>> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (pleasant music) >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante for our live coverage of MWC '23 SiliconANGLE's wall to wall, four-day coverage. We're here with Greg Manganello, who's from Fuijitsu. He's the global head of network services business unit at the company. And Ryan McMeniman is the director of product management for the open telecom ecosystem. We've been talking about that all week, how this ecosystem has opened up. Ryan's with Dell Technologies. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Greg, thanks for coming on. Let's hear Fuijitsu's story. We haven't heard much at this event from Fuijitsu. I'm sure you got a big presence, but welcome to theCUBE. Tell us your angle. >> Thanks very much. So Fuijitsu, we're big O-RAN advocates, open radio access network advocates. We're one of the leading founders of that open standard. We're also members of the Open RAN Policy Coalition. I'm a board member there. We're kind of all in on OpenRAN. The reason is it gives operators choices and much more vendor diversity and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks. >> And so as an entry point for Dell as well, I mean obviously you guys make a lot of hay with servers and storage and other sort of hardware, but O-RAN is just this disruptive change to this industry, but it's also compute intensive. So from Dell's perspective, what are the challenges of getting customers to the carriers to adopt O-RAN? How do you de-risk it for them? >> Right, I mean O-RAN really needs to be seen as a choice, right? And that choice comes with building out an ecosystem of partners, right? Working with people like Fuijitsu and others helps us build systems that the carriers can rely upon. Otherwise, it looks like another science experiment, a sandbox, and it's really anything but that. >> So what specifically are you guys doing together? Are you doing integrations, reference architectures engineered systems, all of the above? >> Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of all of the above. So we've announced our cooperation, so the engineering teams are linked, and that we're combining our both sweet spots together from Fuijitsu's virtual CU/DU, and our OpenRAN radios, and Dell's platforms and integration capabilities. And together we're offering a pre-integrated bundle to operators to reduce that risk and kind of help overcome some of the startup obstacles by shrinking the integration cost. >> So you've got Greenfield customers, that's pretty straightforward, white sheet of paper, go, go disrupt. And then there's traditional carriers, got 4G and 5G networks, and sort of hybrid if you will, and this integration there. Where do you see the action now? I presume it's Greenfield today, but isn't it inevitable that the traditional carriers have to go open? >> It is, a couple of different ways that they need to go and they want to go might be power consumption, it might be the cloudification of their network. They're going to have different reasons for doing it. And I think we have to make sure that when we work on collaborations like we do with Fuijitsu, we have to look at all of those vectors. What is it that somebody maybe here in Europe is dealing with high gas prices, high energy prices, in the U.S. or wherever it's expansion. They're going to be different justifications for it. >> Yeah, so power must be an increasing component of the operating expense, with energy costs up, and it's a power hungry environment. So how does OpenRAN solve that problem? >> So that's a great question. So by working together we can really optimize the configurations. So on the Fuijitsu side, our radios are multi-band and highly compact and super energy efficient so that the TCO for the carrier is much, much lower. And then we've also announced on the rApp side power savings, energy savings applications, which are really sophisticated AI enabled apps that can switch off the radio based upon traffic prediction models and we can save the operator 30% on their energy bill. That's a big number. >> And that intelligence that lives in the, does it live in the RIC, is it in the brain? >> In the app right above the RIC, absolutely. >> Okay, so it's a purpose-built app to deal with that. >> It's multi-vendor app, it can sit on anybody's O-RAN system. And one of the beauties of O-RAN is there is that open architecture, so that even if Dell and Fuijitsu only sell part of the, or none of the system, an app can be selected from any vendor including Fuijitsu. So that's one of the benefits of whoever's got the best idea, the best cost performance, the best energy performance, customers can really be enabled to make the choice and continue to make choices, not just way back at RFP time, but throughout their life cycle they can keep making choices. And so that's really meaning that, hey, if we miss the buying cycle then we're closed out for 5 or 10 years. No, it's constantly being reevaluated, and that's really exciting, the whole ecosystem. But what we really want to do is make sure we partner together with key partners, Dell and Fuijitsu, such that the customer, when they do select us they see a bundle, not just every person for themselves. It de-risks it. And we get a lot of that integration headache out of the way before we launch it. >> I think that's what's different. We've been talking about how we've kind of seen this move before, in the nineties we saw the move from the mainframe vertical stack to the horizontal stack. We talked about that, but there are real differences because back then you had, I don't know, five components of the stack and there was no integration, and even converged infrastructure was kind of bolts that brought that together. And then over time it's become engineered systems. When you talk to customers, Ryan, is the conversation today mostly TCO? Is it how to get the reliability and quality of service of traditional stacks? Where's the conversation today? >> Yeah, it's the flip side of choice, which is how do you make sure you have that reliability and that security to ensure that the full stack isn't just integrated, but it lives through that whole life cycle management. What are, if you're bringing in another piece, an rApp or an xApp, how do you actually make sure that it works together as a group? Because if you don't have that kind of assurance how can you actually guarantee that O-RAN in and of itself is going to perform better than a traditional RAN system? So overcoming that barrier requires partnerships and integration activity. That is an investment on the parts of our companies, but also the operators need to look back at us and say, yeah, that work has been done, and I trust as trusted advisors for the operators that that's been done. And then we can go validate it. >> Help our audience understand it. At what point in time do you feel that from a TCO perspective there'll be parity, or in my opinion it doesn't even have to be equal. It has to be close enough. And I don't know what that close enough is because the other benefits of openness, the innovation, so there's that piece of it as the cost piece and then there is the reliability. And I would say the same thing. It's got to be, well, maybe good enough is not good enough in this world, but maybe it is for some use cases. So really my question is around adoption and what are those factors that are going to affect adoption and when can we expect them to be? >> It's a good question, Dave, and what I would say is that the closed RAN vendors are making incremental improvements. And if you think in a snapshot there might be one answer, but if you think in kind of a flow model, a river over time, our O-RAN like-minded people are on a monster innovation curve. I mean the slope of the curve is huge. So in the OpenRAN policy coalition, 60 like-minded companies working together going north, and we're saying that let's bring all the innovation together, so you can say TCO, reliability, but we're bringing the innovation curve of software and integration curve from silicon and integration from system vendors all together to really out-innovate everybody else by working together. So that's the-- >> I like that curve analogy, Greg 'cause okay, you got the ogive or S curve, and you're saying that O-RAN is entering or maybe even before the steep part of the S curve, so you're going to go hyperbolic, whereas the traditional vendors are maybe trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the lemon. >> 1, 2%, and we're making 30% or more quantum leaps at a time every innovation. So what we tell customers is you can measure right now, but if you just do the time-based competition model, as an organization, as a group of us, we're going to be ahead. >> Is it a Moore's law innovation curve or is it actually faster because you've got the combinatorial factors of silicon, certain telco technologies, other integration software. Is it actually steeper than maybe historical Moore's law? >> I think it's steeper. I don't know Ryan's opinion, but I think it's steeper because Moore's law, well-known in silicon, and it's reaching five nanometers and more and more innovations. But now we're talking about AI software and machine learning as well as the system and device vendors. So when all that's combined, what is that? So that's why I think we're at an O-RAN conference today. I'm not sure we're at MWC. >> Well, it's true. It's funny they changed the name from Mobile World Congress and that was never really meant to be a consumer show, but these things change that, right? And so I think it's appropriate MWC because we're seeing really deep enterprise technology now enter, so that's your sweet spot, isn't it? >> It really is. But I think in some ways it's the path to that price performance parity, which we saw in IT a long time ago, making its way into telecom is there, but it doesn't work unless everybody is on board. And that involves players like this and even smaller companies and innovative startups, which we really haven't seen in this space for some time. And we've been having them at the Dell booth all week long. And there's really interesting stuff like Greg said, AI, ML, optimization and efficiency, which is exciting. And that's where O-RAN can also benefit the Industry. >> And as I say, there are other differences to your advantage. You've got engineered systems or you've been through that in enterprise IT, kind of learned how to do that. But you've also got the cloud, public cloud for experimentation, so you can fail cheaply, and you got AI, right, which is, really didn't have AI in the nineties. You had it, but nobody used it. And now you're like, everybody's using ChatGPT. >> Right, but now what's exciting, and the other thing that Ryan and we are working on together is linking our labs together because it's not about the first time system integration and connecting the hoses together, and okay, there it worked, but it's about the ongoing life cycle management of all the updates and upgrades. And by using Dell's OTEL Lab and Fuijitsu's MITC lab and linking them together, now we really have a way of giving operators confidence that as we bring out the new innovations it's battle tested by two organizations. And so two logos coming together and saying, we've looked at it from our different angles and then this is battle tested. There's a lot of value there. >> I think the labs are key. >> But it's interesting, the point there is by tying labs together, there's an acknowledged skills gap as we move into this O-RAN world that operators are looking to us and probably Fuijitsu saying, help our team understand how to thrive in this new environment because we're going from closed systems to open systems where they actually again, have more choice and more ability to be flexible. >> Yeah, if you could take away that plumbing, even though they're good plumbers. All right guys, we got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, and Dave Nicholson will be back from the Fira in Barcelona on theCUBE. Keep it right there. (pleasant music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase. This is season two, episode four, where we continue to talk with the AWS ecosystem partners, this topic, cybersecurity protect and detect against threats. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a new guest with me. Ryan Ferris joins me the VP of products and engineering at Anisha. Ryan. Welcome to the program. Great to have you. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>So let's dig right in. Why are software vendors turning to Anisha to help them address and access the nearly for over 200 billion market public sector, federal market for cloud services? What is that key event? >>Yeah, it's it. If you know anything about FedRAMP and if you've looked into it, it takes a long time to achieve Fedra. So when customers kind of go into this cold and they're from Mars and they're like, what is bed? They usually find that it's an 18 month journey, maybe a 24 month journey. And so Anisha helps shorten that journey with lower costs and faster time to market. So if you're waiting for our revenue stream from say a government entity, we can get you there faster and get you to a, a state of Fedra certified in a shorter time period. And that's the value problem. >>Faster time to value is critical for organizations. So let's look at this journey as you talked about it, what does the path to compliance look like for specifically for AWS customers with a nation and without help us understand the value add? >>Yeah. So if you're doing it without Angen or if you're just kind of doing it yourself, which some customers choose to do, then they have to go on that journey and kind of learn about three primary things. One thing is how do I just write the entire package? Like there there's a thing called an SSP or a, a system security plan. And that thing is maybe seven or 800 pages long. And you have to offer that all by yourself so you can get help with that or not. That's sort of the academic and, and, and tech writing piece of it. There's another piece of it around what does my environment look like? So as I am ruling out this Fedra solution, what are each piece in my environment that needs to be compliant with Fedra? And it's a voluminous amount of things can be either a dozen or maybe up to a hundred things that you have to tweak and change. So there's a technical deployment store here as well. And then the third thing is keeping you compliant in your AWS environment after you've achieved kind of that readiness state. So the journey does not stop once you achieve Fedra, ATO, it goes on and on and on, and Anisha helps customers kind of maintain and keep them there in that fully compliance state after achieving ATO, >>What's the timeframe for AWS customers in terms of going, alright, we realize we're going on this journey. It's challenging. We need An's help. What's the timeframe to get them actually certified. >>Yeah. We look at the timeframe between the moment you deploy and the moment you start writing about that tech, that Fedra package and when you're audit ready, and in the best case scenario, that could be a few months, right? But you're always, your mileage may vary based on kind of your application readiness and how ready you are to pursue that journey. So the fastest happy path is a few months to audit, audit an audit ready state, but then you have, you kinda have to go through a process whereby you're in the queue for Fedra. And that can kind of take maybe an extra few months, but it really is that that three month accelerated timeframe in the best case scenario, >>Got it. Three months accelerated timeframe. Are there other compliance standards that besides Fedra that you help organizations get compliance with? >>Right. So it's a great question. So FedRAMP in and of itself is just really hard to get to. It's just so many things that you have to do, but if you get to that state, it's based off of a standard called missed 853 specifically rev four, that's kind of a mouthful, but once you achieve that state, there's basically 325 controls that come along with fed moderate. And that buys you a lot of leverage in leeway in mapping and sort of crosswalking to other compliance levels. So if you achieve that state, you buy a lot of, kind of goodness with things that map to either PCI or even HIPAA or SOC two. And, and so you, you kind of get a big benefit and sort of a big bang for your buck by having achieved that, that state for Fedra. >>So from an AWS customer, talk to me about, obviously we talked about the time to value the speed with which you enable organizations to achieve compliance and, and readiness. What what's in it for me in terms of working with a nation as an AWS customer. >>Yeah. For, so for AWS specifically our stack, well, we have kind of two versions of our stack. One is meant for Azure and it's kind of cookie cutter and meant for folks that have an entrenched Azure footprint. The other is it's the majority of our market it's folks that want to in accelerator footprint in AWS. So what's in it for you is that Anan kind of presents something that looks pretty similar to a landing zone, but it's a little bit more peppered with complexity and with tuned configurations. So if you're an AWS customer and let's see you've had an environment for the last 5, 6, 7 years, we help you kind of take that environment and enhance it and become FedRAMP ready in a much faster state. And we are leveraging and utilizing a lot of native AWS core services like ECR, for example, is one we're just starting to lean into AWS inspector for bone scans, those types of things. And then kind of when you get up to that audit, ready state and through ATO, we aggregate a lot of that vulnerability information and vulnerability scanning information into a parable readable, actionable format. And most of those things, those gatherings of data are AWS specific functions that we kind of piggyback on. So we're heavily into cloud trail and, and quite heavy into kind of using the things that are already at our fingertips just by deploying into AWS. >>Yeah. Leveraging what they already are familiar with kind of meeting the customers where they are. I think these days is such an important factor to help organizations make the changes as quickly and dynamically as they need to. >>That's right. Yeah. That's perfect. Yeah. A lot of customers, you know, when, when they start on the journey, they kind of, they, they sort of uncover the, uncover the details around, well, I have an application and this application has existed for six or seven years. How do I get this thing FedRAMP ready? And what does onboarding mean to your stack? We try to make that specific step as easy as possible. So when I'm on the phone with prospects and I'm talking to 'em about embarking on a journey, I kind of get them to a mental model where they treat their application VPC or their application environment as sort of a, and we deploy a separate VPC into their, into their cloud account. And then we peer that information. It's kind of getting into the mechanics a little bit, but we try to make it as easy as possible to start doing the things that we're obliged to do for FedRAMP, for their application, like bone scans and, and operationalization of logging and things like that. And then we pull that information into our AIAN managed BPC. And I think once customers really start to understand and sort of synthesize that mental model, then they kind of have this Baha moment. They're like, oh, okay. Now I, now I really understand how your platform can accelerate this journey into a period that is no more than say two or three months of onboarding >>No more than two or three months. That's, that's a nice kind of guarantee for organizations who are you typically engaging with? Is it the CISO level or are there other folks involved in this conversation? >>Yeah, I, the CISO is probably the best persona to engage with, but it so varies from customer to customer and you never really know who's really gonna, oftentimes it's the CEO or, or sometimes it's a champion that might be the CFO or someone that's incentivized to really start getting market share for federal customers that they don't have access to. That might even be a VP of engineering that we're, that we're conversing with. But most often I think the CISO is central because the CISO of course wants to give in details of what does the staff consist of and exactly how are you helping me with this big burden of continuous monitoring that fed Fedra makes me do. And, and where, where do you fit in that story? So it's usually the CSO, >>Usually the CSO, but some of the other personas that you mentioned sounds like it's definitely a C level or at least a, an executive level conversation. >>It is. Yeah. I'll try to divide that a little bit from my persona. Like I, I run engineering and product. I'm usually dealing with a rather talking to and engaging with the CSO, but the folks that cut the check are either either the CEO or the CFO that really want to widen that kind of revenue stream that they don't have access to. And they're the real decision making personas in this deal. Now, after the decision decision is made, then, you know, they're vetting through VPs of engineering or engineering leaders or the CSO. So like the, the folks that pull the purse strings are usually, you know, the ones that are cutting the check to make this investment that is usually the CSO or rather CEO and the CFO. >>Got it. Okay. So if I'm an AWS customer and I'm on this journey for fed re certification, I've, I've been on it for a while. How do I know it's time to raise my hand or pick up the phone and call Anisha? >>Yeah. You know, some customers that we speak with have already tried to do it and maybe they've failed. Maybe they've been like 12 or 14 months into the journey. And they've said things like, we just don't know how to put the package together, or maybe they've engaged with the third party auditor. And the third party auditor has said, sorry, you guys need to go back to the drawing board or maybe they've missed a good percentage of the technical requirements and they need some consultation and advice or a cookie cutter approach. So it kind of, every journey is different when we are engaging. Sometimes folks are just coming in completely cold or maybe they failed. But the more interesting ones, and I think when we can look a little bit more like heroes are the ones that have tried it, and then a year later they come back, they come back to an, and they want that accelerated goodness. >>Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value either from a customer who came in cold or a customer who came in after trying it on their own or with another partner for a year that you think really demonstrates the value that AIAN delivers? >>Yeah. There is a customer story that's sort of top of mind and it's, I think the guy primarily stuck in what tooling I'll anonymize the customer, but this customer kind of chose the wrong level of tooling as they embarked on their journey. And by tooling, I mean, let me get a little bit more specific here. You can't just choose any vulnerability scanner, for instance, if it's a SAS product, or if it's sending data or requests outside of your Fedra boundary, then you're gonna run into trouble. And this reference customer, or this prospect at the time kind of had a lot of friction there. So as they were bumping up against that three Pao deadline, they realized they had a lot of work to do. And we simplified that, that part of the journey substantially for them by essentially selecting and spoon feeding them and, and sort of accelerating that part of the deployment and technical journey for them. And they were very delighted by that part of it. >>When you're talking with customers who are in, in a state of, of change and fluxes, who isn't these days, we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation considerably over the last couple of years. How do you talk with them about a nation as an enabler of their digital transformation overall? >>Yeah. Digital transformation. It's a, it's a broad word. Isn't it like for, for customers that are moving from an on-prem world into the cloud world, you have this great opportunity to kind of start from scratch. And so for Anisha, we are deploying and maybe not start from scratch, but when you're moving from an on-prem environment into the cloud, your footprint, you have this really nice opportunity to embrace more of AWS core services and to kind of rebuild things, kind of make your architecture drastically improved, or like look different to be more supportable and like less operational overhead. And so when an nation presents itself as sort of this platform in a walled garden environment, some customers have this aha moment that like, if you're gonna move either a portion of your environment or a specific application to the cloud, AIAN really helps you establish that security within that boundary and that footprint in a, in a much more accelerated fashion, then if you were selecting each part of your security infrastructure and then trying to implement it by hand, and that's kind of where we shine. >>Got it. We talked about the personas that you're typically engaging with depending on the organization, but how do you help enterprise companies who say Anisha, we wanna improve DevOps efficiency. We wanna get our applications secure that are running on AWS and those that we may wanna move to AWS in the future. >>Yeah. This gets into futures a little bit, but part of our roadmap, a little bit of a, a kind of a look around the corner for our roadmap is that since we know so much about the FedRAMP environment and FedRAMP moderate and the standard called this 853, it's a really powerful security view. And it's also a really powerful compliance view. So, you know, as I was saying before that, if you achieve a lot of depth and excellence in nest 853, it buys you a lot of kind of crosswalk and applicability for SOC two and HIPAA and PCI. So for DevOps organizations and for just engineering organizations that want more pre-pro insight, there's no reason why you can't just deploy our platform and our stack in a pre fraud environment to get that security signaling such that you can catch things early and prevent maybe spillage or leakage or security issues to go into production. So one of the things that we're doing on a roadmap is a, a feature that we call compliance insights, whereby we present a frame of missed 853 RAV4 that you can deploy into any environment. And that particularly helps the DevOps role by saying, well, if I just, for example, exposed an S3 bucket to world, then I can catch that configuration, that compliance product and catch it, trap it and fix before it leaks out to. >>So you talked a little bit about kind of some of the things that are coming up on a, on the product side, what's next for Anisha, as we look at we're rounding out calendar year 22 coming into 2023, there's still so much change in the market. We've got to embrace that. What's next for the company. What can we expect from the VP of products and engineering? >>Yeah, I think in two, two big areas here, we're gonna double down on our Fedra offering offering, and just continuously improve it and improve it. We're pretty tempted to lean in more heavily to CMMC. We hear a lot about CMMC kind of on the periphery, but we just haven't quite felt the market pressure to really go after that. But there's definitely something there. And I would anticipate some offering that maps to that specific compliance that, that compliance framework. And then in the enterprise, we just month after month, we discuss more about how we can create more flexibility in our platform, such that commercial customers can get more of that goodness, and sort of more of that consolidation and time to market, particularly for small and mid-sized customers. So we'll be releasing more of those pieces of functionality in 2023 as well. >>So the commercial folks be on the lookout for that. >>Yes, absolutely. That's a huge untapped market for us. We're super excited about it and we'll be a little cagey on in our plans until we kind of get through this early availability period and then probably make a bigger splash in the first half of 2023. >>That sounds appropriate. Where can the audience go to learn more about what you guys are doing and maybe get ahead on some of those teaser that you just mentioned? >>Yeah. I think our marketing folks will push out more data sheets and marketing material on what's to come. And if you ever wanted to be part of this early availability program that I just discussed, or that I mentioned, you can always go to anan.com and ping us, and we'd be happy to have a conversation with you and we'll lift up the hood and allow you to look under there for, and just carry on the conversation around what's to come. >>All right, getting a peek of what's under the hood. That's always exciting, Ryan, thank you for joining me on this program. AWS startup showcase. We appreciate your time, your insights and a peek into what's going on at Anisha. >>Awesome. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. >>Likewise. We wanna thank you for watching the AWS startup showcase for Ryan Ferris. I'm Lisa Martin stick right here on the, for great content coming your way. Take care.

