>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Oh, welcome back to the cube. As we continue our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, you know, I know you're familiar with Moneyball, the movie, Brad Pitt, starting as Billy Bean, the Oakland A's general manager, where the A's were all over data, right. With the Billy Bean approach, it was a very, uh, data driven approach to building his team and a very successful team. Well, AWS is taking that to an extraordinary level and with us to talk about that as Matt Hearst, who was the head of global sports marketing and communications at AWS and Matt, thanks for joining us here on the queue. >>John is my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. You >>Bet. Um, now we've already heard from a couple of folks, NFL folks, uh, at re-invent, uh, about the virtual draft. Um, but for those of our viewers who maybe aren't up to speed on that, or having a chance to see, uh, what those folks had to say, uh, let's just talk about that as an opener, um, about your involvement with the NFL and particularly with, with the draft and, and what that announcement was all about. >>Sure. We, we saw, we've seen a great evolution with our work with the NFL over the past few years. And you mentioned during the infrastructure keynote where Michelle McKenna who's, the CIO for the NFL talks about how they were able to stage the 2020 virtual draft, which was the NFL is much most watched ever, uh, you know, over 55 million viewers over three days and how they were unable to do it without the help and the power of AWS, you know, utilizing AWS is reliability, scalability, security, and network connectivity, where they were able to manage thousands of live feeds to flow to the internet and go to ESPN, to airline. Um, but additionally, Jennifer LinkedIn, who's the SVP of player health and innovation at the NFL spoke during the machine learning keynote during reinvent. And she talked about how we're working with the NFL, uh, to co-develop the digital athlete, which is a computer simulation model of a football player that can replicate infinite scenarios in a game environment to help better foster and understanding of how to treat and rehabilitate injuries in the short term and in the long-term in the future, ultimately prevent, prevent and predict injuries. >>And they're using machine learning to be able to do that. So there's, those are just a couple of examples of, uh, what the NFL talked about during re-invent at a couple of keynotes, but we've seen this work with the NFL really evolve over the past few years, you know, starting with next gen stats. Those are the advanced statistics that, uh, brings a new level of entertainment to football fans. And what we really like to do, uh, with the NFL is to excite, educate, and innovate. And those stats really bring fans closer to the game to allow the broadcasters to go a little bit deeper, to educate the fans better. And we've seen some of those come to life through some of our ads, uh, featuring Deshaun Watson, Christian McCaffrey, um, these visually compelling statistics that, that come to life on screen. Um, and it's not just the NFL. AWS is doing this with some of the top sports leagues around the world, you know, powering F1 insights, Buddhist league, and match facts, six nations, rugby match stats, all of which utilize AWS technology to uncover advanced stats and really help educate and engage fans around the world in the sports that they love. >>Let's talk about that engagement with your different partners then, because you just touched on it. This is a wide array of avenues that you're exploring. You're in football, you're in soccer, you're in sailing, uh, you're uh, racing formula one and NASCAR, for example, all very different animals, right? In terms of their statistics and their data and of their fan interest, what fans ultimately want. So, um, maybe on a holistic basis first, how are you, uh, kind of filtering through your partner's needs and their fans needs and your capabilities and providing that kind of merger of capabilities with desires >>Sports, uh, for AWS and for Amazon are no different than any other industry. And we work backwards from the customer and what their needs are. You know, when we look at the sports partners and customers that we work with and why they're looking to AWS to help innovate and transform their sports, it's really the innovative technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, internet of things, for example, that are really transforming the sports world and some of the best teams and leagues that we've talked about, that you touched on, you know, formula one, NASCAR, NFL, Buena, Sligo, six nations, rugby, and so on and so forth are using AWS to really improve the athlete and the team performance transform how fans view and engage with sports and deliver these real-time advanced statistics to give fans, uh, more of that excitement that we're talking about. >>Let me give you a couple of examples on some of these innovative technologies that our customers are using. So the Seattle Seahawks, I built a data Lake on AWS to use it for talent, evaluation and acquisition to improve player health and recovery times, and also for their game planning. And another example is, you know, formula and we talk about the F1 insights, those advanced statistics, but they're also using AWS high-performance computing that helped develop the next generation race car, which will be introduced in the 2022 season. And by using AWS F1 was able to reduce the average time to run simulations by 70% to improve the car's aerodynamics, reducing the downforce loss and create more wheel to wheel racing, to bring about more excitement on the track. And a third example, similar to, uh, F1 using HPC is any of those team UK. So they compete in the America's cup, which is the oldest trophy in international sports. And endosteum UK is using an HPC environment running on Amazon, easy to spot instances to design its boat for the upcoming competition. And they're depending on this computational power on AWS needing 2000 to 3000 simulations to design the dimension of just a single boat. Um, and so the power of the cloud and the power of the AWS innovative technologies are really helping, uh, these teams and leagues and sports organizations around the world transform their sport. >>Well, let's go back. Uh, you mentioned the Seahawks, um, just as, uh, an example of maybe, uh, the kind of insights that that you're providing. Uh, let's pretend I'm there, there's an outstanding running back and his name's Matt Hearst and, uh, and he's at a, you know, a college let's just pretend in California someplace. Um, what kind of inputs, uh, are you now helping them? Uh, and what kind of insights are you trying to, are you helping them glean from those inputs that maybe they didn't have before? And how are they actually applying that then in terms of their player acquisition and thinking about draft, right player development, deciding whether Matt Hertz is a good