do we actually- >> Energy efficient. >> How do we enable the promise of what these things are going to bring, and actually make it real, because if it happens, think about traditional assets. There's projects going on globally that are looking at how do you take equity securities and actually move them to the blockchain. When that stuff happens, boom. >> And I like what you guys are doing, I saw the news out through this crypto winter, some major wallet exchanges that have been advertising are hurting. Take me through what you guys are thinking, what the vision is around the wallet of wallets. Is it to provide an experience for the user or the market industry itself? What's the target, is it both? Share the design goals for the wallet of wallets. >> My favorite thing about innovation and innovation labs is that we can experiment. So I'll go in saying we don't know what the final answer is going to be, but this is the premise that we have. In this disparate decentralized ecosystem, you need some mechanism to be able to control what's actually happening at the consumer level. So I think the key target is how do you create an experience where the consumer feels like they're in control of that value? How do they actually control the underlying assets? And then how does it actually get delivered to them? Is it something that comes from their bank, from their broker? Is it coming from an independent organization? How do they manage all of that information? And I think the last part of it are the assets. It's easy to think about cryptos and NFTs, but thinking about traditional assets, thinking about identity information and healthcare records, all of that stuff is going to become part of this ecosystem. And imagine being able to go someplace and saying, oh, you need my information. Well, I'm going to give it to you off my phone and I'm going to give it to you for the next 24 hours so you can use it, but after that you have no access to it. Or you're my financial advisor, here's a view of what I actually have, my underlying assets. What do you recommend I do? So I think we're going to see an evolution in the market. >> Like a data clean room. >> Yeah, but that you control. >> Yes! (laughs) >> Yes! >> I think about it very similarly as well. As my journey into the crypto market has gone through different pathways, different avenues. And I've come to a place where I'm really managing eight different wallets and it's difficult to figure exactly where all my assets are and having a tool like this will allow me to visualize and aggregate those assets and maybe even recombine them in unique ways, I think is hugely valuable. >> My biggest fear is losing my key. >> Well, and that's an experience problem that has to be solved, but let me give you, my favorite use case in this space is, 'cause NFTs, right? People are like, what does NFTs really mean? Title insurance, right? Anyone buy a house or refinance your mortgage? You go through this crazy process that costs seven or eight thousand dollars every single time you close on something to get title insurance so they could validate it. What if that title was actually sitting on the chain, you got an NFT that you put in your wallet and when it goes time to sell your house or to refinance, everything's there. Okay, I'm the owner of the house. I don't know, JP Morgan Chase has the actual mortgage. There's another lien, there's some taxes. >> It's like a link tree in the wallet. (laughs) >> Yeah, think about it, you got a smart contract. Boom, closing happens immediately. >> I think that's one of the most important things. I think people look at NFTs and they think, oh, this is art. And that's sort of how it started in the art and collectable space, but it's actually quickly moving towards utilities and tokenization and passes. And that's where I think the value is. >> And ownership and the token. >> Identity and ownership, especially. >> And the digital rights ownership and the economics behind it really have a lot of scale 'cause I appreciate the FinTech angle you are coming from because I can now see what's going on here with you. It's like, okay, we got to start somewhere. Let's start with the experience. The wallet's a tough nut to crack, 'cause that requires defacto participation in the industry as a defacto standard. So how are you guys doing there? Can you give an update and then how can people get, what's the project called and how do people get involved? >> Yeah, so we're still in the innovation, incubation stages. So we're not launching it yet. But what I will tell you is what a lot of our focus is, how do we make these transactional things that you do? How do we make it easy to pull all your assets together? How do we make it easy to move things from one location to the other location in ways that you're not using a weird cryptographic numeric value for your wallet, but you actually can use real nomenclature that you can renumber and it's easy to understand. Our expectation is that sometime in the fall, we'll actually be in a position to launch this. What we're going to do over the summer is we're going to start allowing people to play with it, get their feedback, and we're going to iterate. >> So sandbox in when, November? >> I think launch in the fall, sometime in the fall. >> Oh, this fall. >> But over the summer, what we're expecting is some type of friends and family type release where we can start to realize what people are doing and then fix the challenges, see if we're on the right track and make the appropriate corrections. >> So right now you guys are just together on this? >> Yep. >> The opening up friends and family or community is going to be controlled. >> It is, yeah. >> Yeah, as a group, I think one thing that's really important to highlight is that we're an innovation lab. We're working with Broadridge's innovation lab, that partnership across innovation labs has allowed us to move very, very quickly to build this. Actually, if you think about it, we were talking about this not too long ago and we're almost close to having an internal launch. So I think it's very rapid development. We follow a lot of the- >> There's buy-in across the board. >> Exactly, exactly, and we saw lot of very- >> So who's going to run this? A Dow, or your companies, is it going to be a separate company? >> So to be honest, we're not entirely sure yet. It's a new product that we're going to be creating. What we actually do with it. Our thought is within an innovation environment, there's three things you could do with something. You can make it a product within the existing infrastructure, you can create a new business unit or you can spin it off as something new. I do think this becomes a product within the organization based upon it's so aligned to what we do today, but we'll see. >> But you guys are financing it? >> Yes. >> As collective companies? >> Yeah, right. >> Got it, okay, cool. Well, let us know how we can help. If you guys want to do a remote in to theCUBE. I would love the mission you guys are on. I think this is the kind of work that every company should be doing in the new R and D. You got to jump in the deep end and swim as fast as possible. But I think you can do it. I think that is refreshing and that's smart. >> And you have to do it quick because this market, I think the one thing we would probably agree on is that it's moving faster than we could, every week there's something else that happens. >> Okay, so now you guys were at Consensus down in Austin when the winter hit and you've been in the business for a long time, you got to know the industries. You see where it's going. What was the big thing you guys learned, any scar tissue from the early data coming in from the collaboration? Was there some aha moments, was there some oh shoot moments? Oh, wow, I didn't think that was going to happen. Share some anecdotal stories from the experience. Good, bad, and if you want to be bold say ugly, too. >> Well, I think the first thing I want to say about the timing, it is the crypto winter, but I actually think now's a really great time to build something because everybody's continuing to build. Folks are focused on the future and that's what we are as well. In terms of some of the challenges, well, the Web 3 space is so new. And there's not a way to just go online and copy somebody else's work and rinse and repeat. We had to figure a lot of things on our own. We had to try different technologies, see which worked better and make sure that it was functioning the way we wanted it to function. Really, so it was not easy. >> They oversold that product out, that's good, like this team. >> But think about it, so the joke is that when winter is when real work happens. If you look at the companies that have not been affected by this it's the infrastructure companies and what it reminds me of, it's a little bit different, but 2001, we had the dot com bust. The entire industry blew up, but what came out of that? >> Everything that exists. >> Amazon, lots of companies grew up out of that environment. >> Everything that was promoted actually happened. >> Yes, but you know what didn't happen- >> Food delivery. >> But you know what's interesting that didn't happen- >> (laughs) Pet food, the soccer never happened. >> The whole Super Bowl, yes. (John laughs) In financial services we built on top of legacy. I think what Web 3 is doing, it's getting rid of that legacy infrastructure. And the banks are going to be involved. There's going to be new players and stuff. But what I'm seeing now is a doubling down of the infrastructure investment of saying okay, how do we actually make this stuff real so we can actually show the promise? >> One of the things I just shared, Rob, you'd appreciate this, is that the digital advertising market's changing because now banner ads and the old techniques are based on Web 2 infrastructure, basically DNS as we know it. And token problems are everywhere. Sites and silos are built because LinkedIn doesn't share information. And the sites want first party data. It's a hoarding exercise, so those practices are going to get decimated. So in comes token economics, that's going to get decimated. So you're already seeing the decline of media. And advertising, cookies are going away. >> I think it's going to change, it's going to be a flip, because I think right now you're not in control. Other people are in control. And I think with tokenomics and some of the other things that are going to happen, it gives back control to the individual. Think about it, right now you get advertising. Now you didn't say I wanted this advertising. Imagine the value of advertising when you say, you know what, I am interested in getting information about this particular type of product. The lead generation, the value of that advertising is significantly higher. >> Organic notifications. >> Yeah. >> Well, gentlemen, I'd love to follow up with you. I'm definitely going to ping in. Now I'm going to put CUBE coin back on the table. For our audience CUBE coin's coming. Really appreciate it, thanks for sharing your insights. Great conversation. >> Excellent, thank you for having us. >> Excellent, thank you so much. >> theCUBE's coverage here from New York City. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more live coverage to close out the day. Stay with us, we'll be right back. >> Excellent. (calm electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE's Coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and very pleased to be welcoming back. One of our CUBE alumni, the chairman and CEO of Coupa, the man himself Rob Bernshteyn, Rob great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be with you again. >> It's great to be in person. >> Sure. >> I applaud Coupa for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy it's Coupa. >> Well, thank you for saying that, we're definitely feeling it. You're right, we took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID, omicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but we just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanted to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in home and away. >> Absolutely a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion, spend under management. You're almost at a trillion, a year run rate, that's huge. The growth of Cuopa, just up into the right. >> It is and it's really in thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here. Courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their of companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that spend being optimized going to the right channels. Companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. >> I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper-based, manual, no visibility, and I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jabil on this afternoon who had like 6 billion in indirect spend. They couldn't see. And with Cuopa, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility, the BSM community is really helping organization glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. >> Look what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions. They have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals, but in order to do that, they need energy. They need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design, or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury the way they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower. It's given them more gas in the tank and that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. >> Right, that amplification that acceleration the AI and Coupa. I got to see you about, about a year and a half ago. We were a few months into the pandemic but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coopa has really helped customers to mitigate? >> Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home they couldn't do those paper based processes anymore. So they leverage our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks for example and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example, order things or or get goods and services to their folks that are now working from home, for example. But then they're also faced with the acute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we help them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So, I mean, those are just some of the examples but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, you know we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would've needed but we tried to be right there with our customer to give them, you know, the knife, the match, the scissors, the, you know the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves is you know, a true partner to our customers. >> Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers growth in new business in excess of 60% percent record annual revenue, 725, be up for up 34% subscription revenue up. Coupa up into the right. >> Well, it is, and what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business. We're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time, but the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that this, we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Coupa very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth, here's our margins, here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company everything's out there and everyone can see and decide whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. >> Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Coupa in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? >> Well, we set our sites on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently and she was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it that could be used to the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software. You know, where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing, you know, a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk for example, make sure that the goods and services they buy they get on time at the right price points, make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority own supplier needs. All of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratch and service. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this sign insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. >> It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional episodic, Coupa isn't like that. >> Well, you know that there's no shortcut to that. That has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the O in Coupa which is the openness, the openness, the transparency the authenticity in which we, with which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them and interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world, or you know, upper mid-market or mid-market customers whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. >> The trust in a authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corcoran was fantastic. Inspiring, I loved how she said she'd probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought that's Coupa to me, that's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those Cs to me embody what Coupa is. >> Exactly, exactly. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is. No doubt. >> It's true that power of that community is. And I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? (laughing) >> Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these siloed data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raj and our product team we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community. But we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. >> I was talking to one of your customers. I think it was Jabil recently, and we're having them on the program today. And they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa. And one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them, but allow them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes. Because we are here in the back office now moving to the front. >> Rob: That's right. >> In a day to day, really figuring out what if it did this? What if it did that? Now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential >> That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them. Our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle a host of other ERPs, we help them get strategic leverage from those applications. And we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early, you know, enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful, you know relationship with our customers, but also a way to, to give them more and more leverage >> That's critical. Especially as every company these days it has to be a data company, but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights act on it, make pivots. It's one of the words that we probably use so often in the last two years is pivot, but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, their toast. >> I think so I think it's really tough. You know, I frame it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We're worried about, you know, physical labor, moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the advent you know, the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution it's, as you said, it's not only the data, but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people can take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And, you know, we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing, you know, technology company, a cloud based what we call values as a service company. >> Value as service, right. You mentioned in your keynote, you were talking about the the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it was right there with you, Superman, Rocky, was it Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that's another one, and I thought you mentioned, you know my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when they need it. Is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are just higher and higher. >> That's right. That's right. And you know, the U in Coupa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply, if the machine could do the majority of the work there should be less and less stress upon the end user the user themselves, as I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently thoughtfully and optimally as possible. And you know we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man machine, woman machine interaction then less and less is on the, on the man or woman, and much much more is on the, you know the platform that we continue to develop. >> One of the things I read that you said in the press release I think it was yesterday's, chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine organizations like I had Casey's General Store on, this is a company that was founded in the fifties. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs, are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? >> Well, they're all aspiring to it and we're, in my view proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end, to have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shift and consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain, you know, challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, and, you know we're doing something special out there. >> So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? >> You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. >> I saw the dancing video that is not boring. (Rob laughing) >> But you know, it's been what, 52 quarters of going at it, one quarter at a time, one customer at a time one interaction at a time, one line of code at a time, you know, one QA assurance at a time, one support ticket at a time just moving forward moving forward, moving forward. And before, you know, it, you turn around, you look around and we began as you know, know a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like, you know, we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program, congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with Coupa and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events, we appreciate you stopping by on the CUBE. >> Thank You. Thanks for having me again. >> All right. For Rob Bernshteyn, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of day two Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around. My next guest will join me shortly. (lighthearted music)