[Music] hello everyone welcome back to the live coverage here in monaco for the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier host of thecube uh we have a great great guest lineup here already in nine interviews small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen powered by digital bits sponsored by digital bits presented by digital bits of course a lot happening around decentralization web 3 the metaverse we've got a a powerhouse influencer on the qb ryan gills the founder of openmeta been in the issue for a while ryan great to see you thanks for coming on great to be here thank you you know one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is you have young and old coming together the best and brightest right now in the front line it's been there for a couple years you know get some hype cycles going on but that's normal in these early growth markets but still true north star is in play that is democratize remove the intermediaries create immutable power to the people the same kind of theme has been drum beating on now come the metaverse wave which is the nfts now the meta verses you know at the beginning of this next wave yeah this is where we're at right now what are you working on tell us what's what's open meta working on yeah i mean so there is a reason for all of this right i think we go through all these different cycles and there's an economic incentive engine and it's designed in because people really like making money but there's a deeper reason for it all and the words the buzzwords the terms they change based off of different cycles this one is a metaverse i just saw it a little early you know so i recognized the importance of an open metaverse probably in 2017 and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that um so we're very early into that decade and we're starting to see more of a movement building and uh you know i've catalyzed a lot of that from from the beginning and making sure that while everything moves to a closed corporate side of things there's also an equal bottom-up approach which i think is just more important and more interesting well first of all i want to give you a lot of props for seeing it early and recognizing the impact and potential collateral damage of not not having open and i was joking earlier about the facebook little snafu with the the exercise app and ftc getting involved and you know i kind of common new york times guy comment online like hey i remember aol wanted to monopolize dial up internet and look the open web obviously changed all that they went to sign an extinction not the same comparable here but you know everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data the data business so balancing the benefit of data and all the ip that could come into whether it's a visualization or platform it has to be open without open then you're going to have fragmentation you're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives how does the metaverse continue with such big players like meta themselves x that new name for facebook you know big bully tons of cash you know looking to you know get their sins forgiven um so to speak i mean you got google probably will come in apple's right around the corner amazon you get the whales out there how do is it proprietary is walled garden the new proprietary how do you view all that because it's it's still early and so there's a lot of change can happen well it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts right we had the first act which was really truly open right there was this idea that the internet is for the end user this is all just networking and then web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up you know and now as we enter this sort of third act we have the opportunity to learn from both of those right and so i think web 3 needs to go back to the values of web one with the lessons in hindsight of web 2. and all of the winners from web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in web 3. so you can probably guess every single company and corporation on earth will move into this i think most governments will move into it as well and um but they're not the ones that are leading it the ones that are leading it are are just it's a culture of people it's a movement that's building and accumulating over time you know it's weird it's uh the whole web 2 thing is the history is interesting because you know when i started my podcasting company in 2004 there's only like three of us you know the dave weiner me evan williams and jack dorsey and we thought and the blogging just was getting going and the dream was democratization at the time mainstream media was the enemy and then now blogs are media so and then all sudden it like maybe it was the 2008 area with the that recession it stopped and then like facebook came in obviously twitter was formed from the death of odio podcasting company so the moment in time in history was a glimmic glimmer of hope well we went under my company went under we all went under but then that ended and then you had the era of twitter facebook linkedin reddit was still around so it kind of stopped where did it where did it pick up was it the ethereum bitcoin and ethereum brought that back where'd the open come back well it's a generational thing if you if you go back to like you know apple as a startup they were trying to take down ibm right it was always there's always the bigger thing that was that we we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power they have too much influence and now you know facebook and apple and these big tech companies they are that on on the planet and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done but when they were startups they existed to try to take that from a bigger company so i think you know it's not an it's not a fact that like facebook or zuckerberg is is the villain here it's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization anything past this point it becomes more and more unhealthy right and an open metaverse is just a way to build a solution instead of more of a problem and i think if we do just allow corporations to build and own them on the metaverse these problems will get bigger and larger more significant they will touch more people on earth and we know what that looks like so why not try something different so what's the playbook what's the current architecture of the open meta verse that you see and how do people get involved is there protocols to be developed is there new things that are needed how does the architecture layout take us through that your mindset vision on that and then how can people get involved yeah so the the entity structure of what i do is a company called crucible out of the uk um but i i found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company a commercial company won't achieve this objective there's limitations to that so i run a dao as well out of switzerland it's called open meta we actually we named it this six months before facebook changed their name and so this is just the track we're on right and what we develop is a protocol uh we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse and that protocol is in the dao it is in the dow it's that's crucial crucible protocol open meta okay you can think of crucible as labs okay no we're building we're building everything so incubator kind of r d kind of thing exactly yeah and i'm making the choice to develop things and open them up create public goods out of them harness things that are more of a bottom-up approach you know and what we're developing is the emergence protocol which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines right so you have unity and unreal which all the game developers are sort of building with and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game so integration layer basically between the wallet kind of how stripe is viewed from a software developer's campaign exactly but done on open rails and being done for a skill set of world building that is coming and game developers are the best suited for this world building and i like to own what i built yeah i don't like other people to own what i build and i think there's an entire generation that's that's really how do you feel about the owning and sharing component is that where you see the scale coming into play here i can own it and scale it through the relationship of the open rails yeah i mean i think the truth is that the open metaverse will be a smaller network than even one corporate virtual world for a while because these companies have billions of people right yeah every room you've ever been in on earth people are using two or three of facebook's products right they just have that adoption but they don't have trust they don't have passion they don't have the movement that you see in web3 they don't have the talent the level of creative talent those people care about owning what they create on the on what can someone get involved with question is that developer is that a sponsor what do people do to get involved with do you and your team and to make it bigger i mean it shouldn't be too small so if this tracks you can assume it gets bigger if you care about an open metaverse you have a seat at the table if you become a member of the dao you have a voice at the table you can make decisions with us we are building developing technology that can be used openly so if you're a game developer and you use unity or unreal we will open the beta this month later and then we move directly into what's called a game jam so a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible i mean you think about gaming i always said the early adopters of all technology and the old web one was porn and that was because they were they were agnostic of vendor pitches or whatever is it made money they've worked we don't tell them we've always been first we don't tolerate vaporware gaming is now the new area where it is so the audience doesn't want vapor they want it to work they want technology to be solid they want community so it's now the new arbiter so gaming is the pretext to metaverse clearly gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world and this game mechanics under the hood and all kinds of underlying stuff now how does that shape the developer community so like take the classic software developer may not be a game developer how do they translate over you seeing crossover from the software developers that are out there to be game developers what's your take on that it's an interesting question because i come to a lot of these events and the entire web 3 movement is web developers it's in the name yeah right and we have a whole wave of exploration and nfts being sold of people who really love games they're they're players they're gamers and they're fans of games but they are not in the skill set of game development this is a whole discipline yeah it's a whole expertise right you have to understand ik retargeting rigging bone meshes and mapping of all of that stuff and environment building and rendering and all these things it's it's a stacked skill set and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them that is the next cycle that we're going to and that's what i've spent the last three or four years preparing for yeah and getting the low code is going to be good i was saying earlier to the young gun we had on his name was um oscar belly he's argo versus he's 25 years old he's like he made a quote i'm too old to get into esports like 22 old 25 come on i'd love to be in esports i was commenting that there could be someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on tv on our digital tv program in the future that's going to be possible the first party citizenship between physical experience absolutely and meta versus these cameras all are a layer in which you can blend the two yeah so that that's that's going to be coming sooner and it's really more of the innovation around these engines to make it look real and have someone actually moving their body not like a stick figure yes or a lego block this is where most people have overlooked because what you have is you have two worlds you have web 3 web developers who see this opportunity and are really going for it and then you have game developers who are resistant to it for the most part they have not acclimated to this but the game developers are more of the keys to it because they understand how to build worlds yeah they do they understand how to build they know what success looks like they know what success looks like if you if you talk about the metaverse with anyone the most you'll hear is ready player one yeah maybe snow crash but those things feel like games yeah right so the metaverse and gaming are so why are game developers um like holding back is because they're like ah it's too not ready yet i'm two more elite or is it more this is you know this is an episode on its own yeah um i'm actually a part of a documentary if you go to youtube and you say why gamers hate nfts there's a two-part documentary about an hour long that robin schmidt from the defiant did and it's really a very good deep dive into this but i think we're just in a moment in time right now if you remember henry ford when he he produced the car everybody wanted faster horses yeah they didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening they just wanted an incremental improvement right and you can't say that right now because it sounds arrogant but i do believe that this is a moment in time and i think once we get through this cultural shift it will be much more clear why it's important it's not pure speculation yeah it's not clout it's not purely money there's something happening that's important for humanity yeah and if we don't do it openly it will be more of a problem yeah i totally agree with you on that silent impact is number one and people some people just don't see it because it's around the corner visionaries do like yourselves we do my objective over the next say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in web 3 and are leaning into it because we've built technology that solves interoperability between engines mapping ownership from wallets all the sort of blueprints that are needed in order for a game developer to build this way we've developed that we just need to identify where are they right because the loudest voices are the ones that are pushing back against this yeah and if you're not on twitter you don't see how many people really see this opportunity and i talked to epic and unity and nvidia and they all agree that this is where the future is going but the one question mark is who wants it where are they you know it's interesting i talked to lauren besel earlier she's from the music background we were talking about open source and how music i found that is not open it's proprietary i was talking about when i was in college i used to deal software you'd be like what do you mean deal well at t source code was proprietary and that started the linux movement in the 80s that became a systems revolution and then open source then just started to accelerate now people like it's free software is like not a big deal everyone knows it's what it was never proprietary but we were fighting the big proprietary code bases you mentioned that earlier is there a proprietary thing for music well not really because it's licensed rights right so in the metaverse who's the proprietary is it the walled garden is the is it is it the gamers so is it the consoles is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself so i find that that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world actually open maps in the word open but open source software has a trajectory you know foundations contributors community building same kind of mindset music not so much because no one's it's not direct comparable but i think here it's interesting the gaming culture could be that that proprietary ibm the the state the playstation the xbox you know if you dive into the modding community right the modding community has sort of been this like gray area of of gaming and they will modify games that already exist but they do it with the values of open source they do it with composability and there's been a few breakthroughs counter-strike is a mod right some of the largest games of all time came from mods of other games look at quake had a comeback i played first multiplayer doom when it came out in the 90s and that was all mod based exactly yeah quake and quake was better but you know i remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode and playing with my friends remember vividly now the graphics weren't that good but that was mod it's mod so then you go i mean and then you go into these other subcultures like dungeons and dragons which was considered to be such a nerdy thing but it's just a deeply human thing it's a narrative building collective experience like these are all the bottom-up type approaches modding uh world building so you're going to connect so i'm just kind of thinking out loud here you're going to connect the open concept of source with open meta bring game developers and software drills together create a fabric of a baseline somewhat somewhat collected platform tooling and components and let it just sell form see what happens better self form that's your imposing composability is much faster yeah than a closed system and you got what are your current building blocks you have now you have the wallet and you have so we built an sdk on both unity and unreal okay as a part of a system that is a protocol that plugs into those two engines and we have an inventory service we have an avatar system we basically kind of leaned into this idea of a persona being the next step after a pfp so so folks that are out there girls and boys who are sitting there playing games they could build their own game on this thing absolutely this is the opportunity for them entrepreneurs to circumvent the system and go directly with open meta and build their own open environment like i said before i i like to own the things i built i've had that entrepreneurial lesson but i don't think in the future you should be so okay with other companies or other intermediaries owning you and what you build i think i mean opportunity to build value yeah and i think i think your point the mod culture is not so much going to be the answer it's what that was like the the the the dynamic of modding yes is developing yes and then therefore you get the benefit of sovereign identity yeah you get the benefit of unbanking that's not the way we market this but those are benefits that come along with it and it allows you to live a different life and may the better product win yeah i mean that's what you're enabling yeah ryan thanks so much for coming on real final question what's going on here why are we here in monaco what's going on this is the inaugural event presented by digital bits why are we here monaco crypto summit i'm here uh some friends of mine brittany kaiser and and lauren bissell invited me here yeah i've known al for for a number of years and i'm just here to support awesome congratulations and uh we'll keep in touch we'll follow up on the open meta great story we love it thanks for coming on okay cube coverage continues here live in monaco i'm john furrier and all the action here on the monaco crypto summit love the dame come back next year it'll be great back with more coverage to wrap up here on the ground then the yacht club event we're going to go right there as well that's in a few hours so we're going to be right back [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston. The CUBE's coverage of AWS Re-inforce 2022. This is our second live Re-inforce. We did two in the middle that were all digital. Aaron Brown is here as US AWS cyber leader for Deloitte and Ryan Orsi the cloud foundation leader for partners for Amazon Web Services. Jen, welcome to The CUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks. >> Nice to see you. Tell us about the story of Deloitte in cyber and then we'll get it to Deloitte cyber on AWS, or maybe even start there. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, obviously Deloitte, one of the largest cyber consultancies in the world, we've been working with AWS for a very long time. 2013, I was involved with, you know, the first Alliance agreement with them. And then we've been in cloud managed services about five years delivering workloads for clients. We have over 200 clients on that platform and then about a year and a half ago or so, the MSSP program came and it made a ton of sense to us, right? To really level the playing field and gave us a chance to really come out and demonstrate, you know, our capability around MSSP. >> The MSSP program, I saw a slide yesterday in keynote and in the analyst program was, you know, there's technology partners, there's MSSP partners. Explain the MSSP partner. >> Sure, sure. So at the Database Partner Network, we break it down. The program is called the level one MSSP Competency Program. And it is for both those companies that are sort of more of a software company with a managed service and those that are more of a pure service company, it's for both, but it's the general concept, it hosts the community of partners like Deloitte with a concentrated talent pool around 24 by 7 monitoring and response of AWS security events. >> So what is Deloitte? Deloitte's not a pure software play. It's not a pure services play anymore. It's sort of a mixture. >> Yeah, you know, asset enabled services, right? It's the way that we look at it. So, yeah, we're definitely not trying to compete with software companies out there, but we do have assets, right? So we do everything as infrastructure as code and that allows us to deploy our solutions into client environments really quickly. So where you might spend months on third party tool integrations, we leverage all native AWS tools in our standard offering and we can deploy into a client and get those services up and running in a couple of weeks. >> So you sell your software as an integrated service, is that correct? You don't- >> It's service, it's really is service. We sell a metered service. >> You don't sell your software separately? >> No. >> I should say it differently. You include your software as part of the service, is that right? >> Yeah, it is. But actually there's another element. There are obviously some clients who don't want to be in a managed service in perpetuity. And so those same assets that I talked about that we use for MSSP, you know, for the right clients, we don't just give away everything to anybody but for the right clients, for the right engagement, we will work with clients to help them build the capability that they need to run it themselves. And our solution is built in a way where they can do that. Right? We have a base component and a variable component to the solution and we will impart those assets to a client, you know, if the situation is right. >> Okay. So you'll actually transfer the software, but would you charge for that? >> Yeah, certainly, but there's obviously a big service component that goes into it. Right? >> And that's really where your expertise is. >> Yeah, we don't have like a standard, you know, list price but we'll work with clients to basically help them build out that capability because frankly the the market moves so fast that you need a constant capability and engine to update that solution. It's not something that, you know, you're going to sell and someone's just going to use that out of the box for the next five years. >> But a lot of the value that seems that Deloitte brings is you don't run from customization. You welcome that. You, you know, if a client says, hey, I need this special and that special, or whatever it is you'll go attack. You have the staff, the talent to attack that problem. And you use software in areas where you can have repeatability and it helps you scale and be more productive. Is that a fair way to think about it? >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, I guess one of the phrases that we use is we like big hairy problems, right? That's sort of our sweet spot. The, you know, the very simple, hey, I need a couple of guys to do a couple of things, typically, we're not the right firm for that. So, yes, we use the assets cause we realize like, hey, you know, out of everything that needs to be done, there's a significant portion of this that everybody needs more or less the same way. And then we build that, we build the automation to get it in and then we have that variable component working with clients to say, hey, let's make this work in your environment. We use a combination of AWS Native services, but then, you know, some clients have investments in third party tools and we can work with that. >> So it's a perfect match for AWS cause you guys are all about providing tools for builders and here's some primitives, some APIs and Go, we don't want that highly customized snowflake for every single client. >> Exactly. I mean, that's what I feel like the partnership with Deloitte is really bringing to the table for everybody and our mutual customers and builders out there that we both work with is again, they don't run from complexity or customization that security can be complex. It can be hard, Deloitte's helping making it much easier. The AWS partner network is helping kind of bring the ecosystem together and of software service, architectures that AWS recommend for like a security best practice around what to monitor, how to respond, what kind of enriched data should be added to that security finding and kind of pushing that out through our partnerships with it such as Deloitte. >> One of the things that, I mean, certainly big takeaway from this event, the security tracks that reinvent, previous Re-inforce events is AWS imparting, educating its customers on best practice and how tos and things that they should be thinking about, you know, do this, don't do that. In 2019, it was a lot about, hey guys, there's this shared responsibility model and kind of explaining that, we're way, way beyond that now, should we think about Deloitte sort of as an extension of that best practice AWS expertise that can be applied at your clients? I'll go to Deloitte because I don't have the talent to deal with that. I mean, I got talented people, but I just don't have enough of them. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really, you know, our offerings tend to be comprehensive across all the domains. And like I said, the full life cycle of security operations all the way from, you know, identify the issue to resolve it and recover from it. And, you know, when we look at the shared responsibility model, you know, we like to say, hey, we will take you really far up that stack, that customer responsibility area, you know, for our service, we cover a significant portion of that landscape on our client's behalf cause, you know, what do they care about? Deploying workloads, getting the application running, right? Security is just another one of those important, necessary things, but it just sort of standing between you and the business value of your workload. >> And your ideal target customer would be a large medium up to a large enterprise or is all exclusively large or? >> Definitely not exclusively large. You know, the fact that we have all the automation that we do, we have a significant portion of our security operations folks are offshore allows us to be really competitive. And so we're able to serve clients that maybe, you know, in years past wouldn't have been what you'd think of as traditional. So like clients leveraging the marketplace, you know, we're able to serve that market segment. >> So billion dollar up kind of revenue? Odes that sound about right? >> Yeah. Even south of that a bit. >> Okay. So maybe half a billion or 500 million up. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So thinking about that ideal sort of profile, if you don't know, you don't know, I'm going to ask you to guess. >> Yeah. >> What percent of those target companies, enterprises, have a SOC? Is it 100%, 50%, you know, or are you- >> 75, 75% most so. >> Okay. So let's say 3/4. >> Yeah. >> So you compliment the SOC, right? You're not the SOC, but you may be in some cases? >> Depending, now we're talking about it's a function of what their IT enterprise landscape looks like. If they're 100% AWS, yeah. If you're born in the cloud startup and, you know, you don't do anything else and we have, you know, we have a few of those. Right. And they want to give us everything. They're like, you know, our security guys just going to kind of understand what you guys are doing and feel good about it. Yeah. We do that. But for the most, there is an existing SOC. Right. And so what we do is we leverage, you know, an ITSM software to e-bond with our clients service management functions so that when we're generating tickets, they have full visibility to what's going on. We're still resolving things on their behalf, we need to communicate with some clients, right? Cause a lot of security issues that need to get resolved require engagement with the asset owner. So we're not just a black box. So we do have to talk to folks on the ground at the client to resolve issues. >> And that's actually one thing that really impressed me to getting to know Aaron and his team more and more throughout this journey together in the partnership is they're not throwing alerts over the fence to the customers SOC team saying, well, here's some recommended remediation steps, they're actually rolling up their sleeves and doing some remediation themselves and informing the customer. This was taken care of for you. I think that's really unique. >> Yeah. In addition to, you know, our solution obviously has a bunch of auto-remediations, you know, that we do as part of the solution. >> So what's the engagement like? What's the conversation like when people come to you? Say I have a problem, it's blank, right? What are the typical blank- >> You know, a lot of it has been organizations where there's either a business unit that has kind of maybe off run and doing their own thing. And, you know, it's only sort of come to light with the compliance and security organization inside the client that like, hey, these guys maybe need some help. And boy, we're really strapped. We don't have the people cause talent's so tight to go help these guys and make them get it right. We're going to go ahead and keep them kind of off to the side. And you know, we'll do this managed service to help get that addressed. And then another typical scenario is when companies are acquired. So, you know, organization buys a company and they've got a preexisting. Again, they look under the covers and they're like, oh, these guys really need some help because of the way that we deploy everything as infrastructure as code really very quickly, it's a great way to just kind of get it sorted. It's a metered service. So it's not some massive investment that they have to make. We could just get it sorted out until maybe they get a chance to process and actually onboard that new entity into their enterprise structure. So as part of the MSSP program within AWS, you got to be really good at understanding how to utilize the AWS portfolio of cyber security services natively. So you do that, does that check the box on everything you need or do clients typically say, no, no, you got to integrate with all this other mess that I have there. Can you sweep that mess aside and say, hey, I can do this all in the cloud or what's that dynamic like? >> The answer is, yes, both. Right? So, you know, typically clients will have significant investments in existing third party tools and then either politically because of the investment or from a practical standpoint it makes sense to integrate those. Now that does slow down, you know, the deployment and the customization a bit, but, you know, and a lot of times that makes sense for the client. >> Well, it gets hairy. Like you said, you love these kind of hairy problems, right? >> Yeah, that's right. >> You run towards that. >> That's right. We run towards fire >> And, Ryan, your focus on partners is all partners or is it really the MSSPs or? >> All partners, all kinds of partners in the security space, right? >> Right, right. Yeah. Of course. >> Software companies, professional services, managed services. And we're focused on trying to make the security easier for both of our mutual customers here. Right? So that what you mentioned about best practices and, you know, how do you tell what best practices are per AWS service or third party software that's operating in an AWS environment? That's part of what our team does is we create these partner programs. There's a very detailed, very prescriptive technical checklist that out internal security experts are going through with Deloitte folks, for example, as a part of their membership and the level one MSSP program to make sure that, right? Those best practices which could be fresh off the AWS documentation truck are built into their services. And the reason those best practices exist is for a for a good reason. They're built, tried and tested, you know, in our own environments before they reach the documentation website. But all of that is incorporated into that whole kind of validated checklist that we do together. So it's a great way to make sure that operations from partners like Deloitte, software delivered, customization delivered, aligns with what we're able to see from just our Amazon culture of being so customer obsessed and really listening to all of those very specific challenges they might have that the customer will have at different points in their cloud journey. Those challenges are baked directly into key technical requirement criteria that Deloitte's teamed up with us to go achieve. >> What are you seeing at the macro, Aaron? When we talked to practitioners where we'll survey, we have a survey partner called ETR and they'll do spending surveys coming into the year of CIOs and IT buyers, we're expecting 8%, eight to 8 1/2% budget growth, post Ukraine, inflation, Fed tightening, you know, the tech lash, all that. It's dialed down a bit, it's still pretty robust it's 6% and security still remains the number one priority. And we've seen a little bit of momentum deceleration even in security spend across the board, but not anything, you know, tragic. Are you seeing the same or are you seeing security budgets kind of where they were expected to be at the beginning of the year? >> Yeah, you know, I haven't seen it decline. I mean, I think the fact of the matter is for all the things that we talked about before, right? Basically the skill shortages and just the coordination with other cloud programs, there's a tremendous backlog of stuff that needs to be done. And, you know, enterprises have more appreciation now for the need for all, you know, all the various, you know, ransomware things that have happened and others that, hey, they need to get a handle on the security and their environment. And so I think a lot of what's been going on in the last year, the reason it hasn't been faster, hasn't been for a lack of appetite. It's just been a lack of skills and process to do it. >> Has the business case changed? And the variables maybe the same, but it used to be, hey, if you don't do this, you're exposed. Okay. Here's the fear of getting, you know, infiltrated and then it's going to became if you want to quantify it, it's like, okay, what's the expected loss with, and without, you know, the kind of think of insurance terms. Is the business case shifting with digital toward this is a fundamental component of monetization in order to be able to monetize, you have to ensure this level security. Are we there yet? >> Yeah, I think so. I don't think anyone's arguing whether it's, you know, needed or not. Right. So now it's a question of, hey, and I think CJ Moses had a good slide in the opening yesterday where he was saying, you know, was it, make the secure path, the path of least resistance. Right? And so that's a big part of, you know, how we deliver our solution. We really want to make it easy for the enterprise to absorb the security services that we have. Right? And that's really critical. I think that's where the focus is, is make it easier to do security because the value comes right along with it. >> All right. I'll give you each the final word, Ryan, you go first then Aaron kind of put a bumper sticker on Re-inforce 2022. >> It's not slowing down. It's only picking up in terms of innovation, software tools, operational processes, and some of the unique ways that all these tools are tied together. Third party, Native AWS, consulting, the way these services come together, it's only accelerating. It's been pretty exciting to see some of the innovation here this time at this Re-inforce. >> Right, Aaron, what do you say? >> Yeah, I would agree. I mean, just the breadth of capabilities, the new announcements by AWS of the capabilities in their solution stack. I mean, for me, you know, I just kind of wonder like when does it narrow or when does it settle down and I know that that's not now. >> Keep waiting. >> Yeah. >> But, yeah, I think, you know, we will continue to see you know, just rapid acceleration and new features and services that... >> I often say the next decade at cloud ain't going to to be like the last. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on The CUBE. It's great to see you. >> Thanks for having us. Thank you everything. >> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for The CUBE. We'll be back right after this short break from Boston AWS Re-inforce 2022. (soft music)

(theme music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, theCUBE's live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:Inforce '22. Big show for ground security, Amazon re:Invent's coming up. That's the big event of all time for AWS. re:MARS was another one, re:Inforce, the re:Shows, they call them, theCUBE's got you covered. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, who's in an analyst session right now. He'll be back shortly. We've got 2 great guests from an amazing company, HackerOne, been on theCUBE many times, (mumbles) Marten Mickos, of course, a big time, (mumbles) We got two great guests. Sean Ryan, Sr. Principal Product Marketing Manager Will Kapcio, Senior Sales Engineer. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us John. >> So Marten's been on many times, he's such a character. He's such a legend. >> Yeah. >> Your company has had great traction, great community, just this phenomenal example of community meets technology and problem solver. >> Yeah. >> He's been part of that organization. Here at re:Inforce they're just kind of getting wind of it now, right? You hear an open, teamwork, breaking down the silos, a big theme is this whole idea of open community, but yet be hardcore with the security. It's been a big part of the re:Inforce. What do you guys think of the show so far? >> Loving it. Partly too, we're both local here in the Boston area. So the commute was pretty nice. (everyone laughs) And the heat wave broke the other day so that's wonderful, but yeah, great show. It's good to be back in person doing this kind of stuff and just, it's really lively. You get a lot of good energy. We've had a bunch of people stopping by trying to learn what we're all about and so, it's really fun. Great show so far. >> And you guys have a great company. Take a minute to explain for the folks who may not know HackerOne. Tell them what you guys do real quick in one minute. >> Okay, the quick elevator pitch. (chuckles) So really we're making the internet safer using a community of ethical hackers. And so our platform enables that so we can skill match the best talent that's out there around the world to help find all the vulnerabilities that your company needs to discover. So you can plug those holes and keep yourself safe. >> So in an era of a talent gap, Will, you know the technologies out there, but sometimes the skills are not there. So you guys can feel the void kind of a crowdsourced vibe, right? >> Yeah, exactly. If you're trying to build a security program, and apply defense in depth, we offer a terrific way to engage additional security talent either because you can't hire enough or your team is simply overloaded, too much to do, so. >> Hackers like to be a little bit, white hat hackers like to be independent, might want some flexibility in their schedule, live around the world. >> Yes. No question for hackers that do it full time, that do it part-time and then everything in between. >> Well, you guys are in the middle here with some real products. So talk about what's going on here. How vulnerable are the surface areas in organizations that you're seeing? >> Yeah, probably more so than you would think. So we ran a survey earlier this year, 800 security and IT professionals across North America and Europe. And one of the findings from that survey was that nearly a third, actually over a third, 37% of the attack surfaces, not secured. Some of it's not even known. They don't know what they don't know. They just have this entire area. And you can imagine, I mean there's a lot of reasons you know, real legitimate reasons that this happens. One of those really being that we don't know what we don't know. We haven't scanned our attack surface. >> And also it's about a decade of no perimeter anymore. >> Yes. >> Welcome to the cloud. >> For sure. Absolutely. And people are moving quick, right? You know, the Cloud perfect example. Cloud people are building new applications on top of these new underlying configurations happening on a constant basis. Acquisitions, you know, that's just a fast moving thing. Nobody can keep track of it. There's a lot of different skill sets you need you know. And yeah, skill shortage out there too. As we talked about. >> What's the attacker solution you guys have? You guys have this HackerOne attack resistance component, what's that about? >> That's right. So that is to solve what we call the attack resistance gap. So that area that's not protected, hasn't been secured, on top of just not knowing what those assets are, or how vulnerable they are. The other thing that happens is people are sort of doing status quo testing, or they're not able to keep up with effective testing. So scanners are great. They can catch common vulnerabilities, but they're not going to catch those really hard to find vulnerabilities. The thing that the really sophisticated attackers are going to go after. >> Yeah. >> So we use... This large community that we have of ethical hackers around the world to be able to skill match them and get them doing bug bounties, doing pen tests, really bulletproofing the organization, and helping them risk-rank what they find. >> Yeah. >> Triage these, do the retesting, you know, get it very secure. So that's how we do it on a high level. Will, you might have a-- >> Yeah. I mean there's a tremendous amount of automation out there, right? But you can't quite at least not yet replace critical thinking. >> Yeah. >> From smart security minds. So HackerOne has a number of solutions where we can apply those minds in different ways at different parts of the software life cycle at different cadences, to fit our customers' needs, to fit their security needs, and make sure that there's more complete human coverage throughout their software lifecycle, and not just automation. >> Yeah. I think that's a great point, Will and Sean, because you think about open source is like not only grown significantly, it's like's it is the software industry. If you believe that, which I do. Open source is there it's all software free. The integration is creating a DevOps movement that's going the whole level. So Devs are doing great. They're pumping out codes. In fact, I heard a quote here on theCUBE earlier this morning from the CTO Sequence Security that said: "Shift left but shield right." So shifting left is build your security into the code, but still you got to have a shield. You guys have this shielding capability with your attack module management service. So you now you got the Devs thinking: "I got to get better security native" So but they're pumping out so much code. >> Yep. >> There's more use cases, so there's going to be code reviews needed for stuff that she said, "What is this? We got to code review new stuff. A developer created something." >> Yes. >> I mean, that's what happened. That's what's going on everywhere, right? >> Exactly. We often hear that for every 100 developers, you've got one security professional. (John laughs) You know, talk about skill shortage that's just not sustainable. How are you going to keep up with that? >> Yeah. >> So-- >> Your phone is ringing off the hook. There's no phones anymore, but like technically-- >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, yeah, you need to go external find some experts who can help you figure that out, and keep up with that cadence, you know keeps going and going. >> So, HackerOne. I love the ethical thing. I mean, you know, I'm a big fan. Everyone who watches theCUBE knows I'm a big fan of Marten and your company, but it's not just bug bounties that you do. That's just people think of, they see that in the news. "Oh, I made a million dollars from saving Microsoft teams from being exploited" or something like that, or weird things big numbers. But you do more than that. There's code reviews, there's assessments, like a variety of different things, right? >> Yes, exactly. Exactly. >> What are the hottest areas? >> Yeah, I mean, that's exactly why we coined the term, Attack Resistance Management really is to help describe all those areas that we cover, so you're right, bug bounty is our flagship product. It's what we're best known for. And it's a terrific solution. But on top of that, we're able to layer things like vulnerability disclosure, pen testing and code review. >> Pen test is actually really important-- >> Attack surface management, you know, a whole suite of complimentary offerings to help you engage these hackers in new and interesting ways. >> Yeah. >> The bug bounty is very popular because it's fun. >> Yeah. >> I mean if your going to work on something... It's fun for the hackers but the white hat hackers, the companies they can see where's my bugs it's the fear of missing out and the fear of getting screwed over. That's the biggest driver, right, you Know-- >> Yes, definitely and we now have a product called assets. So this is attack surface management. And what we're able to do with that is bring that in leverage the ethical hackers to risk-rank. What's your assets out there? How vulnerable are these? What's critical? Feed that in, and then you know, as Will was saying we've got all kinds of different testing options. Sometimes bug bounty continuous that works. Sometimes you want pen test, you know, you want it bound. >> Well, the thing about the thing about the pen test, well the soccer report, Amazon's got soccer reports but pen test is a moving train. >> Yeah >> Cause if you're pushing new code, you got to pen test it all the time. It's not a one and done. >> Exactly. >> You got to keep it running. Just one and run, right? >> You can't do the old school penetration test once a year, big monolithic thing. You know, this is just a check the box for compliances like, no, you need to be focusing this on the assets that you're releasing, which are constantly changing. And doing ongoing smaller cadences of pen testing. >> I had someone at a conference had a few cocktails in them, confessed to me, that they forged a pen test report. >> Oh man. >> Wow! (everyone laughs) >> Because he's like, "Oh! It was three months ago. Don't Worry about it." Like, but a lot can happen in three months. No, this is reality, they are like, "I can't turn it around fast enough" They had an Apsec review... >> Yeah. >> In their company and... >> And that's it. >> I mean, I'm not saying everyone's doing bad behavior, but like people can look the other way that creates more vulnerabilities. >> It can happen. And even just that time space. Let's say you're only doing a pen test once a year or once every two years. That's a long time. It's a lot of dwell time, you can have an attacker inside mulling around your network. >> All right. So we get a big service here. This one, AWS, we're here at re:Inforce the trend that you see Amazon getting closer to the ecosystem, lot more integration. How are you guys taking HackerOne's attack surface area product management software, closer to Amazon? What's going involved? Because at the end of the day they're enabling a lot of value and their partners are growing and becoming platforms within of themselves. What is the connection with Amazon? Keeping those apps running? How do you guys do that? >> Yeah. So we've got a specific assessment type for AWS. So... On the one hand, we're bringing in the right group of ethical hack hackers who are AWS certified. They have the right skillset, we're matching them. We've got the right assessment type for them to be able to track against and find the right vulnerabilities, report on those. So this is our pen test offering geared particularly towards the AWS platform. And then we also have an AWS security hub integration. So if customers are using the AWS security hub, we can plug into that, feed that information. And that gets more to it, the defense and depth for your AWS. >> And you guys verify all the ethical hackers? Everything's verified? >> Oh yes, absolutely. Fully. >> Yep. So they're verified for their pen testing experience, and skills and of course their AWS skills in particular. And their work experience, making sure that it's long enough that it's good, background check, the whole nine, so. >> How far has Amazon come from your perspective, over the past few years with the security partnerships? I mean their services have grown every year. I mean, every Amazon re:Invent, thousands of new announcements, new services. I mean if they update the DNS server, it's a new thing. Right? So like everything's happening. >> Yeah. >> What's different now? >> It's great to see. I mean, you look around at how many different types of security solutions there are here how many different types of partners, and it just shows you that defense in depth again, it's a really critical thing. Been a wonderful partner for us. I mean that, they're a big fan of us. They tell us that all the time. >> Yeah, 'cause the customers use you. >> Cause they're customers too. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But no, it's, it's been great. So we're looking at, we've got some things on the roadmap, some continued integrations that we look forward to doing with AWS, but you know, again it's a great powerful platform. It gives customers a lot of freedom, but with that freedom comes the responsibility that's needed to actually-- >> Will, what's your take? We hear hybrid security keys, management systems, announced today, encrypt everything, don't have over permissive environments. Obviously they're talking about more platform and that type of stuff >> Absolutely. My take would be, I think our own partnership with the AWS security team is great evidence that they're thinking about the right things. We worked within conjunction with them to develop our pen test methodology. So that combined for proprietary HackerOne platform data and findings across all of our customers that are common issues found in AWS environments with their own knowledge and their own experiences from the AWS security team directly. So it's a pretty powerful checklist that we're able to run through on some of these customers and make sure that all of the most common miss-configurations and such are covered. >> Yeah. They're highly motivated to do that. 'Cause they get blamed for the S3 buckets being kept open. It's not even their fault. >> Right. (crosstalk) >> We got hack over in Amazon. Amazon's terrible! >> Yeah. You know, one of the things we like to talk about is the fact that, you know, cloud is really about automation, right? >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> But you can't automate that human ingenuity the skills that come with an actual human who has the experience and the know how to fix these things. >> It's a lot going on in Amazon. It's always been kind of like, you just described earlier in theCUBE. An erector set, not Lego blocks yet, but still kind of, you still got to build it. It's getting better in the Lego model, but there are challenges in protecting cloud, Will. I mean this is a big part of protecting cloud platforms like AWS. What are some of those challenges? >> I think some of the challenges are the ephemeral nature of the cloud can really result in developers, and you know really business units across an organization spinning up assets that IT or security don't know about. And so that's where things like HackerOne assets in those attack surface management style solutions come into play, trying to identify those assets proactively and make sure that they're receiving some sort of attention from the security team whether it's automated or manual or ideally both. >> You guys got a good solution. So how about the partnership? We got one minute left. Talk about your partnership with AWS. You guys are certified in their security group, with their team and marketplace, right? Talk about some of those things. >> Yeah, we've been in marketplace over a year. We've had that the specific solution that I mentioned the App Pen test for AWS in place and integrated with security hub for some time now. There's some other stats that we could probably share around the ethical hackers that we have working on that. We have a number of certified AWS hackers, who again they have the right skill set for AWS, and they've been a great partner. We are very focused on continuing to work with them, and build out some new offerings going forward. >> Well, you guys have done a great job. Will, tell your team congratulations on the tech side, on the product side, very strong community. You guys had a lot of success. Congratulations! And thanks for sharing on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us John. >> Thank you for your time-- We're here at re:Inforce where all the access tab is open, it's team oriented, we got cloud scale, data, encryption on everything. Big news coming out of re:Inforce, well, theCUBE's got it covered here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (theme music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE. Discover 22 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Velante of a couple of guests from red hat. You may have seen some news yesterday. We're gonna be talking about that. Please. Welcome Ryan King, the senior director of hardware partner ecosystem, and Lori Fontine joins us as well. The senior director of global commercial partner ecosystem. Welcome to the program guys. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, >>Thank you so great to be back in person and nobody word has summit was just last month or so. That's right. Ryan. Talk about hybrid cloud. It's all the buzz. We've been talking a lot about it in the last hour and a half alone. What are some of the trends that, that red hat is seen with respect to hybrid cloud? >>Well, I, I mean, hybrid cloud of red hat has been a trend for quite some time. In fact, we were very early in setting our course towards hybrid cloud with our products and platforms. And that's been a key part of our strategy in terms of the number of transformations have been happening in the enterprise. And with HPE, we're super excited about, you know, we're hitting our stride with OpenShift. I've been working with OpenShift for the better part of my 10 years here at 12 years at red hat, 10 years with OpenShift. And we're very excited about seeing the pattern of going where customers want to build their cloud. It's very important that where, where the market is going. So we're seeing trends from the public cloud now go into edge and telco and 5g and really exceed, see them expanding their infrastructure footprint out to those use cases. And again, we see REL everywhere. So re has continued to expand as well. And then Ansible automation platform has also been a great means of kind of bringing together community for that last mile of automating your entire infrastructure. >>Well, the Lin, the functionality of Linux continues to improve OpenShift is everywhere. I mean, I remember at the red hat summit, I mean, well, we, we, we coined this term super cloud, which is this layer that floats, you know, on-prem took across clouds out to the edge we had Verizon on. They were talking about, you know, 5g developers and how they're developing using, you know, a combination of, of, of OpenShift. So guys have been really crushing it with, with OpenShift. I remember, gosh, I mean, we've been covering, you know, red hat summits for a long time now. And just to see that evolution is actually quite amazing. >>Yeah. It's actually really neat to see our CEOs align too. Right. So the messaging that we've had around hybrid cloud from red hat, like you said, we were kind of the pioneers, honestly, this we've been talking about hybrid cloud from the very beginning. We always knew that it wasn't gonna be public cloud or private cloud. We had to have, you know, hybrid. And, and it's interesting to see that Antonio, you know, took that on and wanted to say, we're gonna do everything as a service right. A few years ago. And, and the whole theme was around hybrid cloud and giving customers that choice. Right? So it's exciting for us to see all of that come together. And I actually worked for HP for like 17 and a half years. So it's really fun for me to be on this side now with red hat and see the messaging come together, the vision come together and just really being able to align and move forward on >>This tremendous amount of transformation in the last few years >>Alone. Oh my gosh, we >>Talk about, you know, customers need choice. They want choice, but you also talked about, we have to meet customers where they are. That seems the last few years to have accelerated, there is no more option for companies. You've gotta meet the customers where they are. >>Exactly. Yeah. And it's all about choice, like you said, and it, everybody's got, you know, their own way to do everything as far as consumption goes and we have to be available and spot on with it, you know, and be able to move quickly with these trends that we're seeing. And so it's great to be aligned. And >>From a partnership standpoint, I mean, you, you mentioned H HP 17 years. I mean, it was, it was a hard to follow company. You had, you had PCs over here, you had services, the kind of the old EDS business. Now there's such a focus absolutely. On this mission, absolutely. Of as a service. And, you know, obviously a key part of that is having optionality and bringing open source tooling into that. I mean, we heard about this in, in spades, at, at red hat summit, which is really interesting this year. It was a smaller VIP event in Boston. And I, and I loved it, you know, cuz it was really manageable. We had all the execs on and customers and partners. It was awesome. What's new since red hat summit. >>Well, I mean, I would say that obviously GreenLake and what we've announced this week is a big new thing for us, but really like we're just continuing on our pattern. We are. Now, if you look at the Q1 report from IBM, you'll see that the growth of the customer base for OpenShift that they reported just continues to go up into the right. You'll see that now, like AMIA is saying that we're like 47.8% of the containers market for the enterprise. You'll see that like we're now in 65% of the fortune 500 with OpenShift, 90% with red hat in general. So we've established our footprint. And when you establish your footprint and customers start taking you out to the edge, we're going into these 5g use cases, we're, we've got an incredible amount happening in the AI space, all these emerging areas of where people are building their cloud, like we're now going to that next level of saying, how do they want to consume it? >>So what's really important to me about that is, is so Omni data around 50% of the market is, is open shift. A people may not realize a lot of people use, you know, do Kubernetes for free, you know, Hey, we're doing Kubernetes, but they don't have that application development framework and all the recovery and all the, the tooling around it. And the reason why I think that's so important, Laurie is ecosystems wanna monetize. So people are paying for things that becomes more interesting and it actually starts to attract people just naturally. >>Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of ecosystem, I mean, that's the beauty of what we're doing with GreenLake too. We're taking on a building block approach. So we're really, it's kind of ISV as a service if you will. And you know, personally, I, this was my baby for the past couple years, trying to make sure that we took into consideration every partner use case, every customer use case. So we created an agreement that would make sense to be able to scale, but