fit for them, maybe John Wallace is a good fit for them. Um, but what are the kinds of, of, uh, what's that process look like? >>So the way that the Seahawks have built the data Lake, they built it on AWFs to really, as you talk about this talent, evaluation and acquisition, to understand how a player, you know, for example, a John Walls could fit into their scheme, you know, that, that taking this data and putting it in the data Lake and figuring out how it fits into their schemes is really important because you could find out that maybe you played, uh, two different positions in high school or college, and then that could transform into, into the schematics that they're running. Um, and try to find, I don't want to say a diamond in the rough, but maybe somebody that could fit better into their scheme than, uh, maybe the analysts or others could figure out. And that's all based on the power of data that they're using, not only for the talent evaluation and acquisition, but for game planning as well. >>And so the Seahawks building that data Lake is just one of those examples. Um, you know, when, when you talk about a player, health and safety, as well, just using the NFL as the example, too, with that digital athlete, working with them to co-develop that for that composite NFL player, um, where they're able to run those infinite scenarios to ultimately predict and prevent injury and using Amazon SageMaker and AWS machine learning to do so, it's super important, obviously with the Seahawks, for the future of that organization and the success that they, that they see and continue to see, and also for the future of football with the NFL, >>You know, um, Roger Goodell talks about innovation in the national football league. We hear other commissioners talking about the same thing. It's kind of a very popular buzz word right now is, is leagues look to, uh, ways to broaden their, their technological footprint in innovative ways. Again, popular to say, how exactly though, do you see AWS role in that with the national football league, for example, again, or maybe any other league in terms of inspiring innovation and getting them to perhaps look at things differently through different prisms than they might have before? >>I think, again, it's, it's working backwards from the customer and understanding their needs, right? We couldn't have predicted at the beginning of 2020, uh, that, you know, the NFL draft will be virtual. And so working closely with the NFL, how do we bring that to life? How do we make that successful, um, you know, working backwards from the NFL saying, Hey, we'd love to utilize your technology to improve Clare health and safety. How are we able to do that? Right. And using machine learning to do so. So the pace of innovation, these innovative technologies are very important, not only for us, but also for these, uh, leagues and teams that we work with, you know, using F1 is another example. Um, we talked about HPC and how they were able to, uh, run these simulations in the cloud to improve, uh, the race car and redesign the race car for the upcoming seasons. >>But, uh, F1 is also using Amazon SageMaker, um, to develop new F1 insights, to bring fans closer to the action on the track, and really understand through technology, these split-second decisions that these drivers are taking in every lap, every turn, when to pit, when not to pit things of that nature and using the power of the cloud and machine learning to really bring that to life. And one example of that, that we introduced this year with, with F1 was, um, the fastest driver insight and working F1, worked with the Amazon machine learning solutions lab to bring that to life and use a data-driven approach to determine the fastest driver, uh, over the last 40 years, relying on the years of historical data that they store in S3 and the ML algorithms that, that built between AWS and F1 data scientists to produce this result. So John, you and I could sit here and argue, you know, like, like two guys that really love F1 and say, I think Michael Schumacher is the fastest drivers. It's Lewis, Hamilton. Who's great. Well, it turned out it was a arts incentive, you know, and Schumacher was second. And, um, Hamilton's third and it's the power of this data and the technology that brings this to life. So we could still have a fun argument as fans around this, but we actually have a data-driven results through that to say, Hey, this is actually how it, how it ranked based on how everything works. >>You know, this being such a strange year, right? With COVID, uh, being rampant and, and the major influence that it has been in every walk of global life, but certainly in the American sports. Um, how has that factored into, in terms of the kinds of services that you're looking to provide or to help your partners provide in order to increase that fan engagement? Because as you've pointed out, ultimately at the end of the day, it's, it's about the consumer, right? The fan, and giving them info, they need at the time they want it, that they find useful. Um, but has this year been, um, put a different point on that for you? Just because so many eyeballs have been on the screen and not necessarily in person >>Yeah. T 20, 20 as, you know, a year, unlike any other, um, you know, in our lifetimes and hopefully going forward, you know, it's, it's not like that. Um, but we're able to understand that we can still bring fans closer to the sports that they love and working with, uh, these leagues, you know, we talk about NFL draft, but with formula one, we, uh, in the month of may developed the F1 Pro-Am deep racer event that featured F1 driver, uh, Daniel Ricardo, and test driver TA Sianna Calderon in this deep racer league and deep racers, a one 18th scale, fully autonomous car, um, that uses reinforcement learning, learning a type of machine learning. And so we had actual F1 driver and test driver racing against developers from all over the world. And technology is really playing a role in that evolution of F1. Um, but also giving fans a chance to go head to head against the Daniel Ricardo, which I don't know that anyone else could ever say that. >>Yeah, I raced against an F1 driver for head to head, you know, and doing that in the month of may really brought forth, not only an appreciation, I think for the drivers that were involved on the machine learning and the technology involved, but also for the developers on these split second decisions, these drivers have to make through an event like that. You know, it was, it was great and well received. And the drivers had a lot of fun there. Um, you know, and that is the national basketball association. The NBA played in the bubble, uh, down in Orlando, Florida, and we work with second spectrum. They run on AWS. And second spectrum is the official optical provider of the NBA and they provide Clippers court vision. So, uh, it's a mobile live streaming experience for LA Clippers fans that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to visualize data through