(tubular bells chiming) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here, get all the action wall-to-wall coverage. The keynotes with the new CEO, Adam Leschi just happened. A lot of action wall-to-wall coverage for days, and we'd love cloud computing because it impacts business. We love all that, but when it impact sports, we love it even more because it can relate to it. You can see the two great guests here from the NHL Formula 1. We got David Lehanski the EVP of business development and innovation at the NHL, Rob Smedley, director of data systems at Formula 1. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today in theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So obviously formula one we know is very data driven. Pun intended, NHL has a lot of action going on as well with innovation streaming, et cetera. Let's get into it. You're both Amazon customers, right? We'll start with you. Formula 1, big partnership with AWS. What's that about? how you guys look at this cloud as you guys go to the next level? Cause you're under a lot of pressure with the data, from the cars and standards and all that good stuff. What's up. >> What's going on? >> Well, I mean, you know, it started probably four or five years ago with the acquisition of Liberty media and formula 1, and there was a real drive towards data. There was a real drive towards, you know, unearthing all of the data that we've got, you know, formula 1, arguably probably generates the most data, this most sports data of any sport on the planet. You know, we have car telemetry data, timing data, metadata, image data, you know, we own all the video data, and the audio data of driver radio, tire data, weather data, you put all that together. You got to, you know, a real massive data. And it was just about trying to unearth that and, and engage the fans more. And that's where the partnership with AWS come from. >> And the competitiveness in formula one I know is really high. You got a lot of smart people on these teams looking for an edge. And I know it's like, it's a whole new world with data as things get exposed. So I got to ask you, what is your job? Are you there to like to corral the data that kind of set standards? What's your role? >> Well, my role is essentially, to use the data at central league level, if you want, for all the franchises, that's all 20 drivers, within the 10 teams to try to, you know, use that data in whatever way possible, whether it's the new car or whether it's the F1 insights powered by AWS to try to engage the fans more. You know, we've understood that data, is really important to tell the story of Formula 1. And it's really important to reach different demographics as well. The younger demographics, the young, the gen Zedders is, you know, those types of guys, it's really important to get to them, because you can condense and at one hour 45 race down to five minutes, right. Which is what they want. So this has been a really important step for us. And a really important part of that journey has been the enablement. >> And I can see the whole e-sports thing I could see after a race. Okay. Now the fans race amongst themselves, as the technology simulation gets better, only headroom there. So to speak. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what we're, you know, that's probably the next generation of what we want to do with the data is we want to make it much more interactive. We're already giving, you know, through the insights and through, you know, the way that, we're trying to tell stories with the different data assets we're already trying to do that, in a much more proactive way of telling the story. The next level of that. is completely immersive, is interactive. And that's what we call the 21st drivers. So there's 20, formula 1 drivers. Right. But, we want to build systems using the data and gamification where you can embed yourself and immerse yourself in that, in the races, the 21st driver and race against the other guys on a Sunday afternoon. >> Awesome. Dave, let's get to the NHL National Hockey League. You guys are doing a lot of good stuff. You're the EVP of innovation and what's going on over there. How do you see the cloud helping you guys innovate. what's on your agenda and what's your role? >> Wow. I don't know if we have enough time, but at the highest level, you know, we're trying to expand and enhance the way we produce and present our game to the world. You know, our sport, we have some similarities, but there's a lot of differences based on the uniqueness of the sport. Statistics, hadn't really been a big part of the National Hockey League in the way people consume the game. I always say, you know, goaltenders have two statistics that have been used to evaluate them. And they were the same ones that were used to evaluate them back in 1917. So almost again a hundred years where it hasn't really evolved that much, but we think there's so much there that can really enrich and transform the game. So we're trying to partner with AWS and the best technology companies in the world to figure out how we can start to capture that data and turn it into meaningful content and experiences that allow fans to go a little bit deeper and a little bit broader. >> Yeah, I can see the data being used for also seeing what the NFL is doing a lot with the safety. Hits are getting harder and faster in the NHL. I mean, the collisions, the equipment, everyone is going faster. That's a big safety issue too. Isn't it? >> There is a safety component too. And it, look, that is one of the unique things about our sports. Both of us are speed involved. The speed though, for us, it's not just on the ice, it's also the pace of play, right? So when you have a stoppage, it's typically 10 or 15 seconds long. So there's not a lot of time to integrate data, to tell stories, to build and graphics and visualizations. So the first phase for us was to build the tracking system that could capture the positional, the positions of the puck and the players throughout the course of every game. And that's generating a massive amount of new data. Now we're trying to add video to that data so we could start to use it to create entirely new experiences. >> What are you guys thinking about from a fan experience as you look at the analytics. Are they interested in more like the, where the puck is, how fast people are going, what are some of the analytics sharing? >> So it depends, Right? So from a fan standpoint, you know, avid fans really want to, they want to go deep and they want understand controlled zone entries and like, you know, things that are really inherent to, you know, the core factors for determining outcome. Casual fans, they like just on knowing speed, right? How fast is the puck moving? How fast are the players moving. Before we had the system, we weren't able to produce it. Before we had AWS, you won't be able to produce that in real time and overlay it onto a game. So we could go even deeper when it comes to players and coaches and media partners, but the ability to build a solution that works in real time to give them the data and the video that they can use to tell those stories is born from AWS. >> And that brings up a great point. I'd love to ask both of you, if you can answer this question about the fan expectations. One of the big trends coming out of this re-invent this year as cloud is creating more capabilities, but the users and the consumers have new expectations. They want it on mobile, they want the highlights, they want everything. They want the data, there are data junkies. They want everything, cause they're immersing, into the experience with multiple touchpoints. TV, app. Whatever. >> I think that's right. And I think that it's up to, you know, as David's just saying that the two sports here with a lot of similarities and you can see that we're both on the same journey and that's because it's been driven in the end by the consumers, it's been driven by our customers. And, I think that now we're on, you know, what I would call the data flywheel, where there's a lot of inertia and it's just getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And this was, if we go back say three, four years when we started the partnership with AWS and we started to get really deep into the data and understand, you know, what the objectives of this whole exercise were, we always knew that there'd be a point where it started to build a lot of momentum and have a lot of inertia and that's, what's happening now. There's a real thirst for it, right? And it's not just, you know, even the naysayers, you know, even the people that kind of looked at it and went, well, why are you filling my screen with data exactly the same as what Dave says, you know, since you know, the goaltender since 1917, you've used the same two stats to evaluate that particular player. In formula 1 it's been exactly the same. So we started to introduce stuff which had been the same state as core for 70 years. And they say, well, what's all this about. Now, those people can't live without that. Right? It's become, a key part of the broadcast. >> And it creates new products, like things like Netflix, who would've thought a series would be on Formula 1, a soap opera for formula 1 in behind the scenes, driving to survive has been quite an acceleration for fan base. I mean, techies in Silicon valley and all around the world have told us like, hey, you know what? That exposes the nerdiness of Formula 1. Kind of cool. So who would have thought, I mean, there's going to be shows on this whole other level. >> I think, another point to add it is about increasing your distribution points and getting your content out to as many people as possible through as many platforms as possible. But I think in addition to that, it's really about, Rob started to touch on this personalization and customization. What can you do within those platforms to give fans the ability to sort of create their own experience? Right? So data highlights, huge, huge, huge level of importance. >> I think community is going to be a big part of this too. As you start to see the data creates more interactions and more progression, if you will. Community, I'm a Bruins fan in California. There's not a lot of Bruins fans, mostly sharks fans, but I got to get online. Where am I? Where's my tribe. I want to hang, that's not just on Twitter. >> Yeah >> So there's a whole another level coming. How do you guys see community developing in your sports? >> I think the community is the biggest factor in all of this. Right? And it's kind of bringing together. It's a global sports community, first and foremost, but then you've got these pockets. So you've got NHL, NFL, you've got formula 1 and they're all gaining popularity, but it's all through really everybody being on this same journey. Everybody's on this same journey of involving tech in the sport of revolutionizing their particular sport. And it's building this global community. I mean, In formula 1, we've got a billion fans worldwide, but that's growing, it's growing every single year, but it's only growing because we're starting now to get to that younger demographic, formerly one could never get to the demographic, you know, formula 1 fans looked like us, but now it's starting to really improve our system. >> The virtualization of this hybrid world we're living in opens up the doors for more access. >> Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's the key point here. And again, they've touched on it. It's the personalization. It's using data and platforms and packages to personalize somebody's engagement with their particular sport. >> I got a couple of questions from the fan base, I knew you guys were coming on. I want to get to you , first, Rob, how has F1 been using Amazon and the cloud to develop the new 2022 race car? >> Well, I mean, it, I would say it's no exaggeration to say Amazon technology enabled, was the key enabler in as being able to design that 2022 car, you know, we designed it in a virtual environment called computational fluid dynamics. You know, the simulations, when we were first running design iterations, were taking something like 40 hours with when we started running it on the EC2, you know, spinning up 7,000 calls, something like that. We got that down to seven hours, manageable. We designed the whole new car. >> Awesome. On the NHL, the question here for you, is that okay, how is the young generation coming into the game? What's changed with the innovation that's impacting, how the games played and how the young guns are coming up? Is there any in technology enabling that? >> Sure. You know, so we're looking at the type of content that younger fans are gravitating to, obviously highlights and dance games, but we talked about it before the ability to see what they want to see with regard to that. So, you know, where we're trying to get to is where you could watch a game and ultimately decide whether or not you want to turn on a right rail of real-time statistics for your favorite player, for your favorite team, for a specific event, whether or not you want to turn on the ability to network with your friends across social platforms, whether or not you want to turn on the betting functionality, whether or not you want to turn on the game functionality. Right? So this is how the younger generation really wants to consume the data, like sort of, they want to see what they want to see, when and how they want to see it. So we're working on that. And then there's everything that goes beyond that. The world of NFTs and VR and AR and alternate forms of content distribution, none of that would be capable or available if not for the ability to capture process and distribute data and video in an aggregate in real time. >> You know, I really think we're onto something so new here. And if you guys are really kind of illustrating the whole point of how being in person, the old model of physical, I don't have to go into arena to watch hockey or go watch formula 1, and hopefully it's on TV. Maybe it's got coverage here and there, but now with hybrid, you can integrate the experiences from the physical in-person where the asset is. >> Absolutely. >> And to virtual and just open up completely new hybrid use cases. I mean, this is brand new. There's no standards. >> Not, exactly. And that's something that we're really starting to look at, which is the event of the future. You know? So how would you bring, how do you mismatch? How would you bring that whole data experience and that whole broadcast experience to the actual event, the live event, and how would you bring the live event to somebody's front room? It's the hybrid model, right? And this is definitely next generation of how we're using the data. We're working with AWS. We're calling it event of the future. It's really, really exciting. I mean, you can imagine going there, to a formula 1 race, you're sat in the stands. You're no longer, you know, watching a car pass every few seconds and wondering what's going on. You've now got AR, VR that you can kind of put up and lay-up across what's going on the track. >> Well, a lot of people would love to get you guys' reaction to this comment online. Cause this is big, I see a lot of naysayers out there because they're so locked into the business model of the physical location. There's a lot of investment in events like this, wants me to buy tickets and show up. So they call it a one-way door here in the industry, they don't want to go through that one way door, but I'm saying that door has already been passed. It's like you're in this hybrid world is here. If you don't get out in front of it, you're going to be toast. So the question is, how do you guys think about this when you talk about the business model of experience? Cause you have to get in there and it's not super great right now on virtual. It could be better. It has to get better. So it's a balance. How do you guys talk about that in your respective fields to educate the potential? I won't say naysayers, but yeah. >> Yeah no, no, no. So we believe it wholeheartedly. You know, when you think about the inner arena experience, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be in place to be able to deliver those types of experiences to fans, while they're in the building, we wholeheartedly believe that the people who are paying the most to see our games should get the best possible experience. So there should be no replay, they don't get, there should be no game that they can't access, no application that they couldn't have on their phone, but you need to have, you know, fairly advanced wireless in the arena infrastructures in place. You need to have a lot of cloud infrastructure and services there. So, you know, that's why we're leveraging Kinesis and SageMaker and AWS elemental services to get all of it condensed, operating in the cloud and distributed. So if you're a fan at a game, they're 18,000 other people, like you trying to access a mobile phone to place a bet on a real-time event that just happened, you can actually do it, but a lot needs to go into that. >> Yeah, that's really good insight because what you're pointing out is is that the physical location is the first party asset. That's the key. You build on that, invest in that and then feed it out into the next world and then figure that out. Do you agree with that. >> Absolutely. 