also to meet all the demands of our customers. And so the, the what's really exciting about this is now we have a chance to take this building block approach, scale it out to all types of partner types, right throughout the entire ecosystem and build offerings together. That is really exciting for us. And that's where we see the real potential here with GreenLake and with red hat, >>What's actually available inside a GreenLake. >>So we are starting with OpenShift. So OpenShift will be available in Q3 that will follow in Q4 with re and then after that Ansible. So we're, we're moving very quickly to bring our platforms into it and it's really our strategic platforms, but it's all based on customer demand. We know we're seeing amazing transformation of customers moving to Kubernetes. You said, you know, OpenShift is Kubernetes with useful additions to it and an ecosystem around it, right? So that transformation is also happening at the bare metal layer. So we're seeing people move into Kubernetes bare metal, which is an amazing growth market for us. >>Explain those useful additions if you would. So why shouldn't I just go out and, and get the free version of Kubernete? Why should I engage red hat and, and OpenShift? What do I get? >>So you get all the day, two management stuff, you get, we have a whole set of additional stuff you can purchase around it, OpenShift platform. Plus you can get our ACM, our advanced cluster management. So you wanna manage multiple clusters, right? You get the ACS, the security side of it. You can also get ODF. So you get storage built into it as well. And we've done all these integrations. You can manage the whole thing as a cluster or as multiple clusters with the whole enterprise support and the long term support that we provide for these things up to 10 years. So >>When you look at the early days lease of, of Kubernetes, it was really, the focus was on simplicity. You had other platforms that were actually doing more sophisticated cluster management. And the, the committers that in Kubernetes said, you know, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna keep it simple. And so that leave some holes and gaps and you know, they're starting to fill those, but what if, if correct me if I'm wrong, but what red hat has done is said, okay, we're gonna accelerate, you know, the, the, the closing of those gaps and stay ahead and actually offer incremental value. And that's why you're winning in the marketplace. >>Well, we're an open company, so we're still doing everything upstream and open source as we do, of course, sticking with, you know, the APIs and APIs to make this all work, both, you know, in terms of what the community's trying to drive, what we're trying to drive for our customers on their behalf. And then just where things are going from a technology basis, make it a lot of investment, >>But you have to, you have to make a red hat, has to make a choice as to where it puts its commitments. You can't spread yourself too thin, so you gotta pick your spots. And you've, you've proven that you're pretty adept at doing that. >>That just comes back to customer centricity, right. And just knowing where our customers need to take the platform. That's, >>That's easy to say, but it's, it's an art form. And a little bit of science. >>Remember these customers have experts that are deep in this space. So it's like, you know, those experts trust us with where they needed to go. And they trust us to help shepherd that and deliver that as a platform to them. So it's not like anybody tell us what you want, right? Like it's really about like, knowing what's the best way to do it. And working with the people that can help you understand how to apply that to their use case >>And within the customer environment, who are you working with? Who is that key constituent or constituents that are guiding red hat in this direction? >>Well, it's certainly infrastructure folks. So it's your, it's your standard folks that are looking at the, how do we lay down our infrastructure? How do we manage it? How do we grow it? It goes out to the application developers. They're trying to deliver this in a cloud native way. And we have new personas, you know, coming in with the AI practitioners, right? So we've announced at before summit at Invidia's event, their new offering called Invidia AI enterprise. And so that's them bringing in enterprise support for GPU, for Kuda and for a software stack above that to start offering some more support there. So they're certifying OpenShift, we're both certifying the servers that run underneath it, and then they're offering support for their stuff on top of it. And that's a whole new use case for us. >>And, you know, I should also mention that even though this paper use with the GreenLake is new for us, and we just had this big announcement, we have done GreenLake deals though. We've done numerous GreenLake deals with our annual subs, right? So I, so even though this is new to us, as far as, you know, monthly utilization and being able to do this cloud consumption this isn't new to us as two companies coming together, we've been doing GreenLake deals for the past couple years. It's just, now we have this cloud consumption availability, which is really gonna make this thing launch. So, >>So what have been some of the customer benefits so far, you've been doing it for a couple years. The announcement was yesterday, but there's obviously feed on the street going on. What are some of the, the big outcomes that you're seeing customers actually bring to reality? >>I think speed and agility, right? That's the biggest thing with, with our products, being able to have it everything predictable and being able to have it consumed one way, instead of having this fragmented customer experience, which is, you know, what we've seen in the past. So I think that's the biggest thing is speed agility and just, you know, a really good customer experience at this point. >>Go get it, please. >>I would say the customer experience is critical. Yes. That's one of the things that we know that in terms of, of patients wearing thin the last couple of years, people expect to have a really strong consumer experience regardless of what you're doing, regardless of what industry and so attention and mind on that is a differentiator in my opinion. >>Absolutely. Yeah. And we've gotta constantly keep our eye on that. I mean, that's, that's our north star, if you will. Right. So, and Lori, >>I know you've saying you're, you've done GreenLake deals in the past, but what feels different to me now in that it's actually coalescing some of the things that Alma Russo announced this morning, the platform on which, you know, ISV is a service. I think you, you called it. Yeah. You, it, it now seems like, you know, look a couple years ago, HP said, okay, this is the direction that we're going. Yeah. They weren't there at that time. And they're still not there. There's a lot of work to be, to be done. But now it's starting to form. You're seeing, you know, the pieces come together, the puzzle pieces that sort of substrate being laid out. And now you're hoping that we see the steep part of the S-curve and that's what customers I think are expecting. >>Right. And it's bringing that operating model to move to a monthly model so they can do pay as you go. Right. And that pairs up nicely with like the cloud native capabilities we're bringing to OpenShift and hybrid cloud in general. So it's, it just shows like we're already getting demand from customers. It's saying like, this is part of our model. Like we know a certain amount of infrastructure we wanna own, and we just wanna own it outright, but there's a lot that they want to have flexibility on. And so being able to add that portion to it is just, you know, gonna help us both. >>And you think about the critical aspects of, of the cloud operating model. It's obviously pay as you go it's, you know, massive scale it's ecosystem enablement, and also automation. I mean, that is, that is a key, what's your point of view on that? You guys with Ansible, you, you, you know, you go back to a couple years ago and it was, you know, there was this, there were a lot of other tooling, but now, I mean, Ansible is really taken off. Yeah. >>It's just, you know, Cinderella story, right? Like it really an amazing community driven thing where we just knew, we all know this, right. You have, when you get to the very last mile of doing infrastructure management, there's a variety of devices, there's variety, a variety of vendors. And then you have like the variety of skills of the people that have to figure out how to do automate all of this. And what Ansible did is it provided a common language across all of that. And so what we do with automation, our, an ible automation platform is we make it. So now teams can manage all of this together and they can share their playbooks and they can host that privately for all their enterprise stuff that they need to do. So it's just, you know, it fits our DNA so well to have something so community driven now with a really nice enterprise message wrapped around it. And it's playing out very well for where, you know, hybrid cloud. Right. Cause there's some more additional variety. You need to be able to manage, you know, across all of your different footprints, because really it's like, it's not just about flexibility and scale up scale down it's where do you need it to run at what time? Right. And that, that last leg Ansible plays a key role in that. >>And we actually, Ansible will be coming further down the, you know, the patch. I know we're gonna talk a little bit about what's available today versus what's available down the road, but yeah, we have that on the radar. So right outta the gate, we're working on OpenShift, obviously bare metal. And we see that happening in Q3 and then behind that as well in Q4 and then Ansible is gonna be right behind that. So that's kind of the order that, and there's other pieces, right? So our whole portfolio is basically available to HP right now. It's just making sure that we can operationalize everything and have the best experience >>All inside of GreenLake, >>All inside a GreenLake. Yeah. Pretty neat. Lori >>Question for you. You've been, you were with HP for a very long time. This is obviously the first discover in three years in person. Exactly. You know, three years ago, Antonio near stood on stage and said, we are going to buy 20, 22. And here we are deliver everything as a service, as a partner and as a former HP, what are you seeing at this discover 22? >>It's it's so interesting. I it's such a sea change if you will. Right. And having come from HPE, I actually led the software as a service organization for a while on the software side of things. And we thought that was like state of the art and cutting edge that was 10, 11, 12 years ago. Right. So to actually see this come to life, because we were all thinking really, everything is a service. How are you gonna do that? Like your entire portfolio is gonna be available. Like that is lofty. Right. And having worked at HP, I thought, wow, I don't, you know, I know things take time. And, but actually just even being around the showcase here and watching everything come to life is amazing. Cause I, I, you know, I, I was very positive about it, but at the same time, it's like that, that was a big goal three years. Right. And it's, I'm seeing it happen >>A big goal in two of those years during a pandemic. Right. So right. Talk about lofty. Oh my gosh. Quite a bit of accomplishments guys. Thank you so much for joining David me on the program talking about actually guys, this is great. What red hat and HPE are doing your power partnership, power ship. Is that a word? It is now your power. >>I like >>That with GreenLake. We appreciate that. We'll look forward to having you guys back on. >>Thank you so much, guys. >>All right. For our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave ante. We are at HPE discover 22 live from the show floor in Las Vegas. This is just day one of our cupboards stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re Mars, Remar stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. Part of thehow is reinforces security. And the big show reinvent at the end of the year is the marquee event. Of course, the queues at all three and more coverage here. We've got a great guest here. Ryan re practice lead data analytics, machine learning at mission cloud. Ryan. Thanks for joining me. Absolutely >>Glad. >>So we were talking before he came on camera about mission cloud. It's not a mission as in a space mission. That's just the name of the company to help people with their mission to move to the cloud. And we're a space show to make that it's almost like plausible. I can see a mission cloud coming someday. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>You got >>The name. We got it. We're ready. >>You guys help customers get to the cloud. So you're working with all the technologies on AWS stack and people who are either lifting and shifting or cloud native born in the cloud, right? Absolutely. >>Yeah. I mean, we often see some companies talk about lift and shift, but you know, we try to get them past that because often a lift and shift means like, say you're on Oracle, you're bringing your Oracle licensing, but a lot of companies want to, you know, innovate and migrate more than they want to lift and shift. So that's really what we're seeing in market. >>You see more migration. Yeah. Less lift and shift. >>Yeah, exactly. Because they, they're trying to get out of an Oracle license. Right. They're seeing if that's super expensive and you know, you can get a much cheaper product on AWS. >>Yeah. What's the cutting up areas right now that you're seeing with cloud Amazon. Cause you know, Amazon, you know, is at their, their birthday, you know, dynamo you to sell with their 10th birthday. Where are they in your mind relative to the enterprise in terms of the services and where this goes next in terms of the on-prem you got the hybrid model. Everyone sees that, but like you got outpost. Mm. Not doing so as good as say EKS or other cool serverless stuff. >>Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. One of the things that's you see from AWS is really innovation, right? They're out there, they have over 400 microservices. So they're looking at all the different areas you have on the cloud and that people are trying to use. And they're creating these microservices that you string together, you architect them all up so that you can create what you're looking for. One of the big things we're seeing, right, is with SageMaker. A lot of people are coming in, looking for ML projects, trying to use all the hype that you see around that doing prediction, NLP and computer vision are super hot right now we've helped a lot of companies, you know, start to build out these NLP models where they're doing, you know, all kinds of stuff you use. 'em in gene research, you know, they're trying to do improvements in drugs and therapeutics. It's really awesome. And then we do some eCommerce stuff where people are just looking at, you know, how do I figure out what are similar things on similar websites, right. For, for search companies. So >>Awesome. Take me through the profile of your customer. You have the mix of business. Can you break down the, the target of the small, medium size enterprise, large all the above. >>Yeah. So mission started working with a lot of startups and SMBs and then as we've grown and become, you know, a much larger company that has all the different focus areas, we started to get into enterprise as well and help a lot of pretty well known enterprises out there that are, you know, not able to find the staff that they need and really want to get into >>The cloud. I wanted to dig into the staffing issues and also to the digital transformation journey. Okay. It okay. We all kind of know what's turning into the more dashboards, more automation, DevOps, cloud, native applications. All good. Yeah. And I can see that journey path. Now the reality is how do you get people who are gonna be capable of doing the ML, doing the DevOps dev sec ops. But what about cyber security? I mean is a ton of range of issues that you gotta be competent on to kind of survive in this multi-disciplined world, just to the old days of I'm the top of rack switch guy is over. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's a really good question. It's really hard. And that's why, you know, AWS has built out that partner ecosystem because they know companies can't hire enough people to do that. You know, if you look at just a migration into a data lake, you know, on-prem often you had one guy doing it, but if you want to go to the cloud, it's like you said, right, you need a security guy. You need to have a data architect. You need to have a cloud architect. You need to have a data engineer. So, you know, in the old days maybe you needed one guy. Now you have to have five. And so that's really why partners are valuable to customers is we're able to come in, bring those resources, get everything done quickly, and then, you know, turn >>It over. Yeah. We were talking again before we came on camera here live, you, you guys have a service led business, but the rise of MSPs managed service providers is huge. We're seeing it everywhere mainly because the cloud actually enables that you're seeing it for things like Kubernetes, serverless, certain microservices have certain domain expertise and people are making a living, providing great managed services. You guys have managed services. What's that phenomenon. Do you agree with it? And how do you, why did that come about and what, how does it keep going? Is it a trend or is it a one trick pony? >>I think it's a trend. I mean, what you have, it's the same skills gap, right? Is companies no longer want that single point of failure? You know, we have a pool model with our managed services where your team's working with a group of people. And so, you know, we have that knowledge and it's spread out. And so if you're coming in and you need help with Kubernetes, we got a Kubernetes guy in that pool to help you, right. If you need, you know, data, we got a data guy. And so it just makes it a lot easier where, Hey, I can pay the same as one guy and get a whole team of like 12 people that can be interchangeable onto my project. So, you know, I think you're gonna see managed services continue to rise and companies, you know, just working in that space. >>Do you see a new skill set coming? That's kind of got visibility right now, but not full visibility. That's going to be needed. I asked this because the environment's changing for the better obviously, but you're seeing companies that are highly valued, like data bricks, snowflake, they're getting killed on valuation. So they gotta have a hard time retaining talent. In my opinion, my opinion probably be true, but you know, you can't, you know, if you're data breach, you can't raise that 45 billion valuation try to hire senior people. They're gonna be underwater from day one. So there's gonna be a real slow down in these unicorns, these mega unicorns, deck, unicorns, whatever they're called because they gotta refactor the company, stock equity package. They attract people. So they gotta put them on a flat foot. And the next question is, do they actually have the juice, the goods to go to the new market? That's another question. So what I mean, what's your take on you're in the trenches. You're in the front lines. >>Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, and it's hard for me to think about whether they have the juice. I think snowflake and data bricks have been great for the market. They've come in. They've innovated, you know, snowflake was cloud native first. So they were built for the cloud. And what that's done is push all the hyperscalers to improve their products, right. AWS has gone through and you know, drastically over the last three years, improved Redshift. Like, I mean it's night and day from three years ago. Did, >>And you think snowflake put that pressure on them? >>Snowflake. Absolutely. Put that pressure on them. You know, I don't know whether they would've gotten to that same level if snowflake wasn't out there stealing market share. But now when you look at it, Redshift is much cheaper than snowflake. So how long are people gonna pay that tax to have snowflake versus switching over snowflakes? >>Got a nice data. Clean room, had some nice lock in features. Only on snowflake. The question is, will that last clean room? I see you smiling. Go ahead. >>Clean. Room's a concept that was actually made by Google. I know Snowflake's trying to capture it as their own, but, but Google's the one that actually launched the clean room concept because of marketing and, and all of that. >>Google also launches semantic layer, which Snowflake's trying to copy that. Does that, what does that mean to you when you hear the word semantic layer? What does that mean? >>And semantic layer just is really all about meta tags, right? How am I going through to figure out what data do I actually have in my data lake so that I can pull it for whatever I'm trying to do, whether it's dashboarding or whether it's machine learning. You're just trying to organize your data better. >>Ryan, you should be a cue post. You're like a masterclass here in, in it and cloud native. I gotta ask you since you're here, since we're having the masterclass being put in a clinic here, lot of clients are confused between how to handle the control plane and the data plane cause machine learning right now is at an all time high. You're seeing deep racer. You're seeing robotic space, all driving by machine learning. SW. He said it today, the, the companion coder, right? The, the code whisperer, that's only gonna get stronger. So machine learning needs data. It feeds on data. So everyone right now is trying to put data in silos. Okay? Cause they think, oh, compliance, you gotta create a data plane and a control plane that makes it highly available. So that can be shared >>Right >>Now. A lot of people are trying to own the data plane and some are trying to own the control plane or both. Right? What's your view on that? Because I see customers say, look, I want to own my own data cause I can control it. Control plane. I can maybe do other things. And some are saying, I don't know what to do. And they're getting forced to take both to control plane and a data plane from a vendor, right? What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>So it's pretty interesting. I actually was presenting at a tech target conference this week on exactly this concept, right, where we're seeing more and more words out there, right? It was data warehouse and it was data lake and it's lake house. And it's a data mesh and it's a data fabric. And some of the concepts you're talking about really come into that data, match data fabric space. And you know, what you're seeing is data's gonna become a product right, where you're gonna be buying a product and the silos yes. Silos exist. But what, what companies have to start doing is, and this is the whole data mesh concept is, Hey yes, you finance department. You can own your silo, but now you have to have an output product. That's a data product that every other part of your company can subscribe to that data product and use it in their algorithms or their dashboard so that they can get that 360 degree view of the customer. So it's really, you know, key that, you know, you work within your business. Some business are gonna have that silo where the data mesh works. Great. Others are gonna go. >>And what do you think about that? Because I mean, my thesis would be, Hey, more data, better machine learning. Right. Is that the concept? >>So, or that's a misconception or, >>Okay. So what's the, what's the rationale to share the data like that and data mission. >>So having more of the right data here, it is improves. Just having more data in general, doesn't improve, right? And often the problem is in the silos you're getting to is you don't have all the data you want. Right. I was doing a big project about shipping and there's PII data. When you talk about shipping, right? Person's addresses, that's owned by one department and you can't get there. Right. But how am I supposed to estimate the cost of shipping if I can't get, you know, data from where a person lives. Right. It's just >>Not. So none of the wrinkle in the equation is latency. Okay. The right data at the right time is another factor is that factored into data mesh versus these other approaches. Because I mean, you can, people are streaming data. I get that. We're seeing a lot of that. But talking about getting data fast enough before the decisions are made, is that an issue or is this just BS? >>I'm going with BS. Okay. So people talk about real time real. Time's great if you need it, but it's really expensive to do. Most people don't need real time. Right. They're really looking for, I need an hourly dashboard or I need a daily dashboard. And so pushing into real time, just gonna be an added expense that you don't >>Really need. Like cyber maybe is that not maybe need real time. >>Well, cyber security add. I mean, there's definitely certain applications that you need real time, >>But don't over invest in fantasy if you don't need an an hour's fine. Right, >>Right. Yeah. If you're, if you're a business and you're looking at your financials, do you need your financials every second? Is that gonna do anything for you? Got >>It. Yeah. Yeah. And so this comes back down to data architecture. So the next question I asked, cause I had a great country with the Fiddler AI CEO, CEO earlier, and he was at Facebook and then Pinterest, he was a data, you know, an architect and built everything. He said themselves. We were talking about all the stuff that's available now are all the platforms and tools available to essentially build the next Facebook if someone wanted to from scratch. I mean, hypothetically thought exercise. So the ability to actually ramp up and code a complete throwaway and rebuild from the ground up is possible. >>Absolutely. >>And so the question is, okay, how do you do it? How long would it take? I mean, in an ideal scenario, not, you know, make some assumptions here, you got the budget, you got the people, how long to completely roll out a brand new platform. >>Now it's funny, you asked that because about a year ago I was asked that exact same question by a customer that was in the religious space that basically wanted to build a combination of Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon altogether for the religious space, for religious goods and you know, church sermons, we estimated for him about a year and about $9 million to do it. >>I mean, that's a, that's a, a round these days. Yeah. Series a. So it's possible. Absolutely. So enterprises, what's holding them back, just dogma process, old school legacy, or are people taking the bold move to take more aggressive, swiping out old stuff and just completely rebuilding? Or is it a talent issue? What's the, what's the enterprise current mode of reset, >>You know, I think it really depends on the enterprise and their aversion to risk. Right. You know, some enterprises and companies are really out there wanting to innovate, you know, I mean there's companies, you know, an air conditioning company that we worked with, that's totally, you know, nest was eaten all their business. So they came in and created a whole T division, you know, to, to chase that business, that nest stole from them. So I think it, I think often a company's not necessarily gonna innovate until somebody comes in and starts stealing their >>Lunch. You know, Ryan, Andy, Jess, we talked about this two reinvents ago. And then Adam Eski said the same thing this year on a different vector, but kind of building on what Andy Jessey said. And it's like, you could actually take new territory down faster. You don't have to kill the old, no I'm paraphrasing. You don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, you can actually move on new ideas with a clean sheet of paper if you have that builder mindset. And I think that to me is where I'm seeing. And I'd love to get your reaction because if you see an opportunity to take advantage and take territory and you have the right budget time and people, you can get it. Oh absolutely. It's gettable. So a lot of people have this fear of, oh, we're, that's not our core competency. And, and they they're the frog and boiling water. >>You know, my answer to that is I think part of it's VCs, right? Yeah. VCs have come in and they see the value of a company often by how many people you hire, right. Hire more people. And the value is gonna go up. But often as a startup, you can't hire good people. So I'm like, well, why are you gonna go hire a bunch of random people? You should go to a firm like ours that knows AWS and can build it quickly for you, cuz then you're gonna get to the market faster versus just trying to hire a bunch of people in >>Someone. Right. I really appreciate you coming on. I'd love to have you back on the cube again, sometime your expertise and your insights are awesome. Give a commercial for the company, what you guys are doing, who you're looking for, what you want to do, hiring or whatever your goals are. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing and give a quick plug. >>Awesome. Yeah. So mission cloud, you know, we're a premier AWS consulting firm. You know, if you're looking to go to AWS or you're in AWS and you need help and support, we have a full team, we do everything. Resell, MSP professional services. We can get you into the cloud optimize. You make everything run as fast as possible. I also have a full machine learning team. Since we're here at re Mars, we can build you models. We can get 'em into production, can make sure everything's smooth. The company's hiring. We're looking to double in size this year. So, you know, look me up on LinkedIn, wherever happy to, to take, >>You mentioned the cube, you get a 20% discount. He's like, no, I don't approve that. Thanks for coming on the key. Really appreciate it. Again. Machine learning swaping said on stage this, you can be a full time job just tracking just the open source projects. Never mind all the different tools and like platform. So I think you're gonna have a good, good tailwind for your business. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Ryan Reese here on the queue. I'm John furry more live coverage here at re Mars 2022. After this short break, stay with us.