on-screen graphic overlays. >>And second spectrum was able to rely on, uh, AWS is reliability, connectivity, scalability, and move all of their equipment to the bubble in Orlando and still produce a great experience for the fans, um, by reducing any latency tied to video and data processing, um, they needed that low latency to encode and compress the media to transfer an edit with the overlays in seconds without losing quality. And they were able to rely on AWS to do that. So a couple of examples that even though 2020 was, uh, was a little different than we all expected it to be, um, of how we worked closely with our sports partners to still deliver, uh, an exceptional fan experience. >>So, um, I mean, first off you have probably the coolest job at AWS. I think it's so, uh, congratulations. I mean, it's just, it's fascinating. What's on your want to do less than in terms of 20, 21 and beyond and about what you don't do now, or, or what you would like to do better down the road, any one area in particular that you're looking at, >>You know, our, our strategy in sports is no different than any other industry. We want to work backwards from our customers to help solve business problems through innovation. Um, and I know we've talked about the NFL a few times, but taking them for, for another example, with the NFL draft, improving player health and safety, working closely with them, we're able to help the NFL advance the game both on and off the field. And that's how we look at doing that with all of our sports partners and really helping them transform their sport, uh, through our innovative technologies. And we're doing this in a variety of ways, uh, with a bunch of engaging content that people can really enjoy with the sports that they love, whether it's, you know, quick explainer videos, um, that are short two minute or less videos explaining what these insights are, these advanced stats. >>So when you see them on the screening and say, Oh yeah, I understand what that is at a, at a conceptual level or having blog posts from a will, Carlin who, uh, has a long storied history in six nations and in rugby or Rob Smedley, along story history and F1 writing blog posts to give fans deeper perspective as subject matter experts, or even for those that want to go deeper under the hood. We've worked with our teams to take a deeper look@howsomeofthesecometolifedetailingthetechnologyjourneyoftheseadvancedstatsthroughsomedeepdiveblogsandallofthiscanbefoundataws.com slash sports. So a lot of great rich content for, uh, for people to dig into >>Great stuff, indeed. Um, congratulations to you and your team, because you really are enriching the fan experience, which I am. One of, you know, hundreds of millions are enjoying that. So thanks for that great work. And we wish you all the continued success down the road here in 2021 and beyond. Thanks, Matt. Thanks so much, Sean.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Espania this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage, we're here in Barcelona, at Cisco Live 2020 inside the Devnet zone. This is day one Eric Herzog is back to talk about cybersecurity he's the CMO and vice president of global channels for IBM storage, good to see you again my friend. >> Dave, Stu, thank you very much for having us we love being on theCUBE and you are the leaders in IT information no one better especially for realtime. >> Thank you very much for that so we're going to talk cyber, very important topic it's a big tailwind for Cisco, IBM obviously a big player in security its on every CIO's mind. What's your angle though in storage specifically? >> Sure, what I think one of the key things is that when people think security they think keep the bad guy out and when the bad guy gets in chase him down and catch him. What they don't realize is sometimes it could be a day, a week or weeks till they know the bad guy is in. So how are you going to protect yourself when all your valuable data is exposed like that, and then when you do have an incident, particularly malware or ransomware, how do you come back to a state where you know you have good data and you basically don't have to pay the ransom or in the case of malware that data is good data. So we can help on both fronts with the things we've done with our cyber resiliency play inside our storage portfolio. So compliments and gives IT and the CSO as well as the CIO, an overall comprehensive security strategy so that when they're in my house how am I keeping them from somehow stealing it even though they're in the house, that's what we can help with. >> Okay I see where you're going here so and by the way I've seen stats that say it's upwards of two hundred or three hundred days before people even realize they've been infiltrated and then it becomes a matter of okay how do I respond, now you've got malware, not only malware but you've got ransomware, and so let's talk more specifically about how you attack that problem. Do you help me sort of find when somethings been penetrated? By looking at the backup corpus? analytics? what do you guys do? >> So we do a couple things, so first of all we do have in our Spectrum Protect Suite, which is our modern data protection, it does the backup et cetera is we can detect anomalous activity in backup data sets, snaps and replicas. We use AI and machine learning to understand if that's a new occurrence so lets take an example, the backup data set runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at midnight you have all kinds of weirdo backup activity, why? Because if you're malware or ransomware you want to get to the secondary data sets first before you attack the primary otherwise they'll just go back to the secondary, yeah they'll lose some time but they'll go to that. So we can detect that and alert the backup admin the storage admin whoever you tell us to do. Then overtime if that process changes and so you're always going to have certain activity at time that previously didn't. We learn that and stop sending alerts and stop sending notes. And obviously we don't say we think it's malware this or ransomware that, what we do is alert them to anomalous activity as an attack could be starting. So that's just one of the things we do, we have much more that we do in cyber resiliency, but in that case monitoring and detection, threat detection, we help do by looking at secondary data sets. >> Eric, wonder if you could bring us on sign to the organization of your customers, because is this something that just the storage team buys or are you being bought in you said by the CSO or you know some other organization and you know want it installed then how does this play out inside the organization? >> Sure, so it's a hybrid strategy so lets take for example, we have a thing called Safeguarded Copy, we've had it for eighteen months now in the mainframe, wildly successful, wildly successful, not just with the new Z but with the old Z14 and the reason is we would go in to the storage guys, and in the Z world money was tight, and we said