100 percent correct. Well, 100 percent agree with everything that David just said. And we've got probably, you know, an even bigger challenge because we've got these 20 sites where we lift and shift 20, 23 races, you know, all round the world where we lift and shift every couple of weeks, and they're not arenas either. They're, you know, these are huge sites. These are you know, five, six kilometer by five, six kilometer square sites. So trying to do everything that David just said in that space, we can open it. >> Yeah, we just turn the lights off, it's over, he's got to pack it all up. >> The private 5G is going to totally help. You can run drones and have full blanket coverage over the location. That's good. That's good stuff. Final question for you guys on data, because I think this is something that we've been kind of talking about on theCUBE over the past year, we see open source software has become a huge success. Do you guys see opening up the data to your fan base and seeing e-sports races in formula 1, is just going crazy. Everyone loves it. It's not there yet but the equipment having your own car in your living room, but it's close, pretty close, it's there. Opening up the data, how do you see that potential? Because there are people who want to maybe code on top of it. How do you guys view that? >> Well, I think it, has to, I mean, Dave, again, touched on this earlier when he talked about, you know, the difference between the casual and the avid. The avid, you'll never, ever satisfy the average thirst for data, right. They want to do what I did and sit on a pit wall and manage a grand Prix team. And that's great, you know, it shouldn't just be for a privilege, you know, 10, 20 people in the world to do that. We should be able to give everybody that experience because we have the technology and the ability and the know how to be able to do that. And that's where, you know, again, partnership with AWS, where we're talking about something called the virtual pit wall. So, you know, the pit stands where it's kind of like the mission control. We want to be able to bring that to the average. And it's just getting deeper and deeper layers where you can set up your bespoke environment. You can set it up just as if you were a race engineer or a team strategist, one of those guys, and you can just get deeper and deeper. And then you start to lay over that. You start to build your own models. We bring in simulation into that whole area. And, you know, it's exactly the same as what you have in the teams. You just go deeper and deeper and deeper. >> What's it like to be on the pit wall there, managing teams. what's it. (men laughing) >> Hmm scary sometimes >> Nerve wrecking. >> Nerve-wracking, I mean, I talked about, you know, the gen Zedders who want the, you know, a two hour race to pass in five minutes, it passes in five minutes. Cause there's so much going on. You know, it's kind of like being the coach or the, you know, the football manager, you know, you're under a lot of pressure. You've got to make the right decisions. You've got to, you know, you've got to make decisions in split seconds. Everybody's an expert 10 seconds after the decision has been made. It's that type of thing, but it's great fun, you know. >> I can see virtual Formula 1 being a hot total hit because with all the data and now autonomous vehicles, you can almost have a collective kind of team approach, like swapping out AI in the cars in real time from the virtual pit. >> Yeah. And again, you know, I'm just going to name check deep racer because you know, AWS deep racer, you know, we formula 1, and AWS deep racer. We did an activation about a year back in the first lockdown, in the first COVID lockdown. So we took a couple of formula 1 drivers, Daniel Ricardo being one of them. And then we built out this deep racer platform and we're trying to look at how we can bring that more, you know, more together. So you've got this virtual, sorry, this AI car, this autonomous car, and you've got formula 1. And how do we merge those two worlds together? And again, that's just trying to immerse people more in the experience. >> Alright, final question. What's the coolest thing you got going on in each of your respective innovation fields with AWS? What would you highlight your favorite innovation or coolest thing you're doing? >> Well, I can't tell you about the coolest, right. That's for sure. Look, I just think what we're doing with AWS with regard to AIML around data and statistics analytics, based on what I said earlier, the evolution of statistics and analytics and hockey really hasn't taken hold, we're there now. The ability to really take a game that's has so much volatility, and we're the only professional teams sport that has personnel changes occurring in life play. So you never really know who's on the ice and the ability now to deliver real-time graphics and visualizations in the broadcast based on movements that had just played within milliseconds. And, we're starting to do that today with shot and save analytics with AWS. So where that can go in the future is really, what's probably the most exciting because it'll totally transform the way fans consumer our game. >> The NHS has always been on the cutting edge on the tech. Been following you guys for years, congratulations. Rob, the coolest thing you're working on, from Amazon, that's cool, and in formula 1 that's in your plate right now. >> Do you know what, I mean, there's so much going on at the minute. It's really difficult to choose any one thing. I think the whole partnership it's everything that we wanted it to be that, you know, the whole way that we're moving data forward and where we're revolutionizing this sport in a lot of ways, you know, sport has sat still for a long time. And to go through that digital transformation, you know, with Amazon and you know, in all the various areas that we're working on, I just think it's all, you know, it's all really, really cool. I mean, it's just moving forward at such a pace. Now. >> If you don't mind me asking why I got you here on the whole data thing, I'm just thinking about if I was on a team, I'd be like, okay, there's a whole new wild west. It's this arbitrage of data, we'll get over on the other team. Do you have to watch out, do you guys talk about like watching teams actually, I mean, it's actually innovative that they can get an edge, but an unfair advantage if they actually had used the data, is there like discussion around, like who can use the data, which teams? >> Of course. I mean, you know, when you get down to the franchises, each team can only use its individual data. You know, that's where we have key insight up at the league level because we've got, you know, a subset of all of the teams data. So we can kind of see everything that's going on. >> And watch out for the hackers coming in and get that data. >> Oh, well, alright, we've got pretty good security. >> Guys, thanks for coming on. I love the sports angle on this. It's really awesome. I think this is a great example of how cloud and digital lifestyle is coming together. The tech integration with the fan experience and the business models are super compelling, and I think that's illustration to just every other business. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Okay so theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent. I'm John furrier, your host in theCUBE. You're watching the leader in event tech covers theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soul music)

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

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to talk about data protection in the age of ransomware. It's a top of mind topic. And with me are two great guests and CUBE alumnus, David Noy, Vice Presidents of Product Management at Dell Technologies and Rob Emsley, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell. Guys, welcome back to the CUBE, it's good to see you both. >> Oh, thanks so much, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks a lot Dave. >> Hey David, let me start with you. Maybe we could look at the macro, the big picture at Dell for cyber security. What are you seeing out there? >> You know, I'm seeing an enormous amount of interest in cybersecurity obviously driven by a string of recent events and the presidential executive order around cybersecurity. Look, we're in unprecedented times where, you know, disaster readiness is not just about being prepared for a wildfire or a sprinkler going off in your data center. It's around a new class of malicious attacks that people just have to be ready for. And it's not even a question of if it's going to happen, it's a question of when it's going to happen. We know it's going to happen, you're going to get hit by them. And so we go beyond just thinking about, hey, how do you build in technical capabilities into the product to make it difficult for attackers? We actually want to get predictive. We want to use advanced technologies and capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning to go out and scan users environments and look at their data which is really the lifeblood of a business and say, hey, we can see that there is potentially an attack looming. We can start to look for dormant attack vectors. And as soon as something bad is happening because we know something bad is going to happen, we can help you quickly recover the restore or figure out which restore point to recover from so you can get your business back and operational as soon as possible. >> Great, thank you for that, David. Hey Rob, good to see you. You know, we've seen a lot of changes recently kind of as David was referencing, it used to be okay, cybersecurity, that's the domain of the SecOps team and, you know, the rest of the company said, okay, it's their problem. You know, data protection or backup, that was the backup admin. Those two worlds are kind of colliding together. We use terms like cyber resiliency now. It's a sort of super set of, if you will, of the traditional cybersecurity. So how can organizations get ahead of these cyber threats when you engage with customers? Do you have any sort of specific angles or tooling that you use to help? >> Yeah, Dave, there's a couple of things to unpack there. You know, I think one of the things that you call out is cyber resiliency. You know, I think there's a balancing act that customers are all working through between cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. On the left-hand side of the balancing act, it's, you know, how can I keep bad things out of my network? And the reality is that it's very difficult, you know, to do that. You know, there's many applications that customers have deployed to protect the perimeter. But as you know, many cyber threats, you know, are manifested from inside of the perimeter. So what we're seeing is customers starting to invest more in making themselves cyber resilient organizations, you know, and as David mentioned, it's not the if, it's the when. The question is, how do you respond to when a cyber attack hits you? So one of the things that we introduced pointing back six months ago is a globally available cyber resiliency assessment. And we worked in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group and we put out a free online assessment tool to allow customers to really answer questions around, you know, a big part of the NIST framework, around detection, protection and recovery. And we give customers the opportunity to get themselves evaluated on, are they prepared? Are they vulnerable? Or are they just, you know, black and white exposed? You know, what we found over the last six months is that over 70% of the people that have taken this cyber resiliency assessment fall into that category of they're vulnerable or they're exposed. >> Right, thank you for that. Yeah, the guys at ESG do a good job in that they have deep expertise in that space. And David, Rob just talked about sort of the threats from inside the perimeter and, you know, any person, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist, you can go on the dark web. You can acquire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server and are willing to put a stick in there and do some bad things or give credentials out, hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs. You know, but more often than not, people are getting away with really, you know, insidious crime. So how is Dell, David helping customers respond to the threat of ransomware? >> So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the product approach is pretty sophisticated. You know, you're right, somebody can come and just put a USB stick into a machine or if they have administrative access, they can figure out a code that they've either been given because, you know, the trust has been placed in the wrong place or they've somehow socially engineered out of someone. Look, it's not enough to just say, I'm going to go lock down my system. Someone who's gained access can potentially gain access to other systems by hopping through them. We take a more of a vault based approach which means that when you create a cyber vault, it's essentially locked down from the rest of your environment. Your cyber criminal is not able to get to that solution because it's been air gapped. It's kept somewhere else completely separate from other network but it also has keys and to the keys to the kingdom or that it opens up only at a certain time of day so it's not vulnerable to coming in at any time. It goes and requests data, it pulls the data and then it keeps that immutable copy in the vault itself. So the vault is essentially like a gated off, modded off environment that an attacker cannot get into. If you find that there was an attack or if an attack has occurred in which an attack will occur sooner or later, you then can basically prevent that attacker from getting access into that vaulted environment before that next opening event occurs. We also have to go back and look at time because sometimes these attackers don't instantiate all at once, I'm going to basically go and encrypt all your data. They take a more of a graduated approach. And so you have to go and look at patterns, access patterns of how data has actually changed and not just look at the metadata, say, okay, well, it looks like the data changed at a certain time. You have to look at the data contents. You have to look at the, if there's a file type. Often times, you can actually analyze that as well and say, hey, this given file whether it's a PowerPoint file or an Excel file or one of the a hundred or a thousand different file types should look like this, it doesn't look like that inside. What are many of the solutions that look for these attackers do is they're just looking at metadata access and then potentially just entropies or how fast things are changing. Well, it's changing faster than it normally would. That's not enough. And the attackers are just going to get smarter about how they go and change things. They're going to change it so that they don't change file suffixes or they don't change them with a very high entropy rate. And without using some kind of a system that's actually constantly tuning itself to say, hey, this is how these attack vectors are evolving over time, you're going to miss out on these opportunities to go and protect yourself. So we have also a constantly evolving and learning capability to go in and say, okay, as we see how these attack vectors are evolving to adapt to the way that we defend against them, we're going to also (audio glitches) other practices to make sure that we account for the new models. So it's a very adaptable kind of, it really is artificial intelligence form of protecting yourself. >> Can I ask you a question, David, just a follow-up on the immutable copy? Where does that live? Is it kind of live on prem? Is it in the cloud, either? >> Both, so we have the ability to put that on prem. We have the ability to put that in a second data center. We have the ability to keep that actually in a colo site so basically, completely out of your data center. And we've got the ability to keep that in the cloud as well. >> The reason I ask is because I just, you know, putting my paranoid SecOps hat on and I'm no expert here but I've talked to organizations that say, oh yeah, it's in the cloud, it's a service. Say, okay, but it's immutable? Yeah, it's write once, read many. You can't erase it. I go, okay, can I turn it off? Well, no, not really. Well, what if I stopped paying for the service? Well, we'd send a notice out. I said, okay, wait a minute. So am I just being too paranoid here? How do you handle that objection? >> Of turning it off? >> Yeah, can I turn it off or can you make it so that nobody can turn it off? >> Oh yeah, that's a good question. So actually what we're building into the product roadmap is the ability to that product actually self inspect and to look at. Whether or not even the underlying, so for example, if the service is running in a virtual machine. Well, the attacker could say, let me just go attack the virtual machine and it infect it and basically turn itself off even in an on-prem, nevermind in the cloud. And so we're looking at building or we're building into the roadmap, a lot more self inspection capabilities to make sure that somebody isn't going to just shut down the service. And so that kind of self resiliency is critical even to a vaulted solution which is air gapped, right? To your point. You don't want someone going, well, I can just get around your solution. I'm just going to go shut it down. That's something that we're getting at. >> So this talks, I think for the audience, this talks it's like an ongoing game of escalation and you want to have a partner who has the resources to keep up with the bad guys cause it's just the constantly, you know, upping the ante, Rob, you guys do a survey every year, the Global Data Protection Index. Tell us about that. What are the latest results? You survey a lot of people. I'm interested in, you know, the context of things like remote work and hybrid work, it's escalated the threat. What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so as you mentioned, the Global Data Protection Index, we survey over a thousand IT executives, you know, around the globe. And in the most recent study, we absolutely started to ask questions specifically around, you know, customer's concerns with regards to cybersecurity. And we found that over 60% of the customer surveyed, you know, really are concerned that they don't feel that they are adequately prepared to respond to cyber threats that they see, unfortunately on a day-to-day basis. You know, certainly, you know, as you mentioned, the work from anywhere, learn from anywhere reality that many customers are dealing with, you know, one of the concerns that they have is the increased attack surface that they now have to deal with. I mean, the perimeter of the network is now, you know, much broader than it ever has been in the past. You know, so I think all of this leads, Dave, to cybersecurity discussions and cyber resiliency