>>Okay, welcome back. Everyone's Cube's coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars machine learning, automation, robotics, and space out. John fir host of the queue. Got a great set of guests here talking about AI, Jason Montgomery CTO and co-founder man and Ryans CEO, founder guys. Thanks for coming on. We're just chatting, lost my train of thought. Cuz we were chatting about something else, your history with DataRobot and, and your backgrounds entrepreneurs. Welcome to the queue. Thanks >>Tur. Thanks for having >>Us. So first, before we get into the conversation, tell me about the company. You guys have a history together, multiple startups, multiple exits. What are you guys working on? Obviously AI is hot here as part of the show. M is Mars machine learning, which we all know is the basis for AI. What's the story. >>Yeah, really. We're we're here for two of the letters and Mars. We're here for the machine learning and the automation part. So at the high level, man is a no code AI application development platform. And basically anybody could log in and start making AI applications. It could be anything from just texting it with the Twilio integration to tell you that you're doing great or that you need to exercise more to integrating with zenes to get support tickets classified. >>So Jason, we were talking too about before he came on camera about the cloud and how you can spin up resources. The data world is coming together and I, and I like to see two flash points. The, I call it the 2010 big data era that began and then failed Hadoop crashed and burned. Yeah. Then out of the, out of the woodwork came data robots and the data stacks and the snowflakes >>Data break snowflake. >>And now you have that world coming back at scale. So we're now seeing a huge era of, I need to stand up infrastructure and platform to do all this heavy lifting. I don't have time to do. Right. That sounds like what you guys are doing. Is that kind of the case? >>That's absolutely correct. Yeah. Typically you would have to hire a whole team. It would take you months to sort of get the infrastructure automation in place, the dev ops DevOps pipelines together. And to do the automation to spin up, spin down, scale up scale down requires a lot of special expertise with, you know, Kubernetes. Yeah. And a lot of the other data pipelines and a lot of the AWS technologies. So we automate a lot of that. So >>If, if DevOps did what they did, infrastructure has code. Yeah. Data has code. This is kind of like that. It's not data ops per se. Is there a category? How do you see this? Cuz it's you could say data ops, but that's also it's DevOps dev. It's a lot going on. Oh yeah. It's not just seeing AI ops, right? There's a lot more, what, what would you call this? >>It's a good question. I don't know if we've quite come up with the name. I know >>It's not data ops. It's not >>Like we call it AI process automation >>SSPA instead of RPA, >>What RPA promised to be. Yes, >>Exactly. But what's the challenge. The number one problem is it's I would say not, not so much all on ever on undifferent heavy lifting. It's a lot of heavy lifting that for sure. Yes. What's involved. What's the consequences of not going this way. If I want to do it myself, can you take me through the, the pros and cons of what the scale scope, the scale of without you guys? >>Yeah. Historically you needed to curate all your data, bring it together and have some sort of data lake or something like that. And then you had to do really a lot of feature engineering and a lot of other sort of data science on the back end and automate the whole thing and deploy it and get it out there. It's a, it's a pretty rigorous and, and challenging problem that, you know, we there's a lot of automation platforms for, but they typically focus on data scientists with these large language models we're using they're pre-trained. So you've sort of taken out that whole first step of all that data collection to start out and you can basically start prototyping almost instantly because they've already got like 6 billion parameters, 10 billion parameters in them. They understand the human language really well. And a lot of other problems. I dunno if you have anything you wanna add to that, Ryan, but >>Yeah, I think the other part is we deal with a lot of organizations that don't have big it teams. Yeah. And it would be impossible quite frankly, for them to ever do something like deploy text, track as an example. Yeah. They're just not gonna do it, but now they can come to us. They know the problem they want solved. They know that they have all these invoices as an example and they wanna run it through a text track. And now with us they can just drag and drop and say, yeah, we want tech extract. Then we wanted to go through this. This is what we >>Want. Expertise is a huge problem. And the fact that it's changing too, right? Yeah. Put that out there. You guys say, you know, cybersecurity challenges. We guys do have a background on that. So you know, all the cutting edge. So this just seems to be this it, I hate to say transformation. Cause I not the word I'm looking for, I'd say stuck in the mud kind of scenario where they can't, they have to get bigger, faster. Yeah. And the scale is bigger and they don't have the people to do it. So you're seeing the rise of managed service. You mentioned Kubernetes, right? I know this young 21 year old kid, he's got a great business. He runs a managed service. Yep. Just for Kubernetes. Why? Because no, one's there to stand up the clusters. >>Yeah. >>It's a big gap. >>So this, you have these sets of services coming in now, where, where do you guys fit into that conversation? If I'm the customer? My problem is what, what is my, what is my problem that I need you guys for? What does it look like to describe my problem? >>Typically you actually, you, you kind of know that your employees are spending a lot of time, a lot of hours. So I'll just give you a real example. We have a customer that they were spending 60 hours a week just reviewing these accounts, payable, invoices, 60 hours a week on that. And they knew there had to be a better way. So manual review manual, like when we got their data, they were showing us these invoices and they had to have their people circle the total on the invoice, highlight the customer name, the >>Person who quit the next day. Right? >>No like they, they, Hey, you know, they had four people doing this, I think. And the point is, is they come to us and we say, well, you know, AI can, can just basically using something like text track can just do this. And then we can enrich those outputs from text track with the AI. So that's where the transformers come in. And when we showed them that and got them up and running in about 30 minutes, they were mind blown. Yeah. And now this is a company that doesn't have a big it department. So the >>Kind, and they had the ability to quantify the problem >>They knew. And, and in this case it was actually a business user. It was not a technical >>In is our she consequence technical it's hours. She consequences that's wasted. Manual, labor wasted. >>Exactly. Yeah. And, and to their point, it was look, we have way more high, valuable tasks that our people could be doing yeah. Than doing this AP thing. It takes 60 hours. And I think that's really important to remember about AI. What're I don't think it's gonna automate away people's jobs. Yeah. What it's going to do is it's going to free us up to focus on what really matters and focus on the high value stuff. And that's what people should >>Be doing. I know it's a cliche. I'm gonna say it again. Cause I keep saying, cause I keep saying for people to listen, the bank teller argument always was the big thing. Oh yeah. They're gonna get killed by the ATM machine. No, they're opening up more branches. That's right. That's right. So it's like, come on. People let's get, get over that. So I, I definitely agree with that. Then the question, next question is what's your secret sauce? I'm the customer I'm gonna like that value proposition. You make something go away. It's a pain relief. Then there's the growth side. Okay. You can solve from problems. Now I want this, the, the vitamin you got aspirin. And I want the vitamin. What's the growth angle for you guys with your customers. What's the big learnings. Once they get the beach head with problem solving. >>I think it, it, it it's the big one is let's say that we start with the account payable thing because it's so our platform's so approachable. They go in and then they start tinkering with the initial, we'll call it a template. So they might say, Hey, you know what, actually, in this edge case, I'm gonna play with this. And not only do I want it to go to our accounting system, but if it's this edge case, I want it to email me. So they'll just drag and drop an email block into our canvas. And now they're making it >>Their own. There is the no code, low code's situation. They're essentially building a notification engine under the covers. They have no idea what they're doing. That's >>Right. They get the, they just know that, Hey, you know what? When, when like the amount's over $10,000, I want an email. They know that's what they want. They don't, they don't know that's the notification engine. Of >>Course that's value email. Exactly. I get what I wanted. All right. So tell me about the secret sauce. What's under the covers. What's the big, big, big scale, valuable, valuable, secret sauce. >>I would say part of it. And, and honestly, the reason that we're able to do this now is transformer architecture. When the transformer papers came out and then of course the attention is all you need paper, those kind of unlocked it and made this all possible. Beyond that. I think the other secret sauce we've been doing this a long time. >>So we kind of, we know we're in the paid points. We went to those band points. Cause we weren't data scientists or ML people. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. You, you walked the snow and no shoes on in the winter. That's right. These kids now got boots on. They're all happy. You've installed machines. You've loaded OSS on, on top of rack switches. Yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable how awesome it's right now to be a developer and now a business user's doing the low code. Yep. If you have the system architecture set up, so back to the data engineering side, you guys had the experience got you here. This is a big discussion right now. We're having in, in, on the cube and many conversations like the server market, you had that go away through Amazon and Google was one of the first, obviously the board, but the idea that servers could be everywhere. So the SRE role came out the site reliability engineer, right. Which was one guy or gal and zillions of servers. Now you're seeing the same kind of role with data engineering. And then there's not a lot of people that fit the requirement of being a data engineer. It's like, yeah, it's very unique. Cause you're dealing with a system architecture, not data science. So start to see the role of this, this, this new persona, because they're taking on all the manual challenges of doing that. You guys are kind of replaced that I think. Well, do you agree with it about the data engineer? First of all? >>I think, yeah. Well and it's different cuz there's the older data engineer and then there's sort of the newer cloud aware one who knows how to use all the cloud technologies. And so when you're trying, we've tried to hire some of those and it's like, okay, you're really familiar with old database technology, but can you orchestrate that in a serverless environment with a lot of AWS technology for instance. And it's, and that's hard though. They don't, they don't, there's not a lot of people who know that space, >>So there's no real curriculum out there. That's gonna teach you how to handle, you know, ETL. And also like I got I'm on stream data from this source. Right. I'm using sequel I'm I got put all together. >>Yeah. So it's yeah, it's a lot of just not >>Data science. It's >>Figure that out. So its a large language models too. We don't have to worry about some of the data there too. It's it's already, you know, codified in the model. And then as we collect data, as people use our platform, they can then curate data. They want to annotate or enrich the model with so that it works better as it goes. So we're kind of curating, collecting the data as it's used. So as it evolves, it just gets better. >>Well, you guys obviously have a lot of experience together and congratulations on the venture. Thank you. What's going on here at re Mars. Why are you here? What's the pitch. What's the story. Where's your, you got two letters. You got the, you got the M for the machine learning and AI and you got the, a for automation. What's the ecosystem here for you? What are you doing? >>Well, I mean, I think you, you kind of said it right. We're here because the machine learning and the automation part, >>But >>More, more widely than that. I mean we work very, very closely with Amazon on a number of front things like text track, transcribe Alexa, basically all these AWS services are just integrations within our system. So you might want to hook up your AI to an Alexa so that you could say, Hey Alexa, tell me updates about my LinkedIn feed. I don't know, whatever, whatever your hearts content >>Is. Well what about this cube transcription? >>Yeah, exactly. A hundred percent. >>Yeah. We could do that. You know, feed all this in there and then we could do summarization of everything >>Here, >>Q and a extraction >>And say, Hey, these guys are >>Technicals. Yeah, >>There you go. No, they mentioned Kubernetes. We didn't say serverless chef puppet. Those are words straight, you know, and no linguistics matters right into that's a service that no one's ever gonna build. >>Well, and actually on that point, really interesting. We work with some healthcare companies and when you're basically, when people call in and they call into the insurance, they have a question about their, what like is this gonna be covered? And what they want to key in on are things like I just went to my doctor and got a cancer diagnosis. So the, the, the relevant thing here is they just got this diagnosis. And why is that important? Well, because if you just got a diagnosis, they want to start a certain triage to make you successful with your treatments. Because obviously there's an >>Incentive to do time. That time series matters and, and data exactly. And machine learning reacts to it. But also it could be fed back old data. It used to be time series to store it. Yeah. But now you could reuse it to see how to make the machine learning better. Are you guys doing anything, anything around that, how to make that machine learning smarter, look doing look backs or maybe not the right word, but because you have data, I might as well look back at it's happened. >>So part of, part of our platform and part of what we do is as people use these applications, to your point, there's lots of data that's getting generated, but we capture all that. And that becomes now a labeled data set within our platform. And you can take that label data set and do something called fine tuning, which just makes the underlying model more and more yours. It's proprietary. The more you do it. And it's more accurate. Usually the more you do it. >>So yeah, we keep all that. I wanna ask your reaction on this is a good point. The competitive advantage in the intellectual property is gonna be the workflows. And so the data is the IP. If this refinement happens, that becomes intellectual property. Yeah. That's kind of not software. It's the data modeling. It's the data itself is worth something. Are you guys seeing that? >>Yeah. And actually how we position the company is man team is a control plane and you retain ownership of the data plane. So it is your intellectual property. Yeah. It's in your system, it's in your AWS environment. >>That's not what everyone else is doing. Everyone wants to be the control plane and the data plan. We >>Don't wanna own your data. We don't, it's a compliance and security nightmare. Yeah. >>Let's be, Real's the question. What do you optimize for? Great. And I think that's a fair, a fair bet. Given the fact that clients want to be more agile with their data anyway, and the more restrictions you put on them, why would that this only gets you in trouble? Yeah. I could see that being a and plus lock. In's gonna be a huge factor. Yeah. I think this is coming fast and no one's talking about it in the press, but everyone's like run to silos, be a silo and that's not how data works. No. So the question is how do you create siloing of data for say domain specific applications while maintaining a horizontally scalable data plan or control plan that seems to be kind of disconnected everyone to lock in their data. What do you guys think about that? This industry transition we're in now because it seems people are reverting back to fourth grade, right. And to, you know, back to silos. >>Yeah. I think, well, I think the companies probably want their silo of data, their IP. And so as they refine their models and, and we give them the ability to deploy it in their own stage maker and their own VPC, they, they retain and own it. They can actually get rid of us and they still have that model. Now they may have to build, you know, a lot of pipelines and other technology to support it. But well, >>Your lock in is usability. Exactly. And value. Yeah. Value proposition is the lock in bingo. That's not counterintuitive. Exactly. Yeah. You say, Hey, more value. How do I wanna get rid of it? Valuable. I'll pay for it. Right. As long as you have multiple value, step up. And that's what cloud does. I mean, think that's the thing about cloud. That's gonna make all this work. In my opinion, the value enablement is much higher. Yeah. So good business model. Anything else here at the show that you observed that you like, that you think people would be interested in? What's the most important story coming out of the, the holistic, if you zoom up and look at re Mars, what's, what's coming out of the vibe. >>You know, one thing that I think about a lot is we're, you know, we have Artis here, humanity hopefully soon gonna be going to Mars. And I think that's really, really exciting. And I also think when we go to Mars, we're probably not gonna send a bunch of software engineers up there. >>Right. So like robots will do break fix now. So, you know, we're good. It's gone. So services are gonna be easy. >>Yeah. But I, oh, >>I left that device back at earth. I just think that's not gonna be good. Just >>Replicated it in one. I think there's like an eight >>Minute, the first monopoly on next day delivery in space. >>They'll just have a spaceship that sends out drones to Barss. Yeah. But I think that when we start going back to the moon and we go to Mars, people are gonna think, Hey, I need this application now to solve this problem that I didn't anticipate having. And in science fiction, we kind of saw this with like how, right? Like you had this AI on this computer or this, on this spaceship that could do all this stuff. We need that. And I haven't seen that here yet. >>No, it's not >>Here yet. And >>It's right now I think getting the hardware right first. Yep. But we did a lot of reporting on this with the D O D and the tactile edge, you know, military applications. It's a fundamental, I won't say it's a tech, religious argument. Like, do you believe in agile realtime data or do you believe in democratizing multi-vendor, you know, capability? I think, I think the interesting needs to sort itself out because sometimes multi vendor multi-cloud might not work for an application that needs this database or this application at the edge. >>Right. >>You know, so if you're in space, the back haul, it matters. >>It really does. Yeah. >>Yeah. Not a good time to go back and get that highly available data. You mean highly, is it highly available or there's two terms highly available, which means real time and available. Yeah. Available means it's on a dis, right? >>Yeah. >>So that's a big challenge. Well guys, thanks for coming on. Plug for the company. What are you guys up to? How much funding do you have? How old are you staff hiring? What's some of the details. >>We're about 45 people right now. We are a globally distributed team. So we hire every like from every country, pretty much we are fully remote. So if you're looking for that, hit us up, definitely always look for engineers, looking for more data scientists. We're very, very well funded as well. And yeah. So >>You guys headquarters out, you guys headquartered. >>So a lot of us live in Columbus, Ohio that's technically HQ, but like I said, we we're in pretty much every continent except in Antarctica. So >>You're for all virtual. >>Yeah. A hundred percent virtual, a hundred percent. >>Got it. Well, congratulations and love to hear that Datadog story at another time >>Or DataBot >>Yeah. I mean data, DataBot sorry. Let's get, get all confused >>Data dog data company. >>Well, thanks for coming on and congratulations for your success and thanks for sharing. Yeah. >>Thanks for having us for having >>Pleasure to be here. It's a cube here at rebars. I'm John furier host. Thanks for watching more coming back after this short break.