what if we could help you protect against mal or ransomware or even internal threats we has dual access control capability from an internal management perspective they said "really?" And then the storage guys actually took that to the security team and said guess what we can help you and they said "oh my god." and they gave money actually to the storage guys, in other instances we approach the security side and in fact one of the things we've done is talked to a lot of our partners who have a security practice a storage practice and never thought about thinking of them in a holistic fashion, so from a partner perspective it gives a more holistic solution to the end user, they sell keep the bad guy out, track the bad guy down and by the way did you know that IBM's flash system will do data-at-rest encryption with no performance penalties so you can encrypt everything on that and there's no penalty, it's at line speed so if they're there for a week or two hundred days or whatever, that data is protected because it's encrypted. So that's more of a the partners work in a holistic security strategy. >> I mean IBM has a long heritage in security, RACF all you old mainframers, Resource Access Control Facility was the gold standard back in the day, and really you know set the road map for you know best practice. So obviously things have changed a lot, what is best practice today are you recommending customers set up air gaps? certainly tooling but more tooling is a challenge for people but how are you seeing customers combat the problem? >> So what we do is we look at if from a storage perspective so we have a couple things, A we have air gaping to tape and air gaping out to clouds, so our Spectrum Virtualize sits on-prem and off-prem we can do air gaping with our Spectrum scale product which are AI and big data again put it out, IBM can all put eventually a snap or a replica out to a cloud, gives you a logical air gap, tape will work with anything file, block and object, then you have a physical air gap, so that's one aspect, the other thing of course you had mentioned already is encrypting, you can encrypt file block and object data, in fact we can worm it, so make it immutable and then encrypt a worm, so and in fact with our object storage because of the way we do our hashing and the way we do our erasure encoding and the way we hide the key, is we basically make it almost non crackable. So file, block and object, what we do to prevent and then the air gaping and the last thing to do is incidents recovery, so they had an incident to go back to a known good copy, so the Safeguarded Copy we can basically mount instantaneously snaps or replicas, they would do a ring-fence network cause obviously they do it online with the real network they could crash it or compromise so you set up a ring-fence network and you keep bringing back the snaps or replicas and look it at right, have the app guys come in run an app and "oh no there's malware okay we can't use that snap" and it's very easy to do, we can automate the process they have to put the ring-fence around and they can go back to as many copies or replicas they have whether it be the file side block or object. So that would help in incident recovery after they know they've had an attack, they've cleaned it up, now you've got to make sure that your secondary data is good data before you restore it, otherwise you could put the malware, ransomware right back in to what you had. So the recovery side, protection side on-prem with encryption and then obviously with air gaping protection but if you will out of house either physical or out to cloud. >> Eric help us connect the dots between what your talking about and the audience here at Cisco Live, obviously networking people there's always a little bit of security inside there, so help us understand how these go together and the reception you get from them. >> Well again the reception is very good because what we do is, Cisco is looking at doing all the network security we're a partner of theirs again allows them or their channel partners to go in and say here's a holistic strategy, keep the bad guy out, okay here's what you do to track the bad guy down, by the way here's what you do on the network side with our Cisco gear, here's what you can do with the storage gear so, partner can go with a holistic strategy to the end user right and say here's what we will do for the network, here's what we'll do for the storage and of course it doesn't step on each other because you're looking at the network traffic, where looking of course at primary storage and secondary storage and actually hybrid multi cloud storage as ways for them to protect their data so it's completely in complimentary play, by the way the other things that IBM security division does both to keep the bad guy out and track the bad, are also none of these things step on each other, it allows you to have a truly holistic strategy cause right now network security is semi thought about, storage security is almost never though about. So it's like let me give you a whole strategy that's going to work bring the data back, help you understand it, keep the data from being stolen, immutable copies, if they're get there and they steal the data, encrypted data, so all kinds of strategies the networking guys just so it allows the end user or certainly the CIO to go to the CSO or to the chief legal officer and say I've got a holistic strategy yes I'm good, it's not an if question it's a when, so here's what I'm doing to reduce the incidents time, here's what I'm doing to keep the bad guy out which is not what we do in the storage division, here's what we do if they're in to keep the data safe so we know if it gets stolen it can't be used. And by the way once we clean up the malware and ransomware we need to get you up and going as soon as possible mister CEO or CFO now or the line of business guys, we can do that with without having the data being compromised or the data being bad data. >> It's interesting to hear tape as part of the equation, right it keeps coming back, but it is part of the best practice, so there's the air gap but tape kind of the last resort, you don't want to really recover from tape, but you know if you have tape in an offsite location, you know if it's a lot of data it's fast to move, because you're putting it on a truck, it may be an RPO issue, but are you seeing that certain industries, financial services in particular, maybe or certain companies are mandating that last resort? >> So what you're seeing with tape overall, is for IBM to renaissance, both inside the data centers, so from that perspective think enterprise accounts, the global fortune two thousand, and from that perspective it's partially about the air gaping, it's partially I've got gobs of data, what's the cheapest way to make sure I've got a backup copy, okay then we're also seeing a huge take up with hyperscalers and cloud providers. So we have several of the top ten cloud providers on the planet that when you buy their archive