discussions being top of mind for really any CIO, their CSO in any industry. You know, in the days of old, you know, we used to focus at the financial services industry, you know, as, you know, a bunch of customers that we, you know, could have very relevant conversations with but now, you know, that is now cross industry-wide. There isn't a vertical that isn't concerned about the threats of cyber security and cyber attacks. So, you know, when we think about our business especially around data vaulting with our PowerProtect portfolio but also with our PowerScale portfolio, with our unstructured data storage solutions. You know, when we're really having constant conversations of brand, how do you make your environment more cyber resilient? And, you know, we've been seeing, you know, rapid growth in both of those solution areas, both implementing extensions of customers, backup and recovery solutions, you know, but also, you know, in the environments where, you know, we're deploying, you know, large scale unstructured storage infrastructure, you know, the ability to have real-time monitoring of those environments and also to extend that to delivering a vaulted solution for your unstructured storage are all things that are leading us to, you know, work with customers to actually help them become more cyber resilient. >> Great, thanks. The last question and maybe for both of you. Maybe Rob you start and David you can chime in. I'm interested in what's exciting you guys, what's new in the portfolio, are there new features that you're delivering that map to the current market conditions? I mean, your unique value proposition and your capabilities have shifted. You have to respond to the market changes over the left last 18 to 24 months whether it's cyber, ransomware, the digital transformation, what's new in the portfolio and what's exciting you guys. >> So Dave, yes, so quite recently we, you know, as well as, you know, running an event specifically to talk about protection and the age of ransomware and to discuss many of the things that we've covered on this call. You know, data protection is still a foundational technology to help customers become, you know, more secure and, you know, reduce their risk profiles. So innovation that we delivered very recently, you know, it's really in three specific areas, you know, VMware Data Protection, NAS Data Protection and then, you know, also, you know, we introduced a tech preview of a direction that we're taking to expand the scalability and manageability of our PowerProtect appliances. So transparent snapshots delivers capabilities to help customers better protect their VMware environment without the concern of disrupting their production applications when they're doing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Dynamic NAS protection moves away from the age old mechanism of NDMP and provides a much more performance and scalable solution for protecting all of that unstructured data running on NAS infrastructure. And then last but not least to say the tech preview of Smart Scale which is our new solution and architecture to allow customers to pull together multiple power of attack appliances within their data sensors and give them a much easier way of managing the PowerProtect appliances that they have and scaling them environment by implementing a federated namespace to align on them to get support in that environment. >> Nice, some great innovations there. All right, David bring us home. What's exciting you? You shared a little bit with the roadmap of... >> Yeah, look, I think all of this is about operations today. Every enterprise is 24/7. It doesn't matter what vertical you're in, right? Downtime is unacceptable. And whether that means whether it's downtime because you got hit by a malicious attacker, it means downtime because you were caused by disruption of virtual machine instances to Rob's point during the backup process. And we can't interrupt those processes, we can't impact their performance. It means, you know, making sure that your largest unstructured repositories in NAS deployments can be backed up in a time that makes sense so that you can meet your own SLAs. And it means that with a smart scale product there are ability to go and say, okay, as you're expanding your backup target environment, we can do that in a seamless fashion without disrupting your backup operations and your day-to-day operations. All of this is around making sure that we minimize the amount of disruption that our end users experience either because of malicious attacks or because of day-to-day operations and making, you know, making sure that those businesses really can operate 24/7. And that is the crux of a really true enterprise solution for data protection >> Guys, very important topic, really appreciate you coming on the CUBE. Great conversation and keep up the good work of protecting our data. >> Well, Dave, thanks. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thanks everybody for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>the cloud is evolving, you know, it's no longer just a set of remote services access through a public cloud Rather it's expanding to on premises to multiple premises across clouds and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one the opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this cube program. We're featuring pure storage and its latest innovations and bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them if you will. And today we have a two part program. First we're gonna hear from rob leaves the CTO of pure storage and then my colleague john Walls is gonna talk to scott. Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is rob lee CTO pure storage. Welcome rob. Good to see you. >>Good to see you again to dave >>Okay, so take us through the announcements from today at a high level what's most exciting about what you're delivering? Yeah, >>absolutely. So as you know, many announcements today, many things to discuss. But overall, uh you know, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. Right. We've always thought of the journey to modern data is being formed by by three pillars if you will. Certainly modernizing infrastructure modernizing operations uh and applications, uh today's announcements are really uh in that in that kind of middle category if like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. Right. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one. Probably people best know us for that. Today's announcements are really about uh tackling that operations, peace bring infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about pure fusion, for example, um you know that that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, uh products and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the application actions that they serve. Whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations or between the premise on premise environment, in the cloud environment. Um likewise, uh the application front, um you know, when we think about today's announcements uh in port works data services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate uh steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud native developers are using and relying on the database applications that are most popular and open source CAssandra Mongo so on and so forth. How do we make the run and operate pieces of those applications, a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed monitored for those app developers and so a ton of a ton of momentum is a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in pure one, um that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure, running the apps and bring those closer together. So when we think about um, you know, the visibility, we're now able to deliver for port works to apologies, allowing developers and devops teams to look at the entire uh tech stack, if you will of a container environment from the application to the containers to the kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes all the way down to the storage and be able to see everything that's going on root cause any sort of problems that come up again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. Um so that's really how I view it, uh and and like I said, it's really the next step in our journey of of helping customers modernize between infrastructure operations and and their applications. >>Okay, So, so you've got the control plane piece, which is all about the operating model. You've got pure one, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the port works piece, which brings sort of development and deployment together and both infrastructure as a code is code and better understanding that full stack of like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers all the way down. So the story says, I feel like it's not even storage anymore. I mean it's cloud, >>It is and you know, I talk a little bit because, you know, at the end of the day we deliver storage, but what customers are looking for is in what they value and what they care about is their data. Now, obviously the storage is in service of the data. Um what we're, what we're doing with today's announcements is again just making it extending, extending our reach, helping customers work over their data. Uh you know, a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage. But now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly? Get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. How >>does this news fit into pure evolution as a company? I mean I don't see it as a pivot because of pivots like, okay, we're gonna go from here and now we're >>doing this right? So >>it's it's more like a reinvention or progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >>Absolutely. Um you know, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's the next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. Right? You know, and again, I go back to um you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long, long term hath long term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data we got our starting infrastructure um and and just uh you know, if you want to do, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not gonna do it on decades old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first. That's how we got our start. Um you know, today's announcements are really the next couple of steps along that journey. Um how do we make, how do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate more automated in the hands of not just the devops teams, the I. T. Teams but the application developers, how do we, how do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why why is that important? Um It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds the traditional kind of measures bandwidth i obsolete and see that sort of thing. But they're looking for a speed of agility. Right? You look at the modern application space around how data is being processed. It's a very, very fast moving application space. Uh you know, the databases that are being used today may be different than the ones using being used three months from now or six months from now And so um developers, application teams are looking for, you know, a ton more flexibility, ton more agility than they were 35, 10, 15 years ago. Um The other aspect is simplicity and reliability, right? As you know, um that's a core component of uh you know of everything. We do our core products uh you know, uh you know, our arrays are storage appliances, um you know, we're very well known for the simplicity and reliability. We drive at the individual product level. Well as we scale and look at um you know, larger environments as we look at uh customers expectations for what they expect from a cloud like service. There is the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. Right. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud wants to be able to manage large fleets of uh infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver uh infrastructure services to their internal customers, want they want to be able to do it in a self service, policy driven, easy to control, easy to manage way. Um and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what what pure fusion is about, right, is allowing operators that control plane to specify those um those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Um Same thing with poor works, right. If we think about simplicity and reliability, uh containers, collaborative applications, microservices, a lot of benefits. They're very fast moving space, you can mix and match components put them together very easily. Um, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity because you have more moving parts and a greater need for reliability because well now you're not just serving one application, but You know, 30 or 40 working in unison and that's really what we're after with port works and port works data services in the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question um, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >>Right. Thanks for that rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. Virtually every infrastructure player now has an as a service offering and there are lots of claims out there about who was first, who is the best etcetera. What's up yours position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack and delivering subscription and, and as a service offerings in the storage industry? You certainly refers to with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as a service and Pure as a service. What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're leading the industry in this regard? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think first and foremost we think of everything we do, uh, you know, pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate uh in an average service model internally or whether it's pure taking on more of that run and operate uh as a service ourselves with pure as a service. Um and so, you know, the second part of your question, which is uh you know, what is it that that sets us apart, What are we doing differently? What gives us confidence that um you know, this is the right path? Well, you know, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a uh you know, a hotter topic in the industry um you know, of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. Right. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry. Um you know, who look at it as a little bit more of a, you know, a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T and CS and call it a service. Um what do I mean by that? Right. So, you know, if you look internally a pure everything we do, we think of as a service, we have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it uh in building out service offerings. Um, you know, when we think about why this is technology led, uh you know, I think of a service for something to be thought of as a service. Right. It's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need uh whether that's, you know, changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day one rigid kind of static swim lanes of Having the capacity plan or plan out what my use is gonna look like 18 months from now. Right. Um I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption. Right? Uh you know, it's it's not it's not a service if you're gonna make me do a data migration or take a downtown. Uh and so when I net all that out Right, what are the things that you need? The attributes you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product that that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolved able. Um you need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of, of needs, whether it's price performance, uh tears, uh you know, high performance capacity, lower cost price points. Um you need something that's got a rich set of capabilities, whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replication snapshots, uh ransomware protection, so you need that full suite of capabilities um but in order to deliver this to service and enable me as a customer to seamlessly grow and change, you know, that's got to be delivered in a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products uh and expect me to change and and move every every single time I have a a service to need change. And so when I net that out that puts us in a absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on to core product families, port works adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price, performance and service tiers. And we're able to do this on a very tight code base and and as you know, uh everything we do is completely not disruptive. So all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of strategic focus for us. >>So these offerings are all part of the services. Service driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >>Absolutely great. >>Um you talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern applications, modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure, what exactly does that mean? And how are you driving that? >>Well, I think um I think it means a couple different things, but if I had to let it out, it's it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. Um and if we look at why that is uh you know, when I talk to customers As they think about infrastructure largely they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support, which is often times the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve. So they're kind of balancing both worlds um and in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic meaning, you know, the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time. Um the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver uh has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up down, growing has to be a lot more elastic um and has much higher variance. Right? And what I mean by that is um you know, you look at a modern cloud, native microservices architecture type application, it's really, you know, 2030 40 different applications, all working in concert with one another under the hood, This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set right back in the day, um you know, you have an oracle application, you go design in an environment for that, right? It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own life cycle. Um these days with modern applications, uh you know, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them, uh you know, working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece. Um and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the changing events and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle and so that at the end of the day drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure, being able to use it for many different purposes, um much more agility, being able to adapt very, very quickly. Uh and much more variants are dynamic range, right? The ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure and this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >>Great, thank you for that. I really liked that answer because it's not just a bunch of, you know, slide wear mumbo jumbo, you actually put some substance on rob, we're gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >>Thank you and >>look forward to having you back soon. Now in a moment, scott Sinclair, who's a senior analyst at enterprise Strategy Group, speaks with the cubes john walls to give you the independent analysts take you're watching the cube, your global leader in high tech coverage. >>Mhm.