>> the CUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the CUBE'S coverage day one, Dell Technologies World 2022 live from The Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. We've been here the last couple of hours. You can hear probably the buzz behind me. Lots of folks here, we're think around seven to eight thousand folks in this solution expo, the vibe is awesome. We've got two guests helping to round out our day one coverage. Ryan Fournier joins us, senior director of product management Edge Solutions at Dell Technologies. And MuneyB Minttazuddin vice president of Edge Computing at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Yeah. >> Isn't it great to be here in person? >> Oh man, yes. >> The vibe, the vibe of day one is awesome. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah. >> I think it's fantastic. >> Like people give energy off to each other, right? >> Absolutely. So lots of some good news coming out today so far on day one. Let's talk about, Ryan let's start with you. With Edge, it's not new. We've been talking about it for a while, but what are some of the things that are new? What are some of the key trends that you are seeing that are driving changes at the Edge? >> Great, good question. We've been talking to a lot of customers. Okay, a lot of the customers you know, the different verticals really find that is a common theme happening around a massive digital transformation and really based on the pandemic, okay. Which caused some acceleration in some, but also not, but many are kind of laggers left behind. And one primary reason is the culture of the OT, IT, you know, lack of barriers or something like that. The OT is obviously the business outcomes, okay. Focused where the IT is more enabling the function and it'll take retail. For example, that's accelerated a significant usage of an in-store frictionless experience, okay. As well as supply chain automation, warehousing logistics, connected inventory, a lot of the new use cases in this new normal post that pandemic. It's really that new retail operating landscape. >> Consumers we are so demanding, we want the same experience that we have online and we want that in the store and that's really driving a lot of this out of consumer demand. >> Oh yeah, no. I think, you know, retail you know, the way you shop for milk and bread change during the pandemic, right? There was pre-pandemic. The online shopping in the United States was only 5%, but during the pandemic and afterwards that's going to caught up to 25, 30%. That's huge. How do you bring new processes in? How do you create omnichannel consumer experiences where online well as physical are blended together? Becomes a massive challenge for the retailers. So yes, Edge has been there for a long time. Innovation hasn't happened, but a simple credit card swipe When you used to pre-pandemic, just to go do your checkout now has become into a curbside pickup. Integration with like, it's just simple payment card processing is not complicated like, you know, crazy. So people are forced to go in a way and that's happening in manufacturing because they're supply chain issues, could be not. So a lot of that has accelerated this investment and what's kind of driving Edge Computing is if everything ran out of the cloud, then you almost need infinite bandwidth. So suddenly people are realizing that everything runs out of cloud. I can't process my video analytics in a store. That's a lot of video, right? >> So we often ask ourselves, okay, who's going to win the edge? You know, we have that conversation. The cloud guys? VMware? You know, Dell? How are they going to go at it? And so to your point, you're not going to do a round trip to the cloud too expensive, too slow. Now cloud guys will try to bring their cloud basically on prem or out to the edge. You're kind of bringing it from the data center. So how do you see that evolution? >> No, great question. As the edge market happens, right? So there's market data now which says enterprise edge workloads in the next five years are going to be the fastest growing workloads. But then you have different communities coming to solve that problem. Like you just said, John is, you know, hyperscalers are going, Hey, all of the new workloads were built on us, let's bring them to the edge. Data center workloads move to the edge. >> Now important community here are, you know, Telcos and Service Providers because they have assets that are highly distributed at the edge. However, they're networking assets like cell towers and stuff like that. There's opportunity to convert them into computer and storage assets. So you can provide edge computing POPs. So you're seeing a convergence of lot of industry segments, traditional IT, hyperscalers, telcos, and then OT like Ryan pointed out is naturally transforming itself. There's almost this confluence of this pot where all these different technologies need to come together. From VMware and Dell perspective, our mission is a multi-cloud edge. We want to be able to support multi-cloud services because you've heard this multiple times, is at the edge consumers and customers will require services from all the hyperscalers. They don't want buy a one hyperscaler suit to suit solution. They want to mix and match. So not bound. We want be multi-cloud south bound to support IT and OT environments. So that becomes our value proposition in the middle. >> Yep. >> So Ryan, you were talking about that IT, OT schism. And we talk about that a lot. I wonder if you could help us parse that a little bit, because you were using, for instance retail, as an example. Sometimes I think about in the industrial. >> And I think the OT people are kind of like having an engineering mindset. Don't touch my stuff. Kind of like the IT guys too, but different, you know. So there's so much opportunity at the edge. I wonder how you guys think about that? How you segment it? How you prioritize it? Obviously retail telco are big enough. >> Yep. >> That you can get your hands around them, but then there's to your point about all this data that's going to going to compute. It's going to come in pockets. And I wonder how you guys think about that schism and the other opportunity. >> Yeah, out there. It's also a great question, you know, in manufacturing. There's the true OT persona. >> Yeah. >> Okay, and that really is focused on the business outcomes. Things like predictive maintenance use cases, operational equipment effectiveness, like that's really around bottleneck analysis, and the process that go through that. If the plant goes down, they're fine, okay. They can still work on their own systems, but they're not needing that high availability solution. But they're also the decision makers and where to buy the Edge Computing, okay. So we need to talk more to the OT persona from a Dell perspective, okay. And to add on to Ryan, right. So industrial is an interesting challenge, right? So one of the things we did, and this is VMware and Dell working together at vMware it was virtual. We announced something called edge compute stack. And for the first time in 23 years of vMware history, we made the hypervisor layer real-time. >> Yep. >> What that means is in order to capture some of these OT workloads, you need to get in and operate it between the industrial PC and the program of logical controllers at a sub millisecond performance level, because now you're controlling robotic arms that you cannot miss a beat. So we actually created this real time functionality. With that functionality in the last six months, we've been able to virtualize PLCs, IPCs. So what I'm getting at is we're opening up an entire wide space of operational technology workloads, which we was not accessible to our market for the last 20 plus years. >> Now we're talking. >> Yeah. And that allows us that control plane infrastructure to edge compute. There's purpose built for edge allows us to pivot and do other solutions like analytics with the adoption of AI Analytics with our recent announcement of Deep North, okay. That provides that in store video analytics functionality. And then we also partner with PTC based on a manufacturing solution, working with that same edge compute stack. Think of that as that control plane, where again, like I said, you can pivot off a different solutions. Okay, so we leverage PTCs thing works. >> So, okay, great. So I wanted to go to that. So real-time's really interesting. >> 'Cause most of much of AI today is modeling done in the cloud. >> Yes. >> The real opportunity is real time inferencing at the edge. >> You got it. >> Okay, now this is why this gets so interesting. And I wonder if Project Monterey fits into this at all. because I feel like so why did Intel win? Intel won, it crushed all the Unix systems out there because it had PC volumes. And the edge volume's going to dwarf anything we've ever seen before. >> Yeah. >> So I feel like there's this new cocktail, you guys describe this convergence and this mixture and it's unknown. What's going to happen? That's why Project Monterey is so interesting. >> Of course. >> Yeah. >> Right? Because you're bringing together kind of hedging a lot of bets and serving a lot of different use cases. Maybe you could talk about where that might fit here. >> Oh absolutely. So the edge compute stack is made up of vSphere, Tanzu, which is vSphere's you know, VM container and Tanzu's our container technology and vSphere contains Monterey in it, right. And we've added vSAN a for storage at the edge. And connectivity is SD-WAN because a lot of the times it's far location. So you're not having a large footprint, you have one or two hoses, it's more wide area, narrow area. So the edge compute stack supports real-time, non-real-time time workloads. VMs and containers, CPU GPU, right. >> NPU, accelerators, >> NPU, DPU all of them, right. Because what you're dealing with here is that inferencing real time, because to Ryan's point, when you're doing predictive maintenance, you got to pick these signals up in like milliseconds. >> Yes. >> So we've gone our stack down to microseconds and we pick up and inform because if I can save this predictive maintenance in two seconds, I save millions of dollars in you know, wastage of product, right? >> And you may not even persist that data, right? You might just let it go, I mean, how much data does Tesla save? Right? I mean. >> You're absolutely right. A lot of the times, all you're doing is this volume of data coming at you. You're matching it to an inferencing pattern. If it doesn't match, you just drop, right. It's not persistent, but the moment you hit a trigger, immediately everything lights go off, you're login, you're applying outcome. So like super interesting at the edge. >> And the compute is going to go through the roof. So yeah, my premise is that, you know, general purpose x86 running SAP is not going to be the architecture for the edge. >> You're absolutely right. >> Going to be low cost, low power, super performance. 'Cause when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, you're going to blow away the performance that we've ever seen on the curves. >> There's also a new application pattern. I've called out something called edge-native applications. We went through this client-server architecture era. We built all this, you know, a very clear in architecture. We went through cloud native where everything was hyperscaled in the cloud. Both of the times we optimize our own compute. >> Yeah. >> At the edge, we got to optimize our owns data because it's not ephemeral compute that you have in hyperscale compute space, you have ephemeral data you got to deal with. So a new nature of application workloads are emerging. We call it edge-native apps. >> Yep. >> And those have very different characteristics, you know, to client server apps or you know, cloud native apps, which is amazing. It's driven by data analysts like developers, not like dot net Java developers. It's actually data analysts who are trying to mine this with fast patents and come out with outcomes, right? >> Yeah, I love that edge-native apps Lisa, that's a new term for me. >> Right, just trademark it on me. I made made it up. (panel laughing) >> Can you guys talk about a joint customer that you've really helped to dramatically transform in the last six months? >> You want to shout or I can go-- >> I think my industry is fine. >> Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at VMworld we talked about Oshkosh, which is again, like in the manufacturing space, we have retailers and manufacturers and we also brought in, you know, Proctor and Gamble and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the customers look at us jointly because you know edge doesn't happen in its own silo. It's a continuum from the data center to the cloud, to the edge, right. There's the continuum exists. So if only edge was in its own silo, you would do things. But the key thing about all of this, there's no right place, it's about that workload placement. Where do I place the workload for the most optimal business outcome? Now for real-time applications, it's at the edge. For non-real-time stuff it could be in the data center, it could be in a cloud. It doesn't really matter, where VMware and Dell strengths comes in with Oshkosh or all of those folks. We have the end-to-end. From you want place it in the data center, You want to place it in your charge to public cloud, You want to derive some of these applications. You want to place it at the far edge, which is a customer prem or a near edge, which is a telco. We've done joint announcements with telcos, like South Dakota Telecom, where we've taken their cell towers and converted them into compute and storage. So they can actually store it at the near edge, right. So this is 5G solutions. I also own the 5G part of the vMware business, but doesn't matter. Compute network storage, we got to find the right mix for placing the workload at the right place. >> You call that the near edge. I think of it as the far edge, but that's what you mean, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Way out there in the (mumbles), okay. >> It's all about just optimizing operations, reducing cost, increasing profitability for the customer. >> So you said edge, not its own silo. And I agree. >> it's not a silo. Is mobile a valid sort of example or a little test case because when we developed mobile apps, it drove a lot of things in the data center and in the cloud. Is that a way to think of about it as opposed to like PCs work under their own silo? Yeah, we connect to the internet, but is mobile a reasonable proxy or no? >> Mobile is an interesting proxy. When you think about the application again, you know, you got a platform by the way, you'll get excited by this. We've got mobile developers, mobile device manufacturers. You can count them in your fingers. They want to now have these devices sitting in factory floors because now these devices are so smart. They have sensors, temperature controls. They can act like these multisensory device at the edge, but the app landscape is quite interesting. I think John, where you were going was they have a very thin shim app layer that can be pushed from anywhere. The, the notion of these edge-native applications could be virtual machines, could be containers, could be, you know, this new thing called Web Assembly Wasm, which is a new type of technology, very thin shim layer which is mobile like app layer. But you know, all of these are combination of how these applications may get expressed. The target platforms could be anywhere from mobile devices to IOT gateways, to IOT devices, to servers, to, you know, massive data centers. So what's amazing is this thing can just go everywhere. And our goal is consistent infrastructure, consistent operations across the board. That's where VMware and Dell win together. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, excellent. And I was just talking to a customer today, a major airline manufacturer, okay. About their airport and the future with the mobile device just being frictionless, okay, no one wants to touch anything anymore. You can use your mobile device to do your check-in and you've got to you avoid kiosks, okay. So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the kiosk. Now you need a kiosk for like checking baggage, okay. You can't get in the way of that, but at least that frictionless experience, for that airport in the future, but it brings in some other issues. >> It does, but I like the sound of that. Last question guys, where can customers go to learn more information about the joint solutions? >> So you can go to like our public websites obviously search on edge. And if you hear at the show, there's a lot of hands on labs, okay. There's a booth over there. A lot of Edge Solutions that we offer. >> Yeah, no, this is I guess as Ryan pointed our websites have these. We've had a lot of partnership in announcements together because you know, one of the things as we've expressed, manufacturing, retail, you know, when you get in the use cases, they involve ISPs, right? So they you know, they bring the value of you know, not just having a horizontal AI platform. We like opinionated models of fraud detection. So we're actually working with ecosystem of partners to make this real. >> So we may even hear more. >> The rich vertical solution, I call it the ISVs. They enrich our vertical solutions. >> Right. >> Oh, WeMo is going to be revolutionary. >> All right, can't wait. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me today and talking about what Dell and vMware are doing together and helping retailers manufacturers really convert the edge to incredible success. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. Thanks Lisa, thanks John for having us. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE. We are wrapping up day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. We'll be back tomorrow, John Farrer and Dave Nicholson will join us. We'll see you then. (soft music)

>>Well, hello everybody. I'm John Walls here with the cube, and we're very happy to continue our coverage here of a splunk.com 21. And today we're going to talk about cyber security. Uh, obviously everybody is well aware of a number of, uh, breaches that have happened around the globe, but you might say there's been a surge in trying to prevent those from happening down the road. And I'm going to let our guests explain that Ryan Covar, who is the security strategist at Splunk. Ryan. Good to see you with, uh, with us here on the cube. Glad you could join us today. >>Thank you very much. I've wished we could have been doing this in person, but such as the time of life we live. >>Yeah. We have learned to live on zoom that's for sure. And, uh, it's the next best thing to being there. So, uh, again, thanks for that. Um, well, let's talk about surge, if you will. Um, uh, I know obviously Splunk and data security go hand in hand that is a high priority with the, with the company, but now you have a new initiative that you're just now rolling out to take that to an even higher level. Tell us about that. >>Yeah, something I'm extremely excited to announce. Uh, it's the first time we're really talking about it is that.com 21, which is wonderful. And it's kind of the culmination of my seven years here at Splunk. Uh, before I came to Splunk, I did about 20 years of cyber security research and defense and nation state hunting and threat intelligence and policy and compliance, and just about everything, uh, public sector in the U S and the UK private sector, a couple of different places. So I've kind of been around the block. And one of the things I've found that I'm really passionate about is just being a network defender or a blue teamer. And a lot of my time here at Splunk has been around that. It's been speaking at conferences, doing research, um, coming up with ways to basically defend organizations, but the tools they have at hand and something that we say Alon is, uh, we, we work on the problems of today and tomorrow, not the distant future, right? >>The really practical things. And we had an, you know, there was a little bit of a thing called solar winds. You might've heard of it. Um, that happened earlier in December and we were able to stand up kind of on an ad hoc ragtag group of Splunkers around the world, uh, in a matter of hours. And we worked about 24 hours for panning over to Australia, into a Mia, and then back over to America and able to publish really helpful work to, for our customers to detect or defend or mitigate against what we knew at the time around solar winds, the attack. And then as time went on, we were continuing to write and create material, but we didn't have a group that was focused on it. We were all kind of chipping in after hours or, you know, deep deprecating, other bits of work. >>And I said, you know, we really need to focus on this. This is a big deal. And how can we actually surge up to meet these needs if you will, uh, the play on the punter. So we created an idea of a small team, a dedicated to current events and also doing security research around the problems that are facing around the world insecurity who use Splunk and maybe even those who don't. And that's where the idea of this team was formed. And we've been working all summer. We're releasing our first research project, excuse me, uh, at.com, which is around supply chain, compromise using jaw three Zeke and Splunk, uh, author by myself and primarily Marcus law era. And we have other research projects coming out every quarter, along with doing this work around, just helping people with any sort of immediate cybersecurity threat that we're able to assist with. >>So what are you hoping that security teams can get out of this work? Obviously you're investing a lot of resources and doing the research, I assume, diversifying, you know, the areas and to which you're, um, exploring, um, ultimately what would be the takeaway if I was on the other end, if I was on the client and what would you hope that I would be, uh, extracting from this work? >>Sure. We want to get you promoted. I mean, that's kind of the, the joke of it, but we, we talk a lot. I want to make everyone in the world who use a Splunk or cybersecurity, looked into their bosses and defend their company as fast and quickly as possible. So one of the big, mandates for my team is creating consumable, actionable work and research. So we, you know, we joke a lot that, you know, I have a pretty thick beard here. One might even call it a neck beard and a lot of people in our community, we create things for what I would call wizards, cybersecurity wizards, and we go to conferences and we talk from wizard to wizard, and we kind of sit on our ivory tower on stage and kind of proclaim out how to do things. And I've sat on the other side and sometimes those sound great, but they're not actually helping people with their job today. And so the takeaway for me, what I hope people are able to take away is we're here for you. We're here for the little guys, the network defenders, we're creating things that we're hoping you can immediately take home and implement and do and make better detections and really find the things that are immediate threats to your network and not necessarily having to, you know, create a whole new environment or apply magic. So >>Is there a difference then in terms of say enterprise threats, as opposed to, if I'm a small business or of a medium sized business, maybe I have four or 500 employees as opposed to four or 5,000 or 40,000. Um, what about, you know, finding that ground where you can address both of those levels of, of business and of concern, >>You know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago? I would've answered that question very differently and I fully acknowledge I have a bias in nation state threats. That's what I'm primarily trained in, however, in the last five years, uh, thanks or not. Thanks to ransomware. What we're seeing is the same threats that are affecting and impacting fortune 100 fortune 10 companies. The entire federal government of the United States are the exact same threats that are actually impacting and causing havoc on smaller organizations and businesses. So the reality is in today's threat landscape. I do believe actually the threat is the same to each, but it is not the same level of capabilities for a 100% or 500 person company to a company, the size of Splunk or a fortune 100 company. Um, and that's something that we are actually focusing on is how do we create things to help every size of that business, >>Giving me the tools, right, exactly. >>Which is giving you the power to fight that battle yourself as much as possible, because you may never be able to have the head count of a fortune 100 company, but thanks to the power of software and tools and things like the cloud, you might have some force multipliers that we're hoping to create for you in a much more package consumable method. >>Yeah. Let's go back to the research that you mentioned. Um, how did you pick the first topic? I mean, because this is your, your splash and, and I'm sure there was a lot of thought put into where do we want to dive in >>First? You know, I'd love to say there was a lot of thought put into it because it would make me sound smarter, but it was something we all just immediately knew was a gap. Um, you know, solar winds, which was a supply chain, compromise attack really revealed to many of us something that, um, you know, reporters had been talking about for years, but we never really saw come to fruition was a real actionable threat. And when we started looking at our library of offerings and what we could actually help customers with, I talked over 175 federal and private sector companies around the world in a month and a half after solar winds. And a lot of times the answer was, yeah, we can't really help you with this specific part of the problem. We can help you around all sorts of other places, but like, gosh, how do you actually detect this? >>And there's not a great answer. And that really bothered me. And to be perfectly honest, that was part of the reason that we founded the team. So it was a very obvious next step was, well, this is why we're creating the team. Then our first product should probably be around this problem. And then you say, okay, supply chain, that's really big. That's a huge chunk of work. So the first question is like, well, what can we actually affect change on without talking about things like quantum computing, right? Which are all things that are, you know, blockchain, quantum computing, these are all solutions that are actually possible to solve or mitigate supply chain compromise, but it's not happening today. And it sure as heck isn't even happening tomorrow. So how do we create something that's digestible today? And so what Marcus did, and one of his true skillsets is really refining the problem down, down, down, down. >>And where can we get to the point of, Hey, this is data that we think most organizations have a chance of collecting. These are methodologies that we think people can do and how can they actually implement them with success in their network. And then we test that and then we kind of keep doing a huge fan of the concept of OODA loop, orient, orient, observe, decide, and act. And we do that through our hypothesizing. We kind of keep looking at that and iterating over and over and over again, until we're able to come up with a solution that seems to be applicable for the personas that we're trying to help. And that's where we got out with this research of, Hey, collect network data, use a tool like Splunk and some of our built-in statistical analysis functions and come out the other side. And I'll be honest, we're not solving the problem. >>We're helping you with the problem. And I think that's a key differentiator of what we're saying is there is no silver bullet and frankly, anyone that tells you they can solve supply chain, uh, let me know, cause I want to join that hot new startup. Um, the reality is we can help you go from a field of haystacks to a single haystack and inside that single haystack, there's a needle, right? And there's actually a lot of value in that because before the PR problem was unapproachable, and now we've gotten it down to saying like, Hey, use your traditional tools, use your traditional analytic craft on a much smaller set of data where we've pretty much verified that there's something here, but look right here. And that's where we kind of focused. >>You talked about, you know, and we all know about the importance and really the emphasis that's put on data protection, right? Um, at the same time, can you use data to help you protect? I mean, is there information or insight that could be gleaned from, from data that whether it's behavior or whatever the case might be, that, that not only, uh, is something that you can operationalize and it's a good thing for your business, but you could also put it into practice in terms of your security practices to >>A hundred percent. The, the undervalued aspect of cybersecurity in my opinion, is elbow grease. Um, you can buy a lot of tools, uh, but the reality is to get value immediately. Usually the easiest place to start is just doing the hard detail oriented work. And so when you ask, is there data that can help you immediately data analytics? Actually, I go to, um, knowing what you have in your network, knowing what you have, that you're actually trying to protect asset and inventory, CMDB, things like this, which is not attractive. It's not something people want to talk about, but it's actually the basis of all good security. How do you possibly defend something if you don't know what you're defending and where it is. And something that we found in our research was in order to detect and find anomalous behavior of systems communicating outbound, um, it's too much. >>So what you have to do is limit the scope down to those critical assets that you're most concerned about and a perfect example of critical asset. And there's no, no shame or victim blaming here, put on solar winds. Uh, it's just that, that is an example of an appliance server that has massive impact on the organization as we saw in 2020. And how can you actually find that if you don't know where it is? So really that first step is taking the data that you already have and saying, let's find all the systems that we're trying to protect. And what's often known as a crown jewels approach, and then applying these advanced analytics on top of those crown jewel approaches to limit the data scope and really get it to just what you're trying to protect. And once you're positive that you have that fairly well defended, then you go out to the next tier and the next tier in next year. And that's a great approach, take things you're already doing today and applying them and getting better results tomorrow. >>No, before I let you go, um, I I'd like to just have you put a, uh, a bow on surge, if you will, on that package, why is this a big deal to you? It's been a long time in the making. I know you're very happy about the rollout of this week. Um, you know, what's the impact you want to have? Why is it important? >>We did a lot of literature review. I have a very analytical background. My time working at DARPA taught me a lot about doing research and development and on laying out the value of failure, um, and how much sometimes even failing as long as you talk about it and talk about your approach and methodology and share that is important. And the other part of this is I see a lot of work done by many other wonderful organizations, uh, but they're really solving for a problem further down the road or they're creating solutions that not everyone can implement. And so what I think is so important and what's different about our team is we're not only thinking differently, we're hiring differently. You know, we have people who have a threat intelligence background from the white house. We have another researcher who did 10 years at DARPA insecurity, research and development. >>Uh, we've recently hired a, a former journalist who she's made a career pivot into cybersecurity, and she's helping us really review the data and what people are facing and come up with a real connection to make sure we are tackling the right problems. And so to me, what I'm most excited about is we're not only trying to solve different problems. And I think what most of the world is looking at for cybersecurity research, we've staffed it to be different, think different and come up with things that are probably a little less, um, normal than everyone's seen before. And I'm excited about that. >>Well, and, and rightly so, uh, Ryan, thanks for the time, a pleasure to have you here on the cube and, uh, the information again, the initiative is Serge, check it out, uh, spunk very much active in the cyber security protection business. And so we have certainly appreciate that effort. Thank you, Ryan. >>Well, thank you very much, John. You bet Ryan, >>Covar joining us here on our cube coverage. We continue our coverage of.com for 21.