or cold store that actually goes onto IBM tape platters, so you have a cost angle which is independent of the cyber resiliency side, then you've got the cyber resiliency side, and for us when we're talking bigger accounts, so think enterprise up to that you know fortune two thousand they're probably going to do different things for different data sets, so certain things might be snapped out to the cloud, other data sets might go out to tape and their are regulated industries still, like healthcare, finance and obviously the government itself where sometimes tape is still like mandated and so even though it's legacy the bottom line is they need it and then once you get in there between the cost angle of what they can save and the fact that oh wait, I thought just back to well wait, what about malware and ransomware and by the way a smart company is going to use a hybrid combination, so they'll have some stuff going out to the cloud then they have on premises. Again our safeguard copy on the mainframe is actually can be on premise, so you've got five hundred immutable snaps that are encrypted and then you keep going back to your final one that didn't have the malware and ransomware, so it's probably a combination strategy even on the storage side which would include tape, what we could do for file block and object on flash we could even do it for if someones got older disk or you know want to use second or like IBM cloud object storage is mostly done on disk, well guess what now that older data is encrypted it's wormed, it's protected, by the way we can air gap IBM cloud objects storage out to the cloud too, so it may well be a very comprehensive strategy based on application workload use case value of the data set and obviously with things like tape and backup to the cloud you have a secondary use case, which is not just about the security but I need to back up the data in case there's a fire or me being the silicon valley guy need to go out to tape cause there might really be an earthquake and as great as IBM arrays are or any of our competitors arrays, cause we as you know with our software support all our competition, those arrays are going to be crushed when the building falls down in silicon valley, so you might need to have tape for cheap backup, so there's a lot of different angles that involve not just cyber resilient but the combination of cyber resiliency and really data reliability and data safety that are independent of the cyber attack worry and you can combine them cause of they way we put this together with our technologies. >> Yeah your talking about a comprehensive strategy, which is very important because this has become a board level topic and it's no longer I'm sure it still happens in many organizations "oh yeah check off item yeah we do that, we do backup to whatever cloud tape" check off, but in many organizations, if not most certainly publicly traded organizations, it's a board level conversation and they really do their homework, down to even the testing, although testing is a little tough right, it's time consuming and cumbersome, but definitely thinking through the board wants to know what happens if okay what about this what about that and they've experienced a lot of different permutations, so it's again not just a check off item anymore you can say oh yeah we comply it's really no we need something that actually works because we know we're going to get hacked. >> Well that's part of the reason Safeguarded Copy on the mainframe side has done so well, companies that are using mainframe it is the most mission critical workloads, the highest transaction workloads, so in the financial sector, in the government sector, in some of the big giant manufacturing or retailers, they're running mainframes and they have been for years and they're not stopping and so for them system uptime is an issue, security is an issue, so the Safeguarded Copy for us has really been really a grand slam home run product, to use a very US centric term, but maybe a sixer if you like cricket or it was a try if you like rugby, but for all those various sports it's been very successful because of what they use that mainframe for and how critical that data, so it's been very successful from that perspective. >> They're like oh, how about, you're obviously sharing a lot of knowledge specific to storage, I said before IBM's got a long heritage in security, how do you collaborate with the other you know security pros at IBM, how much of that sort of filters in to storage and back out? >> So what we do is we make sure that they're aware of what we do, they're looking at some new things, that I can't disclose, around security that would make places for people to go and practice if you will, and do some other things. We're going to be involved in that program which allows people to try things out if you will in a very secure way and someday IBM's going to do a cross storage will be part of its security and some of the other divisions but we haven't yet rolled it out, but it's something they're working on that we'll be part of. And then obviously there are many times in the big accounts where you know the security division are in there the storage guys are in there, but the account team knows that there's both issues and bring us together inside of a big account, so that happens as well more if you will from the sales side versus this official program that we're going to be launching shortly later this year. >> So wrap it up what's going on at Cisco Live? What are the conversations like with customers? What's IBM all about here? >> So for us our big thing has been about both our hybrid mutlicloud technology, which allows seamless move data back and forth, and we have a product called the Versastack, which incorporates our award winning Flashsystems, so we're positioned to either standalone or with the Versastack we have a Versastack in the booth. And then also obviously cyber resiliency, so I just presented yesterday on hybrid multicloud and then today I presented on cyber resiliency and how those things work together, and what we do as Cisco, so it's been a very good show and you know very successful for IBM here at Cisco Live. >> Good to hear, well you guys are great partners thanks for coming on theCUBE, love the shirt as always Eric Herzog IBM thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> All right your welcome, all right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest for Cisco Live Barcelona, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman for John Furrier, we'll be right back. 