>> Okay. We want to pick up on a couple of themes that Mick discussed, you know, supercharging your business with AI, for example, and this notion of getting hybrid right. So right now we're going to turn the program over to Rob Bearden, the CEO of Cloudera and Manuvir Das who's the head of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. And before I hand it off to Rob, I just want to say for those of you who follow me at the Cube, we've extensively covered the transformation of the semiconductor industry. We are entering an entirely new era of computing in the enterprise and it's being driven by the emergence of data intensive applications and workloads. No longer will conventional methods of processing data suffice to handle this work. Rather, we need new thinking around architectures and ecosystems. And one of the keys to success in this new era is collaboration between software companies like Cloudera and semiconductor designers like NVIDIA. So let's learn more about this collaboration and what it means to your data business. Rob, take it away. >> Thanks Mick and Dave. That was a great conversation on how speed and agility is everything in a hyper competitive hybrid world. You touched on AI as essential to a data first strategy in accelerating the path to value and hybrid environments. And I want to drill down on this aspect. Today, every business is facing accelerating change. Everything from face-to-face meetings to buying groceries has gone digital. As a result, businesses are generating more data than ever. There are more digital transactions to track and monitor now. Every engagement with coworkers, customers and partners is virtual. From website metrics to customer service records and even onsite sensors. Enterprises are accumulating tremendous amounts of data and unlocking insights from it is key to our enterprises success. And with data flooding every enterprise, what should the businesses do? At Cloudera, we believe this onslaught of data offers an opportunity to make better business decisions faster and we want to make that easier for everyone, whether it's fraud detection, demand forecasting, preventative maintenance, or customer churn. Whether the goal is to save money or produce income, every day that companies don't gain deep insight from their data is money they've lost. And the reason we're talking about speed and why speed is everything in a hybrid world and in a hyper competitive climate, is that the faster we get insights from all of our data, the faster we grow and the more competitive we are. So those faster insights are also combined with the scalability and cost benefit that cloud provides. And with security and edge to AI data intimacy, that's why the partnership between Cloudera and NVIDIA together means so much. And it starts with a shared vision, making data-driven decision-making a reality for every business. And our customers will now be able to leverage virtually unlimited quantities and varieties of data to power an order of magnitude faster decision-making. And together we turbo charged the enterprise data cloud to enable our customers to work faster and better, and to make integration of AI approaches a reality for companies of all sizes in the cloud. We're joined today by NVIDIA's Manduvir Das, and to talk more about how our technologies will deliver the speed companies need for innovation in our hyper competitive environment. Okay, Manuvir, thank you for joining us. Over to you now. >> Thank you Rob, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of NVIDIA. We're so excited about this partnership with Cloudera. You know, when, when NVIDIA started many years ago, we started as a chip company focused on graphics. But as you know, over the last decade, we've really become a full stack, accelerated computing company where we've been using the power of GPU hardware and software to accelerate a variety of workloads, AI being a prime example. And when we think about Cloudera, and your company, your great company, there's three things we see Rob. The first one is that for the companies that were already transforming themselves by the use of data, Cloudera has been a trusted partner for them. The second thing we've seen is that when it comes to using your data, you want to use it in a variety of ways with a powerful platform, which of course you have built over time. And finally, as we've heard already, you believe in the power of hybrid, that data exists in different places and the compute needs to follow the data. Now, if you think about NVIDIA's mission going forward to democratize accelerated computing for all companies, our mission actually aligns very well with exactly those three things. Firstly, you know, we've really worked with a variety of companies to date who have been the early adopters using the power acceleration by changing their technology and their stacks. But more and more we see the opportunity of meeting customers where they are with tools that they're familiar with, with partners that they trust. And of course, Cloudera being a great example of that. The second part of NVIDIA's mission is we focused a lot in the beginning on deep learning where the power of GPU is really shown through. But as we've gone forward, we found that GPU's can accelerate a variety of different workloads from machine learning to inference. And so again, the power of your platform is very appealing. And finally, we know that AI is all about data, more and more data. We believe very strongly in the idea that customers put their data, where they need to put it. And the compute, the AI compute, the machine learning compute, needs to meet the customer where their data is. And so that matches really well with your philosophy, right? And, and Rob, that's why we were so excited to do this partnership with you. It's come to fruition. We have a great combined stack now for the customer and we already see people using it. I think the IRS is a fantastic example where, literally, they took the workflow they had, they took the servers they had, they added GPUs into those servers. They did not change anything. And they got an eight times performance improvement for their fraud detection workflows, right? And that's the kind of success we're looking forward to with all customers. So the team has actually put together a great video to show us what the IRS is doing with this technology. Let's take a look. >> How you doing? My name's Joe Ansaldi. I'm the branch chief of the technical branch in RAS. It's actually the research division, research and statistical division of the IRS. Basically, the mission that RAS has is we do statistical and research on all things related to taxes, compliance issues, fraud issues, you know, anything that you can think of basically, we do research on that. We're running into issues now that we have a lot of ideas to actually do data mining on our big troves of data, but we don't necessarily have the infrastructure or horsepower to do it. So our biggest challenge is definitely the, the infrastructure to support all the ideas that the subject matter experts are coming up with in terms of all the algorithms they would like to create. And the diving deeper within the algorithm space, the actual training of those algorithms, the number of parameters each of those algorithms have. So that's, that's really been our challenge now. The expectation was that with NVIDIA and Cloudera's help and with the cluster, we actually build out to test this on the actual fraud detection algorithm. Our expectation was we were definitely going to see some speed up in computational processing times. And just to give you context, the size of the data set that we were, the SME was actually working her algorithm against was around four terabytes. If I recall correctly, we had a 22 to 48 times speed up after we started tweaking the original algorithm. My expectations, quite honestly, in that sphere, in terms of the timeframe to get results, was it that you guys actually exceeded them. It was really, really quick. The definite now term, short term, what's next is going to be the subject matter expert is actually going to take our algorithm run with that. So that's definitely the now term thing we want to do. Going down, go looking forward, maybe out a couple of months, we're also looking at procuring some A-100 cards to actually test those out. As you guys can guess, our datasets are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it demands to actually do something when we get more value added out of those data sets is just putting more and more demands on our infrastructure. So, you know, with the pilot, now we have an idea with the infrastructure, the infrastructure we need going forward and then also just our in terms of thinking of the algorithms and how we can approach these problems to actually code out solutions to them. Now we're kind of like the shackles are off and we can just run a, you know, run to our heart's desire, wherever our imaginations takes our SMEs to actually develop solutions. Now have the platforms to run them on. Just kind of to close out, we really would be remiss, I've worked with a lot of companies through the year and most of them been spectacular. And you guys are definitely in that category, the whole partnership, as I said, a little bit early, it was really, really well, very responsive. I would be remiss if I didn't thank you guys. So thank you for the opportunity. Doing fantastic. and I'd have to also, I want to thank my guys. my staff, Raul, David worked on this, Richie worked on this, Lex and Tony just, they did a fantastic job and I want to publicly thank them for all the work they did with you guys and Chev, obviously also is fantastic. So thank you everyone. >> Okay. That's a real great example of speed and action. Now let's get into some follow up questions guys, if I may, Rob, can you talk about the specific nature of the relationship between Cloudera and NVIDIA? Is it primarily go to market or are you doing engineering work? What's the story there? >> It's really both. It's both go to market and engineering The engineering focus is to optimize and take advantage of NVIDIA's platform to drive better price performance, lower cost, faster speeds, and better support for today's emerging data intensive applications. So it's really both. >> Great. Thank you. Manuvir, maybe you could talk a little bit more about why can't we just use existing general purpose platforms that are, that are running all this ERP and CRM and HCM and you know, all the, all the Microsoft apps that are out there. What, what do NVIDIA and Cloudera bring to the table that goes beyond the conventional systems that we've known for many years? >> Yeah. I think Dave, as we've talked about the asset that the customer has is really the data, right? And the same data can be utilized in many different ways. Some machine learning, some AI, some traditional data analytics. So, the first step here was really to take a general platform for data processing, Cloudera data platform, and integrate with that. Now NVIDIA has a software stack called rapids, which has all of the primitives that make different kinds of data processing go fast on GPU's. And so the integration here has really been taking rapids and integrating it into a Cloudera data platform so that regardless of the technique the customer is using to get insight from the data, the acceleration will apply in all cases. And that's why it was important to start with a platform like Cloudera rather than a specific application. >> So, I think this is really important because if you think about, you know, the software defined data center brought in, you know, some great efficiencies, but at the same time, a lot of the compute power is now going towards doing things like networking and storage and security offloads. So the good news, the reason this is important is because when you think about these data intensive workloads, we can now put more processing power to work for those, you know, AI intensive things. And so that's what I want to talk about a little bit, maybe a question for both of you, maybe Rob, you could start. You think about AI that's done today in the enterprise. A lot of it is modeling in the cloud, but when we look at a lot of the exciting use cases, bringing real-time systems together, transaction systems and analytics systems, and real-time AI inference, at least even at the edge, huge potential for business value. In a consumer, you're seeing a lot of applications with AI biometrics and voice recognition and autonomous vehicles and the liking. So you're putting AI into these data intensive apps within the enterprise. The potential there is enormous. So what can we learn from sort of where we've come from, maybe these consumer examples and Rob, how are you thinking about enterprise AI in the coming years? >> Yeah, you're right. The opportunity is huge here, but you know, 90% of the cost of AI applications is the inference. And it's been a blocker in terms of adoption because it's just been too expensive and difficult from a performance standpoint. And new platforms like these being developed by Cloudera and NVIDIA will dramatically lower the cost of enabling this type of workload to be done. And what we're going to see the most improvements will be in the speed and accuracy for existing enterprise AI apps like fraud detection, recommendation engine, supply chain management, drug province. And increasingly the consumer led technologies will be bleeding into the enterprise in the form of autonomous factory operations. An example of that would be robots. That AR, VR and manufacturing so driving better quality. The power grid management, automated retail, IOT, you know, the intelligent call centers, all of these will be powered by AI, but really the list of potential use cases now are going to be virtually endless. >> I mean, Manufir, this is like your wheelhouse. Maybe you could add something to that. >> Yeah. I mean, I agree with Rob. I mean he listed some really good use cases, you know, The way we see this at NVIDIA, this journey is in three phases or three steps, right? The first phase was for the early adopters. You know, the builders who assembled use cases, particular use cases like a chat bot from the ground up with the hardware and the software. Almost like going to your local hardware store and buying piece parts and constructing a table yourself right now. Now, I think we are in the first phase of the democratization. For example, the work we do with Cloudera, which is for a broader base of customers, still building for a particular use case, but starting from a much higher baseline. So think about, for example, going to Ikea now and buying a table in a box, right. And you still come home and assemble it, but all the parts are there, the instructions are there, there's a recipe you just follow and it's easy to do, right? So that's sort of the phase we're in now. And then going forward, the opportunity we really look forward to for the democratization, you talked about applications like CRM, et cetera. I think the next wave of democratization is when customers just adopt and deploy the next version of an application they already have. And what's happening is that under the covers, the application is infused by AI and it's become more intelligent because of AI and the customer just thinks they went to the store and bought a table and it showed up and somebody placed it in the right spot. Right? And they didn't really have to learn how to do AI. So these are the phases. And I think we're very excited to be going there. >> You know, Rob, the great thing about, for your customers is they don't have to build out the AI. They can, they can buy it. And just in thinking about this, it seems like there are a lot of really great and even sometimes narrow use cases. So I want to ask you, you know, staying with AI for a minute, one of the frustrations, and Mick I talked about this, the GIGO problem that we've all, you know, studied in college, you know, garbage in, garbage out. But, but the frustrations that users have had is really getting fast access to quality data that they can use to drive business results. So do you see, and how do you see AI maybe changing the game in that regard, Rob, over the next several years? >> So yeah, the combination of massive amounts of data that had been gathered across the enterprise in the past 10 years with an open APIs are dramatically lowering the processing costs that perform at much greater speed and efficiency. And that's allowing us as an industry to democratize the data access while at the same time delivering the federated governance and security models. And hybrid technologies are playing a key role in making this a reality and enabling data access to be quote, hybridized, meaning access and treated in a substantially similar way, irrespective of the physical location of where that data actually resides. >> And that's great. That is really the value layer that you guys are building out on top of all this great infrastructure that the hyperscalers have have given us. You know, a hundred billion dollars a year that you can build value on top of, for your customers. Last question, and maybe Rob, you could, you could go first and then Manuvir, you could bring us home. Where do you guys want to see the relationship go between Cloudera and NVIDIA? In other words, how should we as outside observers be, be thinking about and measuring your project, specifically in the industry's progress generally? >> Yes. I think we're very aligned on this and for Cloudera, it's all about helping companies move forward, leverage every bit of their data and all the places that it may be hosted and partnering with our customers, working closely with our technology ecosystem of partners, means innovation in every industry and that's inspiring for us. And that's what keeps us moving forward. >> Yeah and I agree with Rob and for us at NVIDIA, you know, we, this partnership started with data analytics. As you know, Spark is a very powerful technology for data analytics. People who use Spark rely on Cloudera for that. And the first thing we did together was to really accelerate Spark in a seamless manner. But we're accelerating machine learning. We're accelerating artificial intelligence together. And I think for NVIDIA it's about democratization. We've seen what machine learning and AI have done for the early adopters and help them make their businesses, their products, their customer experience better. And we'd like every company to have the same opportunity.