(upbeat music) >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Live from the Bellagio, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here all day today and tomorrow. We're going to talk about process mining next. We've got two guests here. Mike Engel is here, intelligent automation and process intelligence leader at PWC. And Ryan McMahon, the SVP of growth at UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> So Ryan, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about process mining. How does UiPath do it differently and what are some of the things being unveiled at this event? >> So look, I would tell you it's actually more than process mining and hopefully, not only you but others saw this this morning with Param. It's really about the full capabilities of that discovery suite. In which, obviously, process mining is part of. But it starts with task capture. So, going out and actually working with subject matter experts on a process. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, order to cash, digitally capturing that process or how they believe it should work or execute across one's environment. Right Mike? And then from there, actually validating or verifying with things or capabilities like process mining. Giving you a full digital x-ray of actually how that process is being executed in the enterprise. Showing you process bottlenecks. For things like accounts payable, showing you days outstanding, maverick buying, so you can actually pin point and do a few things. Fix your process, right? Where process should be fixed. Fix your application because it's probably not doing what you think it is, and then third, and where the value comes, is in our platform of which process mining is a capability, our PA platform. Really moving directly to automations, right? And then, having the ability with even task mining to drill into a specific bottleneck. Capturing keystrokes, clicks, and then moving to, with both of those, process mining and task mining, into Automation Hub, as part of our discovery platform as well. Being able to crowdsource, prioritize, all of those potential, if you will, just capabilities of automations, and saying, "Okay, let's go and prioritize these. These deliver to the greatest value," and executing across them. So, as much as it is about process mining, it's actually the whole entire discovery suite of capabilities that differentiates UiPath from other RPA vendors, as the only RPA vendor that delivers process mining, task mining and this discovery suite as part of our enterprise automation platform. >> Such a critical point, Ryan. I mean, it's multi-dimensional. It's not just one component. It's not just process mining or task mining, it's the combination that's really impactful. Agree with you a hundred percent. >> So, one of the things that people who watch our shows know, I'm like a broken record on this, the early days of RPA, I called it paving the cow path. And that was good because somebody knew the process, they just repeat it. But the problem was, the process wasn't necessarily the best process. As you just described. So, when you guys made the acquisition of ProcessGold, I said, "Okay, now I'm starting to connect the dots," and now a couple years on, we're starting to see that come together. This is what I think is most misunderstood about UiPath, and I wonder, from a practitioner's perspective, if you can sort of fill in some of those gaps. It's that, it's different from a point tool, it's different from a productivity tool. Like Power Automate, I'll just say it, that's running in Azure Cloud, that's cool or a vertically integrated part of some ERP Stack. This is a horizontal play that is end to end. Which is a bigger automation agenda, it's bold but it's potentially huge. $60 billion dollar TAM, I think that's understated. Maybe you could, from a practitioner's perspective, share with us the old way, >> Yeah. >> And kind of, the new way. >> Well obviously, we all made a lot of investments in this space, early on, to determine what should we be automating in the first place? We even went so far as, we have platforms that will transcribe these kind of surveys and discussions that we're having with our clients, right. But at the end of the day all we're learning is what they know about the process. What they as individuals know about the process. And that's problematic. Once we get into the next phase of actually developing something, we miss something, right? Because we're trying to do this rapidly. So, I think what we have now is really this opportunity to have data driven insights and our clients are really grabbing onto that idea, that it's good to have a sense of what they think they do but it's more important to have a sense of what they actually do. >> Are you seeing, in the last year in a half we've seen the acceleration of a lot of things, there's some silver linings but we've also seen the acceleration in automation as a mandate. Where is it? In terms of a priority, that you're seeing with customers, and are there any industries that you're seeing that are really leading the edge here? >> Well I do see it as a priority and of course, in the role that I have, obviously everybody I talk to, it's a priority for them. But I think it's kind of changing. People are understanding that it's not just a sense of, as Ryan was pointing out, it's not just a sense of getting an understanding of what we do today, it's really driving it to that next step of actually getting something impactful out the other end. Clients are starting to understand that. I like to categorize them, there's three types of clients, there's starters, there's stall-ers and those that want to scale. >> Right? So we're seeing a lot more on the other ends of this now, where clients are really getting started and they're getting a good sense that this is important for them because they know that identifying the opportunities in the first place is the most difficult part of automation. That's what's stalling the programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got these clients that are saying, "Hey, I want to do this really at scale, can you help us do that?" >> (Ryan) Right. >> And it's quite a challenge. >> How do I build a pipeline of automations? So I've had success in finance and accounting, fantastic. How do I take this to operations? How do I take this this to supply chain? How do I take this to HR? And when I do that, it all starts with, as Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer at VMware, would say and as a customer, "It starts with data but more importantly, process." So focusing on process and where we can actually deliver automation. So it's not just about those insights, it's about moving from insights to actionable next steps. >> Right. >> And that is where we're seeing this convergence, if you will, take place. As we've seen it many times before. I mentioned I worked at Cisco in the past, we saw this with Voice Over IP converging on the network. We saw this at VMware, who I know you guys have spoken to multiple times. When a move from a hypervisor to including NSX with the network, to including cloud management and also VSAN for storage, and converging in software. We're seeing it too with process, really. Instead of kids and clipboards, as they used to call it, and many Six Sigma and Lean workshops, with whiteboards and sticky papers, to actually showing people within, really, days how a process is being executed within their organization. And then, suggesting here's where there's automation capabilities, go execute against them. >> So Ryan, this is why sometimes I scoff at the TAM analysis. I get you've got to do the TAM analysis, you've got to communicate to Wall Street. But basically what you do is you pull out IDC or Gartner data, which is very stovepipe, and you kind of say, "Okay we're in this market." It's the convergence of these markets. It's cloud, it's containers, it's IS, it's PaaS, it's Saas, it's blockchain, it's automation. They're all coming together to form this, it sound like a buzzword but this digital matrix, if you will. And it's how well you leverage that digital matrix, which defines your digital business. So, talk about the role that automation, generally, RPA specifically, process mining specifically, play in a digital business. >> Do you want to take that Mike or do you want me to take it? >> We can both do it? How about that? >> Yeah, perfect. >> So I'll start with it. I mean all this is about convergence at this point, right? There are a number of platform providers out there, including UiPath, that are kind of teaching us that. Often times led by the software vendors in terms of how we think of it but what we know is that there's no one solution. We went down the RPA path, lots of clients and got a lot of excitement and a lot of impact but if you really want to drive it broader, what clients are looking at now, is what is the ecosystem of tools that we need to have in place to make that happen? And from our perspective, it's got to start with really, process intelligence. >> What I would say too, if you look at digital transformation, it was usually driven from an application. Right? Really. And what I think customers found was that, "Hey," I'm going to name some folks here, "Put everything in SAP and we'll solve all your problems." Larry Ellison will tell you, "Put everything into Oracle and we'll solve all your problems." Salesforce, now, I'm a salesperson, I've never used an out of the box Salesforce dashboard in my life, to run my business because I want to run it the way I want to run it. Having said that though, they would say the same thing, "Put everything into our platform and we'll make sure that we can access it and you can use it everywhere and we'll solve all of your problems." I think what customers found is that that's not the case. So they said, "Okay, where are there other ways. Yes, I've got my application doing what it's doing, I've improved my process but hang on. There's things that are repeatable here that I can remove to actually focus on higher level orders." And that's where UiPath comes in. We've kind of had a bottom up swell but I would tell you that as we deliver ROI within days or weeks, versus potentially years and with a heavy, heavy investment up front. We're able to do it. We're able to then work with our partners like PWC, to then demonstrate with business process modeling, the ability to do it across all those, as I call, Silo's of excellence in an organization, to deliver true value, in a timeline, with integrated services from our partner, to execute and deliver on ROI. >> You mentioned some of the great software companies that have been created over the years. One you didn't mention but I want you to comment on it is Service Now. Because essentially McDermott's trying to create the platform of platforms. All about workflow and service management. They bought an RPA company, "Hey we got this too." But it's still a walled garden. It's still the same concept is put everything in here. My question is, how are you different? Yeah look, we're going to integrate with customers who want to integrate because we're an open platform and that's the right approach. We believe there will be some overlap and there'll be some choices to be made. Instead of that top down different approach, which may be a little bit heavy and a large investment up front, with varied results, as far as what that looks like, ours is really a bottoms up. I would tell you too, if you look at our community, which is a million and a half, I believe, strong now and growing, it's really about that practitioner and those people that have embraced it from the bottom up that really change how it gets implemented. And you don't have what I used to call the white blood cells, pushing back when you're trying to say, "Hey, let's take it from this finance and accounting to HR, to the supply chain, to the other sides of the organization," saying, "Hey look, be part of this," instead of, "No, you will do." >> Yeah, there's no, at least that I know of, there's no SAP or Salesforce freemium. You can't try it before you buy. And the entry price is way higher. I mean generally. I guess Salesforce not necessarily but I could taste automation for well under $100,000. I could get in for, I bet you most of your customers started at 25 of $50,000 departmental deployments. >> It's a bottoms up ground swell, that's exactly right. And it's really that approach. Which is much more like an Atlassian, I will tell you and it's really getting to the point where we obviously, and I'm saying this, I work at UiPath, we make really good software. And so, out of the box, it's getting easier and easier to use. It all integrates. Which makes it seamless. The reason people move to RPA first was because they got tired of bouncing between applications to do a task. Now we deliver this enterprise automation platform where you can go from process discovery to crowd sourcing and prioritizing your automations with your pipeline of automations, into Studio, into creating those automations, into testing them and back again, right? We give you the opportunity not to leave the platform and extract the most value out of our, what we call enterprise automation platform. Inclusive of process mining. Inclusive of testing and all those capabilities, document understanding, which is also mine, and it's fantastic. It's very differentiated from others that are out there. >> Well it's about having the right framework in place. >> That's it. From an automation perspective. I think that's a little bit different from what you would expect from the SAP's of the world. Mike, where are you seeing, in the large organizations that you work with, we think of what you describe as the automation pipeline, where are some of the key priorities that you're finding in large organizations? What's in that pipeline and in what order? >> It's interesting because every time we have a conversation whether it's internal or with our clients, we come up with another use case for this type of technology. Obviously, when we're having the initial conversations, what we're talking about is really automation. How do we stuff that pipe with automation. But you know, we have clients that are saying, "Hey listen, I'm trying to carve out of a parent company and what I need to do is document all of my processes in a meaningful way, that I can, at some point, take action on, so there's meaningful outcomes." Whether it be a shared services organization that's looking to outsource, all different types of use cases. So, prioritizing is, I think, it's about impact and the quickest way to impact seems to be automation. >> Is it fair to say, can I look at you UiPath as automation infrastructure? Is that okay or do you guys want to say, "Oh, we're an application." The reason I ask, so then you can answer, is if you look at the great infrastructure plays, they all had a role. The DBA, the CCIE from Cisco, the Cloud Architect, the VMware admin, you've been at all of them, Ryan. So, is there a role emerging here and if it's not plumbing or infrastructure, I know, okay that's cool but course correct me on the infrastructure comment and then, is there a role emerging? >> You know, I think the difference between UiPath and some of the infrastructure companies is, it used to take, Dave, years to give an ROI, really. You'd invest in infrastructure and it's like, if we build it they will come. In fact, we've seen this with Cloud, where we kind of started doing some of that on prem, right? We can do this but then you had Amazon, Azure and others kind of take it and say, "Look, we can do it better, faster and cheaper." It's that simple. So, I would say that we are an application and that we reference it as an enterprise automation platform. It's more than infrastructure. Now, are we going to, as I mentioned, integrate to an open platform, to other capabilities? Absolutely. I think, as you see with our investments and as we continue to build this out, starting in core RPA, buying ProcessGold and getting into our discovery suite of capabilities I covered, getting into, what I see next is, as you start launching many bots into your organization, you're touching multiple applications, so you got to test it. Any time you would launch an application you're going to test it before you go live, right? We see another convergence with testing and I know you had Garrett on and Matt, earlier, with testing, application testing, which has been a legacy, kind of dinosaur market, converging with RPA, where you can deliver automations to do it better, faster and cheaper. >> Thank you for that clarification but now Mike, is that role, I know roles are emerging in RPA and automation but is there, I mean, we're seeing centers of excellence pop up, is there an analogy there or sort of a similar- >> Yeah, I think the new role, if you will, it's not super new but it's really that sense of an automation solution architect. It's a whole different thing. We're talking about now more about recombinant innovation. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Than we are about build it from scratch. Because of the convergence of these low-code, no-code types of solutions. It's a different skill set. >> And we see it at PWC. You have somebody who is potentially a process expert but then also somebody who understands automations. It's the convergences of those two, as well, that's a different skill set. It really is. And it's actually bringing those together to get the most value. And we see this across multiple organizations. It starts with a COE. We've done great with our community, so we have that upswell going and then people are saying, "Hang on, I understand process but I also understand automations. let me put the two together," and that's where we get our true value. >> Bringing in the education and training. >> No question. >> That's a huge thing. >> The traditional components of it still need to exist but I think there are new roles that are emerging, for sure. >> It's a big cultural shift. >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> How do you guys, how does PWC and UiPath, and maybe you each can answer this in the last minute or so, how do you help facilitate that cultural shift in a business that's growing at warp speed, in a market that is very tumultuous? How do you do that? >> Want to go first or I can go? >> I'll go ahead and go first. It's working with great partners like Mike because they see it and they're converging two different practices within their organization to actually bring this value to customers and also that executive relevance. But even on our side, when we're meeting with customers, just in general, we're actually talking about, how do we deal with, there's what? 13 and a half million job openings, I guess, right now and there's 8500 people that are unemployed, is the last number that I heard. We couldn't even fill all of those jobs if we wanted to. So it's like, okay, what is it that we could potentially automate so maybe we don't need all those jobs. And that's not a negative, it's just saying, we couldn't fill them anyway. So let's focus on where we can and where, there again, can extract the most value in working with our partners but create this new domain that's not networking or virtualization but it's actually, potentially, process and automation. It's testing and automation. It might even be security and automation. Which, I will tell you, is probably coming next, having come out of the security space. You know, I sit there and listen to all these threats and I see these people chasing, really, automated threats. It's like, guys a threat hunter that's really good goes through the same 15 steps that they would when they're chasing a false positive, as if a bot would do that for them. >> I mean, I've written about the productivity declines over the past several decades in western countries, it's not universal around the world and maybe we have a productivity boost because of Covid but it's like this perpetual workday now. That's not sustainable. So we're not going to be able to solve the worlds great problems. Whether it's climate change, diversity, massive deaths, on and on and on, unless we deal with that labor gap. >> That's right. >> And the only way to do that is automation. It's so clear to me that that's the answer. Part of the answer. >> It is part of the answer and I think, to your point Lisa, it's a cultural shift that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. When you think about people that are coming into the work force, it's an expectation now. So if you want to retain or you know, attract and retain the right people, you'd better be prepared for it as an organization. >> Yeah, remember the old, proficient in Word and Excel. Makes it almost trivial. It's trivial compared to that. I think if you don't have automation chops, going forward, it's going to be an issue. Hey, we have whatever, 5000 bots running at our company, how could you help? Huh? What's a bot? >> That's right. You're right. We see this too. I'll give you an example at Cisco. One of their financial analysts, junior starter, he says, "Part of our training program, is creating automations. Why? Because it's not just about finance anymore. It's about what can I automate in my role to actually focus on higher level orders and this for me, is just amazing." And you know, it's Rajiv Ramaswamy's son who's over there at Cisco now as a financial analyst. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday, no kidding, right Dave? And I get a text from Rajiv, who's now CEO at Nutanix, and he says, "I can't believe I just created a bot." And I said, "I'm at the right place." Really. >> That's cool, I mean hey, you're right too. You want to work for Amazon, you got to know how to provision a EC2 instance or you don't get the job. >> Yeah. >> You got to train for that. And these are the types of skills that are expected- >> That's right. >> For the future. >> Awesome. Guys- >> I'm glad I'm older. >> Are you no longer proficient in Word is the question. >> Guys, thanks for joining us, talking about what you guys are doing together, how you're really facilitating this massive growth trajectory. It's great to be back in person and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers later today. >> Terrific. >> Great. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath FORWARD IV. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM. Think the digital experience I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us manager of ECM solutions at auto owners insurance company, Ryan, welcome to the program. Thank you. And Michelle Christianson is here as well. VP of enterprise report management practice at end choice, Michelle. It's good to have you on the program. Thank you. Thank you. So let's, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of and choice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about auto owners company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders, but give us an overview of auto owners insurance. >>Sure. So I don't want to said insurance is an insurance company. That's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Um, just by our name being auto owners insurance, which is how we started. Um, we write all personal lines, commercial lines and also have a life insurance company, >>So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about end choice. I know this, you guys are an IBM gold business partner, but this is end choices first time on the cubes. So give us a background. Sure, sure. Great. So in choice are an IBM gold business partner. Uh, we have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas, um, Austin, Texas, and, uh, Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM digital business automation space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped, uh, through the years. And we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM solutions. And talk to me a little bit Michelle, about how it is that you work with with, um, auto owners. >>So we assisted auto owners recently in their digital transformation journey and they were, uh, dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get for moving forward, you know, provided better customer satisfaction, um, experience, um, for their clients agents. And so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM digital business automation portfolio. Excellent client. Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about auto owners, your relationship with IBM and choice and how is it helping you to address some, the challenges in the market today? >>Sure. So I don't know if this has a long-term relationship with IBM. Um, originally starting back as we go as a mainframe customer and then, you know, more recently, um, helping us with different modern technology initiatives. Uh, they were instrumental in the nineties when we created our initial web offerings. And then more recently they've been helping us with our digital business automation, which has helped us to, um, mature our content, offering it. >>So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM. Right. And you mentioned the nineties, ah, a time when we didn't have to wear a mask on our faces. So a couple of decades it goes back. Yeah. >>Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that back, you know, back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things, >>Uh, the seventies, another good time. All right. So Michelle had talked to me a little bit about what end choices doing with IBM solutions to help auto owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said, this is a company that was founded in 1916. And I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation a lot harder than it sounds well. That's correct. Just as I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategies, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like auto owners, um, with their journey by first realizing, um, their existing, existing, digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need. And then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and process. And finally we re-invent, um, their strategic offering with modern capabilities. >>So we're focused on technologies like RPA machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure. So any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go forward. So this offers us, our clients, um, smarter and more into intuitive interfaces, creating basically a better user experience and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know, we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we reinvent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice have ha has helped auto owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern. And I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >>Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at auto owners with IBM. Um, when I started the team about seven years ago, we originally started using file NATS and data cap and case manager and content aggregator, um, as our first, um, movement from a traditional, um, platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform. And that helped us a lot to improve our business process, um, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable more recently, we've been working with Michelle and the team on our, um, migration to a content management on demand platform. And that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills, um, to our agents and customers, um, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are, um, important, um, for our customers to be able to see it to, um, engage from, with auto owners in a, in a digital era. >>So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that is that, is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents. So a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how, um, that like content manager on demand, for example, and what you're doing with ETF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >>Sure. So, uh, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management management on demand journey. Um, one is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Um, specifically some functionality around searching and searchability of our content, um, that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, um, ability to implement, uh, records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, um, as well as, um, some different options to be able to present the content, uh, to our customers and agents in a, in a better and more modern way. Um, and I'm choices role rolling that has really been, sorry, guide us on that journey, um, to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >>Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about hybrid cloud AI data, a big theme of, uh, IBM think is your, how is enChoice using hybrid cloud and AI, you mentioned some of the ways, but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like auto owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. Well, sure, sure. So, um, of course with the Calpec offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the cloud Pak for automation, um, several of those offerings are, some of them are, um, uh, built specifically to, uh, survive or to, to, um, be hosted in a hybrid environment. And as we working with auto owners, um, transforming their platforms going forward, for example, they just invested in, in a, um, a, uh, I just lost the word here. I, they just invested in a new platform mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. >>So, um, Ryan mentioned, uh, some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers and a particular, um, that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, um, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to management manage it. And of course, um, just that whole, um, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner. Um, we work with, uh, these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those? Um, it's great to take advantage of the new stuff, but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. >>And, um, so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those excellent leading edge. Ran, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, uh, sorry. Uh, an insurance company from the early 19 hundreds moving into the using container technology. I'll have stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about hybrid cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from, from your policy holders. >>Yeah, for sure. So, uh, first and foremost, um, we were a red hat open shift, uh, customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform. Um, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to, uh, move to cloud pack, um, and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. Um, at the end of last year, we updated our license thing so that we can move in that direction and we're starting to, um, deploy, um, digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform, which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability. Um, just a lot of ease of use things, um, for my team, um, to make their jobs easier, but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. Um, there's also a number of products that are in the, um, containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing, um, the same a couple, um, and those are both things that we're looking at auto owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents, um, to continue to grow the business >>Very forward-thinking uh, awesome Ryan, thanks for sharing with us. What auto insurance or auto owners insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how, how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from end choices perspective in terms of your digital transformation. Um, well we have been a hundred percent focus on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and, uh, and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey. Um, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know, helping transform our clients experience such that, you know, customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. >>So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients, we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. That is good. It sounds like the last year has been, uh, very fruitful for you. And I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM solutions, the transformation that you're both of your companies are on, and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. Thank you. Thank you for Rand Dunnings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM. Think that digital experience.