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(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are at Oracle Park, formerly AT&T Park, recently named Oracle Park. Right on the shores of McCovey Cove, in downtown San Francisco. We haven't been here since Sport's Data, I think 2014. I can't believe it's been five years. So maybe now the Giants' situation will turn as we make a run for the pennant. We're here at a really interesting event, it's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. And we're here with kind of the master of ceremonies, if you will, he's Mike Proman, the Managing Director of Scrum Ventures. Mike, great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks again for the time. >> Absolutely. So what is this day all about? Give us the low down. >> Yeah so, start up frenzy, right? Sports tech community's just in it's infancy right now. There's a lot of fragmentation though, in this world. And how do we best connect start ups to best-in-class companies, right? Japanese companies, there's a lot of excitement in Japan right now. We have Rugby World Cup coming up next month, we have the Olympics next year. How do we enable the start up community to realize those opportunities from a partnership perspective? So, we set out on this journey about a year ago. Bringing together companies of all different stages, all different geographic regions, and all different areas of focus within sports tech. And our job was to connect them to opportunities in Japan. What we kind of uncovered along the journey right, is that this is a community. And that we're building a platform here that transcends Asia, right. We want to help this community, and whether it's connecting them with the venture audience, or otherwise, we feel this is a great reflection of innovation coming in to this industry. >> Now you took kind of an interesting tact. You've called them, before we turned the cameras on, kind of a cohort, kind of an incubator, not really an incubator. So how is this thing structured, how do people get involved? What are some of the benefits of being part of this group versus out there slogging it on your own? >> Well, absolutely, and I think everyone's first reaction is, oh, this is just another accelerator, right? And we've really made a point of not identifying ourselves as an accelerator, for a variety of reasons. Number one, it's a stage-agnostic cohorts, right. So a lot of the companies that are representative here today, the 159 in our cohort, they've raised 10, 20, 30, $40 million. In many respects, they're all grows up, right. They don't need a quote unquote, a traditional accelerator. But our reality is, everybody needs acceleration. And particularly in Asia, Japan in particular, right? You need allies, you need advocates, you need facilitators. And people who are going to help revenue optimization, as well as just breaking the door in some cases. There's a lot of high profile content coming to that region, and if we can help people, it all comes back to us, long term. >> Right, right. And then the other piece, obviously, is the investment piece. 'Cause you work with a number of Japanese investment firms, so that's really kind of part of the, you know, we're sitting in San Franscisco, the event's called Tokyo, the Olympics are a year way, and you're from the Mid-West. So, you're kind of bringing it all together here in San Franscisco. >> You know, sport is the great unifier, right. So this is a great opportunity for us to speak to other industries, and bring the venture community into this conversation. Because, as you know, it's about top-line growth for a lot of these startups, but in many cases, they need capital to be able to accelerate into that growth. And so, you know, it's a very exciting time, and we're here to help support everybody. Our DNA, we're investors, right. We're a venture capital firm. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is, these companies needs advocacy and connections, and that's what we're here to provide. >> Right, so, you said 100 plus companies in cohort. So, there's a lot of things going on in sports tech, but what are some of the really oddball ones that you're seeing a little further out than maybe most people aren't thinking about. >> Yeah, you know, the trends to me that I'm really excited about personally, are those opportunities that transcend the industry, right. Where is there opportunity for us to democratize things, from just a lead athletes, right, into things that you and I both need. So look at athlete performance. Look at recovery health, as an industry focus, right. Hydration, you look at mental health, sleep health, dietary health, you know. Players of the Giants, they need that, right? But you and I need that too. So where are those technologies that are innovators or thought leaders and leading the way in those spaces? The nice thing about Sports Tech Tokyo is we focus in athlete performance, stadium experience, and fan engagement, right. And there are 13 sub-categories, so it's a very broad based cohort, a lot of different areas of expertise. But bringing them all together is what's most rewarding. >> What's your favorite piece of it? I mean, it's hard to pick your favorite kid, but a couple of interesting companies in the portfolio that you'd like to highlight. >> Everyone's always saying, oh, you put me on the spot. No, absolutely not, Jeff. But in reality, my background is, I've been an entrepreneur for 10 plus years before this. And I've worked with brands like Coca Cola, and the NBA. What excites me most-- >> So we framed you up with a Coke bottle, by the way. >> Thank you very much. That was a nice product placement there. The nice thing is, I'm seeing technology today that didn't fundamentally exist a year or two ago. So I could tell you my favorite right now, in 2 weeks that might be entirely different, right. You're going to meet somebody from Misapplied Sciences, and they are doing some of the most breakthrough, cutting edge tech that, it's mind boggling, in terms of what they can do. And what's great about a company like Misapplied, is that they're doing it in sports, but they're also doing it in retail, and other high-dense environments. And so to me, those are the winners in this cohort. The ones that can transcend sport, and add value to so many other places. >> Right, so, before I let you go, you got a busy day ahead. What's the run of the day, what should people expect who are coming through the gates here at Oracle today? >> Well I said this is not your traditional accelerator. Well, this is not your traditional demo day, by any means, right. Traditionally, demo day is a bunch of company pitches, and then there's maybe some conversation afterwards. To us, this is a celebration of a broader cohort, right. Our 100 plus mentors that make up the Sports Tech Tokyo community. And we wanted to celebrate those individuals, right. The 100 mentors, the 400 plus attendees we have here today. So, think of it as an extended cocktail party, right. We want people to connect, and connect at scale. And so that's the back half of the day. The front half of the day is more content oriented. We have a lot of industry experts, again, common theme is transcending the vertical. Looking at opportunities to bring the venture community into the conversation. >> All right, well Mike, good luck and have a great and very busy day. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate it Jeff. >> He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco on the shores of McCovey Cove, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat digital music)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And we are back live in Boston as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. It is our sixth year here at the show and this year obviously some huge announcements. A significant moment it's been for Red Hat, we heard from Jim Whitehurst a little bit ago. Stu Miniman, John Walls, we're now joined as well by Niall Fitzgerald, who is the GM of IT Application Architecture and Design at Spark NZ. Niall, good afternoon, or I guess good morning still we're in an Eastern time zone. >> Yeah it's the middle of the night in New Zealand I'd say. >> Yeah, so Spark NZ New Zealand. Tell us a little bit first off about Spark NZ. What the folks back home are doing right now, work-wise, and your role with the company. >> Yeah, so Spark is the largest provider of telecommunication services in New Zealand. All the traditional type of services you'd expect, mobile, broadband, et cetera. We came out of the traditional kind of post office, so we've a lot of heritage, and about four years ago we rebranded from Telecom New Zealand into Spark. To represent that we were changing from being a telco into much broader range of digital services. Our purpose is to help all New Zealanders win big in the digital world. >> Niall, step back for a second. Talk to our audience that might not know the telecom industry as well as you, I've been an observer and participator in the industry but you know back in the dot com boom it was like limitless bandwidth and we're gonna do all these wonderful things, and cloud and digitization, have put some new opportunities as well as stresses and strains on your industry so, you know what's going on and you said you rebranded? >> Yeah, look, I think it's well-known it's been a tough last few years for most telcos in the world. I was listening to Red Hat talking yesterday about 60 consecutive quarters or more of growth, I don't think there's any telco in the world that probably has the same story. Like most, we're facing kinda decline in all the traditional revenues like voice and text and things like that, so we're all having to kinda rebrand ourselves and deliver much higher levels of customer service. People expect the same levels of service from us that they do from Amazon, Google, and everyone else. In Spark what that means to us is we've moved into lots of new things as you said, things like ICT, we're now very big in cloud, we've recently launched a Spark Sports brand and we've got streaming right to the key events like Formula 1. We're going to stream the Rugby World Cup, which is a massive event for New Zealanders, so looking forward to seeing that and Ireland on the all blacks in the final in September this year. So yeah, lot going on. Tough times but forcing us to keep changing every year. >> And so, about these changes that you're making whether technologically based, let's just deal with that. What is that ultimately going to do for you in terms of better customer service delivery? So, you've got inherent challenges, you've talked about them at all, that the world's changing, how we use this medium, this communication opportunity is changing, and you've been just a little behind the wave, hard to keep up with it, so rapidly changing. How much of a challenge is that? And then how are you going to address this going forward? How do you stay relevant? >> Yeah I think we're lucky in one regard because if I look back about five, seven years ago we were like most traditional telcos. We had a spaghetti for want of a better description of systems, and then we had all was multiples of everything, at the time we had 19 integration layers and 10 billing systems and it wasn't uncommon. But way back in 2012 we actually embarked on a massive transformation program, and we spent five years consolidating all of that infrastructure so going into about 2017 we were very lucky in that we had a massive foundation laid already, so what that then enabled us to do was to actually push away calls from our contact centers into mobile apps, into digital adoption. We've been a big embracer of things like big data and robotic process automation as well to try and take cost out of our industry. So, I think we're quite well placed. Now that allows us to do things like innovate new products for our customers so we bundle things like Spotify and Netflix. It allows to introduce things like Spark Sports brand, which we couldn't have done five years ago before the transformation We just wouldn't have been able to enable these things with our existing kind of legacy IT estate. >> So how's open-source play into all this for you? >> Yeah open-source, I suppose our first foray into open-source was when we went to start embracing big data and automation. So we started using things like Hadoop and various other things and our entire platform is based around open-source. We changed to an IMS network recently and we started embracing things like OpenStack, and then it really took us to a new level recently when we started working on Red Hat's Fuse, and OpenShift we started implementing that. >> Okay, so the OpenStack show for many years, the last few years we saw the telcos coming in specifically for network function virtualization or NFV. Is that what you're using in that space? >> Yeah, we are. Interestingly, at this conference I've heard a lot of people talk about OpenShift and OpenStack, obviously, particularly in the telco game. We actually came out a bit differently from the application space. So we had an integration platform that we had put in through this transformation phase which had served us well, and was connecting all of our 40, 50 systems together. But it was coming up to a life cycle event, and we decided we'd look externally and see had we options beyond just upgrading it. So we started looking around, and we effectively found Fuse, and in bringing in Fuse we then brought OpenShift in, which is quite different to what I've seen from a number of other people, they're bringing in things like OpenShift and building on top of it. We did it the other way around, you know? And we did it primarily for cost reasons, you know? >> Yeah, so talk a little bit about that impact of Fuse and OpenShift, what that means. Were you already down the containerization journey, or did that help drive >> Niall: No, no some of that modernization? >> That's exactly what happened. If I'm honest we hadn't really explored containerization too much because we had come to the end of our kind of transformation journey. Open-source and containerization wasn't around when we went through that. So we kinda needed some really core reasons to move on, so, yeah effectively what happened was we looked at Fuse, I was gonna say primarily for cost, but we were looking for something that we could migrate to where it makes sense. We were looking for something that wasn't a massive lift for the people who worked in