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM, think 20, 21. We're gonna talk about the edge. Like what is the edge, how it's going to evolve. And we're gonna take a look at an autonomous vessel use case, which is quite interesting with me as Rob high. He was an IBM fellow VP and CTO. IBM edge computing. Rob. Welcome. Great to see you again. Thanks Dave. Appreciate that. Yeah. So let's start with the basic question here. You know, people's like, Oh, what is the edge? Like, it's one big thing and it's not, it's it's many things, but how should we think about the edge and why should enterprises, you know, feel like it's necessary to begin to lean in? >>Well, so let's just start with the use cases. Uh, you know, what edge means is the ability to put a camera on a manufacturing floor, you know, perhaps juxtaposed with a robot monitoring the work that the robot is doing using AI visual recognition to detect whether what that robot is doing is producing high quality parts or not. And to be able to do that in real time, to be able to use that analytic thin to, you know, quickly remediate any kind of quality issues, uh, helps lower costs, it helps increase your yield and it helps increase the overall efficiency of your production processes. Or if not that then putting it in something a little bit. It's perhaps a little bit more familiar to us, the idea of an autonomous vehicle, you know, being able to, you know, drive and, and, uh, do driver assistance to drivers safety kinds of features, you know, all of that requires compute and having that compute where people are actually performing these tasks based on the data that they're receiving at the moment that they receive it, they are able to process that real time, be able to give them the feedback that allows them to make better decisions, to be able to do that. >>Not only with lower latency, but actually with better protection of their data, uh, better protection of their personal information or private information. If you're thinking about, you know, the business in which they operate, you know, be able to do that, even when the network fails, be able to do that without necessarily having to transmit tons and tons of data back to the cloud, especially if you end up not actually using that anywhere. That's what as computing really means. >>Yeah. So it sounds like the edge isn't that maybe we shouldn't think of it as a place, but the most logical place to process the data, um, depending on latency and other factors, it's a, that's a good way to look at it. So >>It's just where we do our work. >>Yeah. Well, you do the work, right? That's that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. So, you know, we always were talking about the pandemic changing the way we think about things. And I wonder if you can comment on, on the, the edge context as come back from, you know, work from home or remote work, um, you know, think 20, 22, we hope it's going to be face-to-face could edge play a part in that has the pandemic, uh, made you think differently about the opportunities at edge? >>Yeah. And in fact, what we've seen is the pandemic is actually beginning to accelerate digital transformation. If you think about it, you know, any store that wanted to survive the same Deming could only do so by basically introducing a digital presence, you know, the ability to buy online. And even if you're picking up at the store, picking up the curbside, you know, you can't go into a restaurant without getting that QR code that gives you, you know, your digital menu, um, trying to get workers back into both the factories, as well as the warehouses and offices, and to do so safely, be able to ensure that they're wearing the face mask and socially distancing properly. All of these things I think have driven digital transformation. And if you think about the task of, you know, buying online and picking up the store while store is better, have a pretty good idea of where their inventory is. >>Um, they need to know exactly where that product is so they can quickly pick it and get it available to the client before they arrive at the store. Um, and so that's edge computing. We need edge computing to be able to automate the processes of inventory tracking down to individual items and where they're located throughout the store to be able to do the recognition for whether people are or are not being changing their social distancing or wearing their PPE, um, to be able to ensure that our processes are as automated as possible to limit the amount of human interaction that's required in order to perform these processes. All of that I think has accelerated both digital transformation, as well as particularly the use of edge computing, uh, in, in all of our businesses. >>I think about, you know, the forced March to digital in 2020. And if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business, but to your, my big takeaway from what you just said is that digital transformation is just starting and now people really have some time to think about that, that digital strategy. And as we think about doing things more safely, maybe with less human intervention, we love autonomous vehicles. Examples just cause because there's a technically they're challenging, but, but I wonder if you could tell us the story of the Mayflower autonomous ship it's it's upcoming journey, it's going to be cruelest across the Atlantic, unbelievable collecting data, you know, talk about how edge relates to that story. What can you tell us? >>Well, first of all, this is simply talk about the task of navigating a ship from one port on one side of the world to another port across the ocean, across the Atlantic. Um, you know, the ocean is a dangerous place. Uh, yes, it's wide open it's, you know, lots of water, but the reality is it's full of barriers. Of course, you've got land barriers, you've got other ships, you've got Marine life, you've got debris that gets stuck dropped in the ocean. And so the task of navigating is actually quite difficult. And again, to the same point that we've made earlier, you have to have local compute in order to really be able to make those decisions fast enough with enough acuity, with enough clarity, to be able to, um, to be able to safely safely navigate around those kinds of obstacles. So we have to put compute in the ship. >>So the Mayflower ship is as I sort of implied, uh, a, a ship that will be autonomous. There are no human beings involved in the, in operating the ship. It has to be able to on its own, both recognize these obstacles, recognize on the ship, recognize about recognized, um, you know, that cargo container that happened to fallen off, uh, some other ship and floating through the ocean, uh, recognize, you know, uh, rain life, uh, whales and other, other, uh, fish and birds that might be, uh, uh, on, in the way. Um, and, and, and to be able to, um, do all that, you know, entirely without any human intervention. So that compute power is really a prime example of an edge computer. It is compute in the, in the business of navigation, uh, making decisions about, um, the things that it sees and, and making decisions about how best to circumvent those issues. >>Um, now along the way, I should also say part of what the med flagship is going to do is not only exercise the task of navigation and prove that, um, these algorithms can efficiently and effectively, uh, bring that shift from one side of the world to be upside safe, but along the way, it's going to conduct science is going to, um, collect water samples for the, um, chemical makeup of, of the oceans at various points along the way, it's going to be sampling for microplastics or, uh, examining phytoplankton for its health and life. Uh, it's going to be the detecting wave motions and the wave energy that might be indicative of how the world is transforming in the presence of global climate change. Um, these science packages that are going to be formed are also being performed autonomously without human intervention. And that actually opens up a very exciting potential future, which is the idea of these autonomous ships navigating the oceans, collecting data that can then be brought back for the scientists to examine so that they, the scientists are not having to go out and spend weeks and months at a time in perilous conditions. >>These potentially the only conditions, um, collected that data, but rather they can remain safely at land. The ship will collect the data and they can analyze that data from their home labs. So this is actually a really exciting project, but one that I think would demonstrate not only the idea of edge computing, but also the advances in navigation and Marine science. >>Yeah, because I mean, the ship has to navigate itself. Not only is it bringing back data, but there's a great, great example. I met a lot of the work in machine intelligence today is done in the modeling side. This is, this, this is inference going on in near real time. Uh, which we think is where, where the, the, the action is. That's why we love the autonomous, because there's a lot of IBM tech involved in here as well. Is there not, I mean, you've got to have software and you've got your edge devices. You've got, you know, automation capabilities. I mean, it's not right. That this is like serious technical challenge. >>Yeah. Well, we were approached by the primary team on this project and it didn't take us long to realize the utility that some of our technology would have to advancing their project. And so you're right. I mean, we have things like operational decision manager, ODM, which typically is used in the financial services industry, but now it's being applied to the rules of navigation. We've called the Culver over cold rags. Um, we've got, uh, our AI services that do visual recognition because obviously we've got to be able to detect and identify, um, the things that, that the ship is seeing along the way and be able to distinguish what those things are. Uh, we have our IBM edge application manager, which is being used to manage deployment of these kinds of workloads, and frankly, all of the workloads that are hosted in the ship, getting that managed and deployed onto the ship. Uh, and, and of course, you know, all these things have to be integrated. And so that's just a small sampling of the kinds of technologies, but it's a good example of where I think the edge kind of represents the combination of what we have all been working with in this industry, which is how do we bring technologies together, the solver problem as an integrated solution, >>You mentioned financial services. So I wonder if we could, you know, think beyond shipping maybe, uh, what, what are you seeing in other industries? Are there any patterns that are developing where clients are saying, Hey, we need this sort of this capability. What can you tell us? >>So edge computing is it's probably greatest demand right now in manufacturing, uh, in industrial four dash zero, uh, kinds of, uh, environments where, you know, most of the industry, the industrial industry, the markets have grown up largely dependent upon operations, technology, OT, but one of the things that people need in these kinds of environments is the additional benefits that come from AI. And we've talked about, you know, using AI to do visual recognition on manufacturing processes, looking at quality inspection, for example, but you know, there's other aspects of production optimization of worker safety. We talked a little bit about that, um, around, uh, you know, predictive maintenance and asset management, uh, you know, these kinds of additional things that are necessary to really run your factory efficiently, or you're, you know, you're a drilling rig or your energy production systems. All these kinds of industrial processes can benefit from the advances that are occurring in analytics in, um, in, and then of course, having localized compute to do that with, to both do those kinds of decisions in real time, but also to offload the amount of transmission, the data that we have the transmitting back to the cloud. >>So industry four O or manufacturing is one big area retail. We talked a little bit about that, but you think about, you know, point of sale terminals, and the idea of being able to brute two offers at point of sale, to be able to do price checking to help you navigate the store is digital signage. Um, you know, all the user experiences, spillage and spoilage and loss prevention, these are all kinds of use cases that will benefit retail retailers, um, lot of demand. And of course, again, the need to be able to do that locally within the store, we talked to touch a little bit on automotive. The whole automotive industry right now is going through a really fundamental transformation where virtually every automobile now is being imbued with more and more compute capacity and localized processing for doing driver's safety and, and car maintenance and, and, and even short of, you know, full autonomy, which is of course is another topic in its own, right? Uh, lots of experiences that can be brought there as well. So lots of opportunity in distribution, manufacturing, retail banking, uh, uh, virtually every industry that we've looked at has some opportunity for, um, leveraging the benefit that does computing. >>It's hard to get cars right now because the chip short is. But, um, I wonder real quick, if you could talk about 5g, you hear a lot about 5g, there's a ton tons of hype there. Uh, how should we be thinking about 5g? How real is it? What's your take in terms of its impact on the edge? >>So a couple of thoughts here. One is 5g obviously is accelerating, and it has the effect of accelerating edge computing, because one of the benefits of 5g of course, is lower latency and higher bandwidth. And that kind of opens people's minds, the potential to leverage the network connectivity of equipment that otherwise, you know, is hard to connect. If you think about the factory floor for a moment in all the kinds of equipment you have on the factory floor, if you had to hard wire, all that equipment to get access to the compute power on that, that could be a very expensive proposition. You'd like to kind of wirelessly connect that equipment. And that's one of the things that 5g brings to the table, because some of the spectrum that five peak uses has less potential to interfere with that equipment then than you would otherwise. So I think that what we're going to see is 5g will sort of disproportionately benefit I'll call them industrial or commercial unit use cases as compared to 4g and LTE, which were very much centered on consumer use cases. 5g is accelerating as competing in a many ways. 5g actually depends on edge computing. It doesn't mean that we can't do educated beginning without 5g. We can, we can certainly do it for DLP than wireline. Uh, but I think 5g is going to have a very symbiotic effect on, on edge computing, >>Just like wifi was enabler on mobile, but this is a, you know, much, much, much larger potential. Rob. We got to go, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights. Love to have you back. Awesome. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cubes coverage of IBM. Think 2020, 21, 2021. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests from Fortinet with me next talking about an very interesting topic that's something that always piques my interest, cybersecurity, and some of the things going on with respect to that. Sandra Wheatley joins us the SVP of marketing, threat intelligence and influencer communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you again. >> Thank you, Lisa. I'm delighted to be here today. >> Lisa: Good and Rob Rashotte is here as well, vice-president, global training and technical field enablement at Fortinet. Rob welcome to the program. >> Hi, great to meet you Lisa. Nice to be here. >> Likewise. So since I last saw Fortinet we've had such a challenging year as we all know, that's an understatement, but one of the things that happened so quickly was the distribution of the workforce. And there were already preexisting gaps in IT Visibility and teams being siloed, security teams being siloed as well exacerbated distinct cybersecurity skills gap. So Sandra I want to start with you. Talk to us about what's going on with the cybersecurity skills gap and how it's impacting organizations today. >> Thank you, Lisa. While the cybersecurity skills gap continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing security organizations today, as you know, the cybersecurity space is very dynamic. It's constantly changing and we saw this even through COVID with more people working from home or being educated from home. Cyber adversaries are using remote workers as a way into the enterprise network. And so security organizations today are facing a lot of complexity. They deal with billions of alerts that come in every day and a lot of these have to be managed manually and they just don't have the professionals to keep up with that. So it continues to be a big issue facing organizations. We have seen some progress about a year ago. It was estimated that we would need 4 million professionals come into the industry to close the gap. We are now at probably a little bit over 3 million. So there is progress being made but we still have a long way to go. >> Yeah, good progress there. But what I mean, one of the things that we saw so quickly was with the distribution center was suddenly, there were tons of trusted devices that were off the network perimeter where all these keep going, "Use your own device at home until we can get you something provisioned on the network." So huge challenge that was almost like a light switch for people in any industry. Rob, talk to me from your perspective the ongoing cybersecurity skills gap. What are some of the things that you were seeing through your lens? >> Yeah, well, I mean it has certainly changed our focus over the last year with the pandemic and the change in workforce and so on. And I think as a cybersecurity vendor, a lot of the times when we talk about training and the skills gap we often tend to think pretty quickly about engineers and technical training and like this has really opened up our eyes too. We need to really broaden our scope when we're talking about training and closing the skills gap, because it's a lot more than just engineers. So we've had to really focus more on really anyone sitting in front of a computer screen and ensure that programs are available for people that are working from home that need to understand, the fact that security is just as big an issue if you're working from home or working from the office. So it's really broadened our scope in terms of who we're delivering training to and within a number of our programs, actually, that has happened. When we're dealing with we have a lot of academic partners that we deliver training with them. And one thing that's happened there is we we've traditionally dealt with engineering schools within our academic partners but now we're starting to see a lot of business schools coming and talking to us about delivering training within MBA programs and so on. So that business leaders can start understand, the need to be addressing cybersecurity in the boardroom for example, not just within the it department. So it's I guess the one thing I would say is it's really broadened our scope in terms of who the audience is for cybersecurity and the skills gap is a, you know it impacts a lot of different areas in the organization. >> Yeah, you brought up a great point there that elevation of security to the board level is critical. As we saw like big spikes and things like Ransomware last year. Ransomware getting much more sophisticated kind of playing on people's concerns for buzzwords like COVID-19 for example, and I talked to a lot of organizations where security is at the board level but the talent gap is another challenge. Sandra talk to us about what Fortinet is doing from a partnership perspective to help shrink that gap. >> Well, it's interesting because if you were to do a survey of people about where the responsibility lies to train more professionals for the industry, you'll see a split about 40% of people feel like academia should be providing the training and the curriculum to bring more professionals into the industry. And then others feel like it's a mix between corporate private public partnerships. And that's something that Fortinet believes in. We are tackling this issue on multiple fronts. We recently launched our TAA initiative or our Training Advancement Agenda, and a lot of the pro programs that Rob manages are part of that agenda like our free NSE training, our security academies, but we're also working with a lot of global partners, corporate partners like Salesforce, and IBM. We're also working with the World Economic Forum on this initiative because we really believe it's a joint effort to really make a difference. And so, for example, with Salesforce we provide some of our curriculum and training for free on their training platform, the same with IBM. And we'll continue to scale these partnerships because with these partners, we can reach more people and accelerate the impact that we can have overall. >> Absolutely that ability to expand it especially as we saw such a change in the cyber threat landscape last year as you said, Sandra you've made great progress needing, you know, a deficit of 4 million folks down to 3 million, but also looking at the opportunity to try to find more folks leveraging partners and to rubs point elevating the conversation or expanding that scope. This isn't just a problem for IT and security folks. This is a challenge across the organization that the board needs to be focused on because we've seen in this rapidly changing last year organizations and enough peril in trying to pivot their businesses. And then you add on some of the cyber threats. Rob can you talk a little bit more about the TAA initiative? I know that about your Network Security Expert program NSE program, you guys also do FortiVet program. Tell us a little bit about some of those programs and maybe some of the things that you've done to broaden the scope during the last year. >> Yeah, it certainly can. I mean, there's a number of programs that make up the agenda and you know we've widened the scope in terms of the audiences that we're looking at. But also as Sandra mentioned, trying to expand our reach as ordinary, obviously we have a reach into our partners and our ecosystem, but the ecosystem of the IBM's and the world economic forums and so on go far beyond our reach. But one of the things that we were able to do as a company almost exactly a year ago, we made the conscious decision that the training curriculum that we've built, we wanted to make it available to as many people as we possibly could. So we we've made approximately 400 hours worth of cybersecurity training available to anyone that wants to sign up and take the training in self-paced format, where they want to take it, when they want to take it. So that was a big commitment on our part and that training continues to be free today and we'll keep it free until we start to see the skills gap closed but that that has resulted I guess it was about a month or two ago when we were tracking numbers that we've exceeded over a million registrations for that training, which really was validation to us that the demand for this training is massive. So that's helped us expand our reach but that training as well we're making it available for free, but we have all sorts of different types of partners who are taking that training and making it three free through their learning portals as well. So it's really expanded the reach in that way. You know, another area that we've really focused on is partnering with nonprofits who are representing underrepresented groups. So you mentioned the veterans program that's been a program we've had for quite a while now, but we've looked at that program and thought, well, you know, we can definitely replicate our efforts there and look at other groups as well and start to see how we can partner with different NGOs to really address the diversity and inclusion, within the cybersecurity industry. 'Cause, you know, I think one thing that's interesting here is because of the skill shortage, a lot of hiring managers have had to start to look at recruiting through non traditional streams. And that that can be, you know, looking at if we have policies that say, we must hire people with four year degrees. Well, maybe we want to take a look at that and see well is that really necessary for all the jobs that we're looking at? Maybe we could look at shorter programs even high school students but then also looking at underrepresented groups it is a great way for us to take a look at this skills gap in cybersecurity and align it with our diversity and inclusion initiatives, internally within our organizations and see how we can bring that to bear on problem and really start to have the same time, create a much more diverse workforce within cybersecurity while we're trying to close that skills gap. >> I love that what a great opportunity to expand upon that. I wanted to ask you just really quickly, Rob she said 400 hours of free cyber training available over a million registrations so far. You're right, that definitely shows the demand. I'm curious when we think of backgrounds we think are these, you know need to be IT folks. Is that curriculum broad enough so that somebody with a marketing degree or somebody that doesn't have a degree could kind of get in on level one and start learning their way up the security stack? >> Yeah, it is a very broad scope. When we look at the catalog, it is multiple levels. And in fact our network security expert program it's an eight level program. And the first couple of levels of that program are applicable to anyone that needs an awareness of cybersecurity and the issues. So, yeah, it's perfect. And `in fact the level one of that program is something that we've integrated into a new service offering which is our Cybersecurity Awareness Program that companies can implement internally to provide that base level of cybersecurity awareness to all of their employees. And then as you go up to level two, three, four and five, and so on, it gets more and more technical right up to the NSE level or we're talking about, you know, architects engineers are developing very large critical cyber security infrastructures. >> Lisa, you bring up a very important point that I'd like to make a comment on. There's this misconception that you need a degree in Computer Science or some other technical degree to be in cyber security. And that's absolutely not the case. In fact, half the people in cybersecurity don't have a degree in any Computer Science program, et cetera, but you know there's a lot of skillsets and backgrounds that really map well to cybersecurity. And it's a very broad industry. There was new roles coming all of the time. So I would encourage people to not let that be a barrier to getting into this industry. And in fact our Veteran's program has been extremely successful because people coming out of the defense forces have a lot of the skills that match very well to cyber security like attention to detail, situational awareness, the ability to work under pressure. So it's definitely a misconception that the industry needs to correct. >> I couldn't agree more, especially as the daughter of a Vietnam Combat Veteran and I love what you guys are doing with veterans but you're right. There's so many other skills that people have that are so transportable and transferable that, and it's such an exciting industry. I mean, we all have a million devices scattered around. I think with those new Apple tags that if I put one on my dog's collar, my dog's going to be a connected device. There's so many opportunities to learn but there's also more exposure. The more people that have different backgrounds I think just that with that thought diversity alone, organizations in any industry can benefit. Sandra talk to us about how partners are taking some of these programs and rolling them into their own to help kind of open that door wider as you say, to make sure that barrier isn't there and also get more folks aware of what they can learn. >> Yeah, the encouraging thing is I just see a lot more creativity around this issue. If you think about it, the lack of diversity in IT has been a challenge for everyone that the issue in cybersecurity is just a manifestation of that. And one of the reasons is that it's particularly cybersecurity. A lot of people don't understand how to get into the industry, or they have a lack of awareness about the different types of roles. And we see this in particular with women and young females as well as underserved minority groups. In fact, the veterans program is one way to bring more of that diversity into the industry. And if you think about it today, women make up about 24%. I think it's single digits for underrepresented groups. So we have a huge opportunity there. And I think somehow working with our partners we're doing a lot of different things. Not only are we providing our curriculum and our training and the technical support, but we're also done a lot of work around mapping roles and the steps you need to take to, to achieve those roles. So we've created that for different roles, and we've shared that with some of our training partners and they provide that information on their training platforms. We also regularly have done a lot of different podcasts and interviews with women and minorities have gone through the industry and been very successful talking about how they did that and how they got there. We're working with lots of nonprofits like Women in Cybersecurity speaking to people out there providing them the support. So it's a multi-phase approach. And I do think that private industry need to be doing things like creating entry level kinds of roles to bring more people in the industry and recruit differently. But the good news is there's a huge amount of awareness around this, and you definitely see companies doing a lot more, as well as our partners. >> Well if I could just touch on something there, well Sandra is talking about the different career roles and so on. The industry can get pretty complicated pretty quickly when we're talking about different roles. And there's a lot of buzzwords. And you know when people are looking at this and say, well, how do I even get into this industry? It sounds very technical complicated. And, you know, there are a number of different career patching tools that you can find out there around cyber security but when there's too many of those that even gets confusing. So the career paths that we've developed, we've done that in conjunction with NICE and there's an initiative called the NICE Framework which stands for National Initiative for Cyber Security Education. And so the pathways that we've developed map to that. So, you know, that's one thing I'd like to encourage other organizations to make sure that we're all following that framework so that as we're providing these career paths to people we're using the same terminology. We're using the same titles and career paths and so on. So it just makes it a little bit more understandable for people to pick a path that they want and then start their journey. >> I also think exposing students earlier in their education about cyber security is really important. In fact, we're just released a book called "Cyber Safe" and it's targeting elementary school children and their parents and making them more aware of cybersecurity, the risks, how they should behave online. It talks about cyber bullying and it also helps has guidance in there for parents. And this is a book that we're making freely available to underserved schools and it can easily be accessed online. We've had great reviews, but it's all part of our TAA efforts to educate and make people more aware about the opportunities on the industry overall. >> I love that, Sandra our SVP of marketing. Is there a URL that you can give our audience where they can find that free resource? >> Yes, you can find that I believe on our NSE training page. You can just go to fortinet.com NSE and or TAA and you will find information about how to get the book. >> Excellent so fortinet.com search TAA or NSE you'll find that information. I'm going to check that out myself 'cause maybe you know, for adult children of parents who also need some cybersecurity help I think I might check that out for myself. >> You can (indistinct) copy Lisa. >> Thank you, excellent. It's been great talking to you guys. This is such an interesting topic. I love the efforts that Fortinet is doing to close those gaps and also what you're doing to bridge that with the diversity and inclusion efforts brought out. That's a great effort, Sandra, Rob thank you for joining me today. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa >> For Sandra Wheatley and Rob Rashotte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation with Fortinet. (gentle music)

>> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's maximo mobile. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the--example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about to slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

(soft music) >> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's Maximo Mbo. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the C QVS example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about the slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM, think 2020 >>one brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021 we're gonna talk about the Edge like what is the Edge, how it's going to evolve? And we're gonna take a look at an autonomous vessel use case, which is quite interesting with me is rob high and IBM fellow VP and Cto, IBM edge computing rob. Welcome. It's great to see you again. >>Thanks. Dave appreciate that. Good seeing you too. >>Yeah, So let's start with the basic question here, you know, people are like, well what is the Edge? Like it's one big thing and it's not, it's, it's many things, but how should we think about the edge and why should enterprises, you know, feel like it's necessary to begin to lean in? >>Well, let's just start with the use cases. Uh, you know, what edge means is the ability to put a camera on the manufacturing floor, you know, perhaps juxtaposed with a robot monitoring the work that the robot is doing using ai visual recognition to detect whether what that robot is doing is producing high quality parts or not. And to be able to do that in real time to be able to use that analytic then too, you know, quickly remediate any kind of quality issues, helps lower cost, it helps increase your yield and it helps increase the overall efficiency of your production processes. Or if not that, then putting it in something that's perhaps a bit more familiar to us. The idea of an autonomous vehicle, you know, be able to, you know, dr and do driver assistance to driver safety kinds of features, you know, all of that requires compute and having that compute where people are actually performing these tasks based on the data that they're receiving at the moment they receive it be able to process that real time, give them the feedback that allows them to make better decisions to be able to do that not only with lower latency, but actually with better protection of their data, better protection of their personal information or private information. If you're thinking about the business in which they operate, you know, be able to do that even when the network fails to be able to do that without necessarily have to transmit tons and tons of data back to the cloud, especially if you end up not actually using that anywhere. That's what as computing really means. >>Yeah. So it sounds like the edges, maybe we shouldn't think of it as a place, but the most logical place to process the data of, depending on late and see and other factors. It's that's a good way to look at it. So it's >>yeah, just where we do our work. >>Yeah. Well you do the work, right. That that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. So you know, we always we're talking about the pandemic, changing the way we think about things. And I wonder if you can comment on the the edge context as we come back From we work from home or remote work. You know, I think 2022, we hope it's going to be face to face. Uh good edge play a part in that. Has the pandemic uh made you think differently about the opportunities that edge? >>Yeah. And in fact what we've seen is the pandemic is actually beginning to accelerate digital transformation. If you think about it, you know any store they wanted to survive. This pandemic could only do so by basically introducing a digital presence, you know, the ability to buy online. And even if you're picking up at the store, picking up the curbside, you know you can't go into a restaurant without getting that Q. R. Code that gives you your digital menu. Um Trying to get workers back into factories as well as the warehouses and offices. And to do so safely be able to ensure that they're wearing their face masks and socially distancing properly. All of these things I think have driven digital transformation. And if you think about the task of buying online and picking up the store well stories better have a pretty good idea of where their inventory is. Um They need to know exactly where that product is. So they can quickly pick it and get it available to the client before they arrive at the store. Um And so that's edge computing. We need edge computing to be able to to automate the processes of inventory tracking down to individual items and where they're located throughout the store. To be able to do the recognition for whether people are or not maintaining social distancing or wearing the PP. E. Um to be able to ensure that our processes or as automated as possible to limit the amount of human interaction that's required in order to perform these processes. All of that I think has accelerated both digital transformation as well as particularly the use of edge computing uh in all of our businesses. >>I think about, you know, the force marched to digital in 2020 and if you weren't a digital business you were out of business. But you're my big takeaway from what you just said is a digital transformation is just starting. And now people really have some time to think about that, that digital strategy and and as we think about doing things you know more safely, maybe with less human intervention, we love autonomous vehicles. Examples, just because they're technically they're challenging. But I wonder if you could tell us the story of the Mayflower autonomous ship, its upcoming journey, it's going to be cruelest across the atlantic, unbelievable collecting data. You know, talk about how edge relates to that story. What can you tell us? >>Well, first of all, this is simply talk about the task of navigating a ship from one port on one side of the world too, another port across the ocean, across the atlantic. Um you know, the ocean is a dangerous place. Yes, it's wide open, it's you know, lots of water, but the reality is it's full of barriers. Of course, you've got land barriers, you've got other ships, you've got marine life, you've got debris that gets dropped in the ocean. And so the task of navigating is actually quite difficult. And again, to the same point that we made earlier, you have to have local compute in order to really be able to make those decisions fast enough with enough acuity with enough clarity to be able to be able to safely safely navigate around those kinds of obstacles. So we have to put compute in the ship. So the may fire ship is as I sort of implied a ship that will be autonomous. There are no human beings involved in in operating the ship. It has to be able to on its own. Both recognize these obstacles, recognizing the ship, recognize about, recognize um, you know, that cargo, uh, container that happened to have fallen off some other ships and floating through the ocean, recognize, you know, rain life, uh, whales and other other fish and birds that might be, uh, in the way. Um, and, and, and to be able to um, do all that, you know, entirely without any human invention. So that compute power is really a prime example of an edge computer. It is compute in the, in the business of navigation, making decisions about the things that it sees and making decisions about how best to circumvent those issues. Um, Now along the way, I should also say part of what the Mayflower ship that's going to do is not only exercise the task of navigation and prove that these algorithms can efficiently and effectively bring that shit from one side of the world to the other side safely. But along the way, it's going to conduct science is going to collect water samples for the chemical makeup of the oceans. At various points along the way it's going to be sampling for microplastics are examining phytoplankton for its health and liveliness. It's going to be the detecting wave motions and the wave energy that might be indicative of how the world is transforming in the presence of global climate change. Um These science packages that are going to be formed are also being performed autonomously without inhuman invention. And that actually opens up a very exciting potential future, which is the idea of these autonomous ships navigating the oceans, collecting data that can then be brought back for the scientists to examine so that they the scientists are not having to go out and spend weeks and months at a time in these perilous conditions, these potentially lonely conditions um collecting that data, but rather they can remain safely on land. The ship will collect the data and they can analyze that data from their home labs. So this is actually a really exciting project, but one that I think will demonstrate not only the idea that computing, but also the advances in navigation and marine science. >>Yeah, because I mean the ship has to navigate itself. Not only is it bringing back data, but there's a great, great example. I mean a lot of the work in machine intelligence today is uh in the modeling side. This is this is this is inference going on in near real time, uh which we think is where the action is. That's why we love the autonomous because there's a lot of IBM tech involved in here as well. Is there not? I mean, you've got to have software and you've got your edge devices, you've got, you know, automation capabilities. I mean, it's not all right. This is like serious technical challenge. >>Yeah. Well, we were approached by the primary team on this project and it didn't take us long to realize the utility that some of our technology would have to dancing their project. And so you're right. I mean, we have things like operations, decision and ODM which typically is used in the things of the services industry, but now it's being applied to the rules of navigation would call the cold cold rags. Um We've got our Ai services that do visual recognition because obviously we've got to be able to detect and identify um, the things that the ship is seeing along the way and be able to distinguish what those things are. Uh we have our imagine application manager which is being used to manage deployment of these kinds of workloads and frankly all of the workloads that are hosted in the ship, getting that managed and deployed onto the ship. Uh and and of course, you know, all these things have to be integrated. And so that's just a small sampling of the kinds of technologies. But it's a good example of where I think the edge kind of represents the culmination of what we have all been working within this industry, which is how do we bring technologies together to solve a problem as an integrated solution? >>You mentioned financial services. So I wonder if we could, you know, think beyond shipping, maybe what, what are you seeing in other industries? Are there any patterns that are developing, where clients are saying, hey, we need this sort of this capability? What can you tell us? >>So, I think it is, it's probably greatest demand right now in manufacturing, uh, in industrial 4.0, uh, kinds of environments where, you know, most of the industry, the industrial industries and markets have grown up largely dependent upon operations technology. Ot but one of the things that people need in these kind of environments is the additional benefits that come from A. I and we talked about using ai to do visual recognition on manufacturing processes, looking at quality inspection, for example, but there's other aspects of production optimization of workers safety. We talked a little bit about that around uh, predictive maintenance and asset management. Uh, you know, these kinds of additional things that are necessary to really to run your factory efficiently or you're you're drilling rig or your energy production systems. All these kinds of industrial processes can benefit from the advances that are occurring in analytics. And um, and, and then of course, having localized compute to do that with, to both do these kinds of decisions in real time, but also to offload the amount of transmission that we end up transmitting back to the cloud. So industry 40 or manufacturing is one big area retail. We talked about that, but you think about point of sale terminals and the idea of being able to do offers at point of sale to be able to do price checking to help you navigate the stores, digital signage. Um, you know, all the user experiences, spillage and spoilage and loss prevention. These are all kinds of use cases that will benefit retail retailers. Um, lot demand, of course. Again, the need to be able to do that locally within the store. We talked to touch a little bit on automotive. The whole automotive industry right now is going through a really fundamental transformation where virtually every automobile now is being imbued with more and more compute capacity and localized processing for doing driver safety and car maintenance and, and, and even short of, you know, full autonomy, which is of course is another topic in its own right. Uh lots of experiences that can be brought there as well. So lots of opportunity and distribution, manufacturing, retail banking. Virtually every industry that we've looked at has some opportunity for leveraging the benefits of the computer. Yeah, >>it's hard to get cars right now because the chip shortest. But I wonder real quick if you could talk about five G, you hear a lot about five Gs tons of hype there. How should we be thinking about 5G? How real is it? What's your take in terms of its impact on the edge? >>So a couple of thoughts here, one is 5G obviously is accelerating And it has the effect of accelerating edge computing because one of the benefits of 5G of course is lower latency and higher bandwidth. And that opens people's minds. The potential to leverage the network connectivity of equipment that otherwise is hard to connect. If you think about the factory floor for a moment and all the kinds of equipment you have on the factory floor. If you had to hardwire all that equipment to get access to the compute power on that, that could be a very expensive proposition. You'd like to kind of wirelessly connect that equipment and that's one of things that five day brings to the table because some of the spectrum five take uses has less potential to interfere with that equipment than than you would otherwise. So I think that what we're going to see is 5G will disproportionately benefit. I'll call him industrial or commercial use cases as compared to four G. And L. T. Which were very much centered on consumer use case five Gs accelerating edge computing in many ways Five G actually depends on edge computing doesn't mean that we can't do edge computing without five do we can we can certainly do it for dlt even wire line But I think 5G is going to have a very symbiotic effect on edge computing. >>Yeah just like wifi was enabler mobile but this is much much much larger potential rob. We gotta go. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights. I'd love to have you back, awesome. Thanks. >>Alright appreciate it. Thank >>you for watching everybody's Day Volonte for the cubes coverage of IBM. Think 2020 21 2021 will be right back. >>Yeah. >>Yeah.