our integration already, so they could be rescaled into it, and interestingly we turned agile recently which has changed the way we look at the needs of our systems. So our old integration platform, if we needed to deploy a change we had to take an outage, which was fine when we had a centralized IT department who deployed once a month and took a two hour outage, but when you have 20 tribes all developing features in isolation and they wanna go straight through to production, if everybody took an outage then our systems wouldn't really be up very often. So one of the key things that we were looking at for our new integration platform was can we deploy hot and can we scale? So that's basically where Fuse came into us. >> Okay, so can you? >> We can and we do. Still a little bit nervous about pressing the button mid-day and doing stuff >> Right, simultaneously and thinking this has really gotta work, right? >> Yeah then normally, >> We saw it today though on the demo stage, on the keynote. You know, simultaneous operations going on. >> No, we do it, and they normally don't tell me when they're doing it they just do it and tell me it worked afterwards, but no it's actually been really successful and you can imagine connection 40 or 50 systems together is effectively the equivalent of about 2,000 API's and we managed to migrate, we're about 70% of the way through. But we've managed to migrate those without actually impacting the systems that use them and that's probably been one of our most successful IT projects that I've seen. >> It's funny, you said we were towards the end of our transformation journey, and of course I think we all understand, it is just, I might've reached a marker in my journey, but it needs to be a continuous process. And you went through an agile transformation. So bring us in a little bit. Organizationally, what happened there. Some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile, 'cause I mean agile's always an ongoing thing. >> It is, yeah. So about the start of last year we started to think about agile and the need to change our ways of working. And we looked at a number of models overseas, and companies like Spotify and various banks, and we settled on a model of chapter and tribes. And we took about six months in looking at what that meant for us as an organization and all of the things that we needed to change. Everything from, people's contracts to people's titles. We got rid of all complex titles and moved down to simple things like Developer, Tester, et cetera. We had to train our people in agile so we ran boot camps for over 2,000 people. We had one with 500 people attend. We had to review all of our processes and see where we had centralized things like IT governance or procurement. How do you actually manage this when you have up to 20 different people effectively, or tribes doing their own developments, so over a period of about six months we went through all of these. We started with a concept of some forerunner tribes so we could figure out how this thing actually works, you know? And get some lessons. And then on the first of July last year, about a 2,000 people in various buildings packed up their stuff in their desks and moved into a new world, into their tribes with different working spaces and different collaboration areas and all the tools that we need. So, yeah we're about nine months down that journey now and it's been good. >> How many total employees? >> We have about 5,000 in total. >> 5,000, so you had 500 at one time. 10% of your workforce in training at one time. >> That's right, yeah. Absolutely. >> How do you keep the wheels on the bus rolling? Because I mean you're asking people not only to learn new skills, but learn them in a new environment, and learn them literally in a new place. I mean that's just massive change and I think, we're human beings. We're creatures of habit to a certain extent. You had to hit a lot of bumps along the way. >> Yeah, so one of the key things we did upfront was we said the operate part of our business, which is effectively things like our contact center, our sales staff, our service desks, we will not go agile with those on the first day, because they operate in a slightly different way of working. The people in our stores, et cetera. So we had a concept of agile light and agile heavy. So we kinda parked them for a minute so that we wouldn't do exactly what you say and let the wheels fall off the trolley. And we took to people that were the IT developers, the product development staff, and all of that, which came to just over about 2,000 people, and we firstly flipped those 2,000 people and put those through bootcamp. But even as you say, scheduling the boot camps, we made sure that we always had the right people on the ground and we would schedule smaller boot camps for them later if we needed to do it, but yeah. >> So nine months in now. You talking to your peers, if they're gonna go through. Any key learnings, what were some of the most challenging things that you ran into? >> I think probably the major one is that agile at its heart is a way of working, and despite the name it's actually quite prescriptive in how you should work, you know? When you pick up the agile book it tells you all the ceremonies you need to run and the processes that you need to run as well. And I think you need to be pragmatic in how you implement it because there are so many different flavors of agile. The one flavor, even with an organization of Spark size, it doesn't work. So the tribes and squads that are building out new products compared to the tribes that are doing things like upgrading systems, they will work in different ways. So I think the first thing is be pragmatic, take the goodness and the intent of agile, but implement it in how it works for you. And there's some other practical considerations, like prior to being agile we had quite a large number of our technology partners were based offshore in India, and you know it's quite difficult to run a 10 AM stand up in New Zealand setting the priorities for the day and the sprint plans, when, you know, four members of your team are asleep in India. You know, they're missing out on all of the goodness and the collocation and the sharing, so one of the things we had anticipated that, so luckily enough we had moved a lot of those people onshore in advance of agile, you know? But it is a big cultural change for everyone in the organization, not least the leadership teams as well. >> John: Well you got through it. >> We got through it, but there's no going back. >> Absolutely, no you're in the deep end now. Well, Niall, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time joining us here on theCUBE, and I think that an Irishman is always welcomed in Boston. >> Thank you very much! We've been enjoying the hospitality. >> Yeah the door's always open. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Niall Fitzgerald, joing us from Spark NZ. Back with more here on theCUBE, you're watching this live at the Red Hat Summit 2019.