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto-Owners Insurance Company, Ryan, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well, VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at enChoice, Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. So let's, Ryan let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of enChoice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about Auto-Owners Company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders but give us an overview of Auto-Owners Insurance. >> Sure. So Auto-Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Despite our name being Auto-Owners Insurance, which is how we started, we write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. >> So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about enChoice. I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner but this is enChoice's first time on the Cube, so give us a background. >> Sure, sure, great. So enChoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas of Austin, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM Solutions. >> And talk to me a little bit Michelle about how it is that you work with with Auto-Owners. >> So we assisted Auto-Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, you know provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their client's agents, and so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on-demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. >> Excellent, Ryan Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. >> Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto-Owners, your relationship with IBM and enChoice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? >> Sure. So Auto-Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM originally starting back years ago as a mainframe customer and then, you know more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the nineties when we redid our initial web offerings, and then more recently they've been helping us with our Digital Business Automation which has helped us to mature our content offering at Owners. >> So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, and then you mentioned the nineties at a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces. (laughing) So a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? >> Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that, that, you know back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things. >> The seventies, another good time. (laughing) All right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what enChoice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto-Owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said this is a company that was founded in 1916, and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation. It's a lot harder than it sounds. >> Well, that's correct. Yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto-Owners with their journey, by first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need, and then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processizations and finally we re-invent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure, so any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go for it. So this offers us, our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces creating basically a better user experience, and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. >> Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we re-invent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice has helped Auto-Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern, and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >> Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto-Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago we originally started using file NATS and data cap, and case manager, and content aggregator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform, and that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the enChoice team on our migration to a content management on-demand platform, and that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it, to engage with Auto-Owners in a, in a digital era. >> So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that, is that is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents, so a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how that like content manager on-demand, for example and what you're doing with ECF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >> Sure. So, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on-demand journey. One is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided, and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Specifically, some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a in a better and more modern way and enChoice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >> Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about Hybrid Cloud AI Data a big theme of IBM Think this year. How is enChoice using Hybrid Cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the other ways but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like Auto-Owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. >> Well, sure, sure. So of course with the Cloud Pak offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the Cloud Pak for automation, several of those offerings are some of them are built specifically to survive or to to be hosted in a hybrid environment, and as we're working with Auto-Owners transforming their platforms going forward for example, they just invested in, in a, a I just lost the word here. They just invested in a, a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats, and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers in a particular that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those. It's great to take advantage of the new stuff but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. >> Excellent leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, sorry an insurance company from the early 1900's moving into the using container technology. I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation, and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from from your policy holders. >> Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hat OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a Cloud Pak and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction, and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing to name a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at Auto-Owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents to continue to grow the business. >> Very forward-thinking, awesome Ryan. Thanks for sharing with us what Auto-Owners Insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from enChoice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation. >> Well, we have been a hundred percent focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know helping transform our client's experience such that you know customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. >> That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you, and I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think The Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> You're watching continued coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm sure you're joining just a couple of hundred thousand of your closest friends and family on the web as we engage this AWS builder community in a very different way this year. I'm super excited to have one, for the first time Flexera on theCUBE program, I'm Keith Townsend @CTOAdvisor on Twitter and I'm joined by the CEO of Flexera, Jim Ryan. Jim, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having us Keith. >> And Marie Godfrey, Senior Vice President of Product at Flexera. >> Thanks. It's good to be here. >> Welcome to the show. So, first off, I think most of the industry knows Flexera from the famous survey you guys do every year. Help us understand, what's the purpose of the survey and the intent of it? >> I think the purpose of the survey is to continue to provide the pulse of the market to our customers and the market at large. This is not a revelation to say that cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud is an ever-changing fast, fast moving target in the industry and we find that by pulsing our customers and pulsing the market and then in return, giving people a broader sense as to what's going on, how they view the current top three challenges that they're facing, allows people to just stay relevant and stay current without having to do so much heavy lifting themselves. >> So, talk to me about the other part that's not as famous. Marie, the product, what's the primary goal of Flexera? >> So, to take off from what Jim said, the state of the cloud report that we issue every year is just one of many that we do research on and we published and Flexera hasn't always been known as a cloud management tool or a cloud provider of optimization solutions for the cloud. We have grown up and our legacy is very much on software asset management. So, over the course of both organic and inorganic means, we find ourselves in this great position now to be able to talk to not only our core strengths as an organization and as a company, but also what we do to help our customers optimize their cloud cost. >> So, one of the interesting outputs or data points from the report is this 70/30 split. I've seen it as 80/20, 70/30, more or less the same ideal concept that we spend 30% of our time basically on these innovative projects but 70% of our time basically on traditional IT operations. How does that impact your team's view of the market? >> Well, I think it profoundly impacts our view. You can call it the elephant in the room or you can call it the immovable object. The fact of the matter remains is that although a lot of the focus, attention and an ever increasing share of everybody's budget is being focused and centered on the cloud, if you're a CIO or somebody working in the CIO's organization, what you've got to realize and focus on is that 70% of your applications in your spending in your tech stack, are still on premise and VMs and other things that simply cannot be ignored. So, our overarching value proposition above and beyond remaining relevant in the cloud and publishing the state of the cloud is we focus on giving CIOs and IT teams the insight as to what's going on in your on-prem estate and if we do our jobs properly with our technology stack, it's identifying overuse or cost optimization opportunities, so, you can take dollars from your legacy stack and throw it over to invest in more innovative things that's going to move the needle for your business. >> So, that's a pretty interesting, I think value pop especially where the public cloud show help me understand kind of the overall challenge when we're thinking about public cloud, where typically less than 30% of our resources are probably in the public cloud. For most people watching this interview and the majority are on the private cloud, how does like Flexera help me to extract the value of both environments? >> Well, that's by robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? So, for everybody listening in here, lean in and listen. The biggest problem that we have when we're talking with our customers is that the cloud people aren't talking to the legacy on-prem asset management people and like Americans or everybody else, we got to just get together and talk to one another so, there's money and budget dollars to be extracted on the legacy on-prem last glamorous stuff of the house here and I say with great certainty not knowing all of the situations with everybody that's watching this, that I'm sure that you fight for single Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yen, et cetera, et cetera that you want to spend on your cloud initiatives. By collaborating with your brethren and your sisters over on the other side of the aisle and by looking at what's going on on the on-prem estate here, you can identify opportunities where you can reallocate budget dollars. >> So Marie, you guys have this term that I've not seen before, Technology Value Optimization or TVO, explain that to me. >> So, TVO is just the latest evolution in terms of how we think about our portfolio and our place in this ecosystem. That includes not just your traditional infrastructure management but this bridging and this realization of value when it comes to how we help our customers extract the value from what we do really, really well which is all around discovery of IT assets. It's around knowing my entitlements, it's around understanding my usage and now of course we brought cloud assets into the picture and helping our customers not only understand and see into those cloud assets but really look at how do I right size? How do I reclaim dollars? How do I avoid failed audits and really understand my usage patterns and what it is I need to do to enact and move toward that digital transformation that Jim referred to? So, at the end of the day, how we think about technology value optimization is that critical factor which is all around understanding the return on the investment and how to better understand and monetize the value for our customers in terms of what they have today and where they need to go. >> Ken, I wanted you to shed some light in what we consider or what we should now consider assets in this new era of cloud, and that your traditional products that how could others understand the AS or the asset either is a server or a virtual machine on that server networks switch etcetera but as I look at SaaS and past platforms and infrastructure as a service platform, what is the asset in this new world? >> By my definition, an asset is anything that your company spend money on and you need to get a return on it. So, 10 years ago, if we were having this conversation, an asset would have been a desktop, a router, a server, or maybe it would be a multi-core server and as things started to get a little bit more complicated, we added virtual machines. So, assets weren't just physical devices, they were virtual devices where we really cut our teeth and made a name for ourselves at Flexera was in software license optimization or software asset management, which is you take all of your physical assets and then you throw software applications from IBM, Oracle SAP, Microsoft and you put those two together and what you have are licensable events or financial exposure, because it's not just as simple as buying a database from Oracle, Oracle is going to want to know how many cores you're running on the server, and all of those different combinations in a Rubik's cube of complexity throw off licensable or financial events and while I'd love to tell everybody that the cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is making it easier, it's actually making it more sophisticated and more complicated to try and get your head around it because now you have containers and just when we thought we had figured out VMs and what assets and things are running in VMs, you've got containers that are going up and down and trying to find out what assets are in containers across a hybrid multicloud environment says the latest instantiation of chasing your tail here in the business. >> And then help me think through, or at least visualize this concept of entitlements when it comes to the cloud era. When I had on premises assets, I could go and look at my Oracle license and maybe figure out what I was entitled to but now when I, especially when I think of multicloud multi-service and even hybrid where Microsoft gives me credits or on premises services versus off-prem services, help me understand how I should be looking at that and how Flexera helps. >> I think you've got to be looking at it at closely and you can't look at it in isolation. So what you can't do is look at what you've got spun up in an Azure environment and AWS or Google cloud environment, because you're only going to negotiate one agreement with Microsoft most likely. You're only going to negotiate one ELA with IBM or Oracle, or fill in the blank and you know what, Oracle's not going to care what you're running in just cloud if they come and audit you. They are going to perform an audit, and they're going to want to know what you're running in in an on-prem world in VMs, on your data center and your desktop, and then they're going to want you to bring to full account what you're running in your cloud environments as well. So the way Flexera helps you is that we can discover, and we can give you an unprecedented visibility into what's running throughout your IT assets estate, whether it's on-prem, on a desktop, in a data center, on a SaaS application and an infrastructure platform as a service, pull it back and normalize it and compare that to what you've actually signed with all of your suppliers and when we do our job right, our customers run our algorithms across what you're entitled to use and what you're actually using, and what we find is that there's anywhere from 30 zero to 30% of overused in spend in ways. >> Keith, I just want to add example of where I saw this in real time with one of our solution engineers this about two weeks ago, where he was demonstrating the power of what we deliver across entitlements and usage and understanding where a potential wasted spend is and the customer was really focused on Oracle, and making sure that the Oracle negotiation coming up was going to be one where the customer felt like they were in a position of strengths and really understood what entitlements and usage were but when we showed them that Oracle was one piece of a bigger puzzle and that their cloud spend and AWS spend, and even their spend with some of their largest SaaS applications was actually much smaller than the whole, it really showed the customer the power of looking at these assets back to your question around assets and how do we think about them in a way that compares them to one another so the customer gets a full point of view. >> It's very difficult to get an Apple's and Apple's comparison with hybrid versus public and it's no longer just, I don't know if it was ever simple, but it's just more complex these days. Last question, as you look at the past few years, and I go to the Flexera website and look at your product portfolio, talk to me about the relationship between your customer in the industry and how that's changed and how customers consume Flexera as a product. >> I think over the years, our customers like the market has shifted to our SaaS and cloud offering we back in the day we used to have perpetual licenses and we were focusing on an on-prem scenario only, and our customers rightfully so have become far more demanding much like the market has and they now expect things to be delivered in real time with an agile mindset on a SaaS or cloud native basis and with that becomes a much, much higher expectation in terms of customer success and service that they get, because they're on a subscription basis, they can cancel at any time, just like we can do with our cable service provider. So we've really had to invest a lot, not just in R&D and making sure that our technology delivers outcomes, but in the way that we work with and service our customers. They're far more demanding than that they ever have and I wouldn't want it any other way and we think that our strategic imperatives is just keeping up with that in their high demands and expectations in the future. >> Well, I really appreciate you two taking out the time out of your busy schedules, both of you on the East coast, I'm in a Midwest, couple of hundred thousand people tuning into AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual learning to tackle a lot of these complex problems. The pandemic, the new reality of the market has forced us to address implementing and managing enterprise IT in a completely different way. This conference is a great example of that. We thank our friends at Flexera for sponsoring this interview. You want to learn more about theCUBE's coverage? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Plenty of content with me and my fellow co-host this year coming out of AWS re:Invent 2020 talk to you next installment of theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:invent 2020, it's virtual this year, we're usually in person this year we have to do remote interviews because of the pandemic, but it's been a great run, a lot of great content happening here in these next three weeks of re:Invent. We've got two great guests here as part of our coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm your host, John Furrier. Barbara Kessler, Global APN Programs Leader, and Ryan Broadwell, Global Director of ISVs for AWS. Thanks for coming on the CUBE, Thanks for joining me. >> Hey, thanks for having us, it's great to be here. >> You know we heard of-- >> Yeah thanks for having us John. >> Thanks for coming on. Sorry we're not in person, but tons of content. I mean, there's a lot of the VODs, the main stages, but the news hitting this morning around Doug's comments from strong focus of ISVs is just a continuation. We heard that last year, but this year more focus investments there, new announcements take us through what we just heard and what it means. >> Yeah John, I'll jump in first and then let Barbara add some additional color and commentary, but I think it is a continuation for us as we look at continuing to build a momentum with our ISVs they're mission critical for us, and we hear that loud and clear from our customers. So as you think about building off what Doug was talking about, I think it's first important for us to start with, we look to help our partners build and build well-designed solutions on AWS, supporting their innovation and transformation and working together to deliver scalable, reliable, secure solutions for our customers. To facilitate this, we offer programs such as AWS SaaS Factory, that provide enablement to our ISVs to build new products, migrate single tenent environments or optimize existing SaaS Solutions on AWS. And we do this through mechanisms like Webinars, Bootcamps, Workshops and even one-on-one engagements. You know, as you talked about, we just heard from Doug announce AWS SaaS Boost, which is a ready to use open source implementation of SaaS tooling and best practices to accelerate ISV SaaS Path. Through SaaS Factory which we've worked on with many ISVs in the last few years and you're well aware of, we have lots of learnings and we've helped a lot of partners make that journey towards SaaS. Partners like BMC, CloudZero, Nasdaq, Cohesity, or F5 transform their delivery and business models to SaaS. We've had a lot of demand for this type of engagement. And we knew it was important that we come up with a scalable way to help partners accelerate their transformation. SaaS Boost provides prescriptive experience to transform applications through an intuitive tool with many core services needed to develop and operate on the AWS Cloud. In addition to that, we look to use the well-architected framework, which is proven to set the architectural best practices for designing in operating systems in the Cloud, to help ISVs build their solutions on AWS. We just launched two additional lenses in well-architected tool, to enable ISVs to conduct these reviews from within the AWS console, one SaaS environment, and one aligned with foundational technical reviews, which helps partners prepare for the technical validation in AWS Partner Programs. >> You know, the SaaS Boost, I love that I was joking on Twitter, it sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that SaaS Boost, don't drink too many of them you get immune to two to strong out, but this is what people want Barbara. This is about the Partner Network. You guys are providing more stuff, more successful programs and capabilities. This is what the demand is for. Help me get there faster path to SaaS. Can you explain what this means for partners? What's in it for them, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Ryan talked about some of the things that we do to help partners build their ISVs and software or SaaS products. But in addition to that, we provide a number of programs and resources to help partners also grow their business through marketing and sales focused programs. That's an area that we are focused on investing deeply with our partner community. For example, we offer APN Marketing Central through which partners can find and launch free customizable marketing campaigns, or even find a marketing agency to work with that has experienced messaging AWS, it also offers APN marketing activity. We recognize that not all partners, especially if they're in their startup stages, have those investments and skill sets yet around marketing. So Marketing Academy offers self service content to teach partners who don't have that capability in house today, to how to drive awareness campaigns and build demand for their offerings. We also offer a broad set of funding benefits to help partners starting from the build stage that Ryan talks about through Sandbox Credits to support their development, all the way through marketing with Market Development Funds as they're selling with what we call our partner Opportunity Acceleration Program, which is how we fund POC to support our partners and winning new customers. We also heard Doug announce in the keynote that we are launching the ISV Accelerate Program. This is our new co-selling program for ISVs that offer compensation incentives for AWS account managers, access to co-sale specialists and reduced marketplace listing fees to help our partners continue to grow their business with us. >> You know, successful selling is amazing. You want to make money. I mean, come on, you bring it a lot to the table. Co-selling I think that's a huge point. Nice call out there. Ryan, can you give some examples of partners that have been successful with these resources? >> Hey John, thank you. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of walk through with one good example and a little bit of detail. And what we've seen with Sisense is a great example of a partner that leveraged these resources and the work that they've done with Luma Health. So Luma Health serves millions of patients, provides a Cloud-hosted patient engagement platform that connects patients and providers. You know when word about COVID started, spreading Luma helped solve a big increase in questions and concerns from patients and the providers. Luma Health saw an opportunity to create new products, to help patients and providers during the pandemic, to decide what to build and how to build it, the company wanted to analyze sentimental signal and data real-time. Using Sisense, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Web Services, Data Migration Services, Luma Health built a platform that delivered analytics and insights it needed, democratizing access to the data for all users. As a result, Luma Health uncovered insights such as facts that SMS was the preferred method of communication and that many patients had similar questions. Just three weeks after their hypothesis, Luma Health released new products based on its insights, a turn-key EHR enabled healthcare solution, zero contact check-in and COVID-19 Broadcast Messaging System. >> So a lot of good successes. The question that I would ask you guys, this is the probably what's on everyone's mind is I'm a partner, I'm growing, obviously I'm in the partner network because I'm being successful. I don't have a lot of time. I need to figure out all the stuff that you have. You have so much going on that's good for me. I don't know what to do. Can you help me figure out what resources and programs to leverage? I could imagine this is a question that I would have, I want it too, I want to make money co-sell, I want to get into this program. What's the best path? I mean, what do I do? Can you share how you help your partners get on the right road, have the right resources, What are the right programs? 'Cause it makes it more consumable. This is probably a big challenge, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, happy to explore that. So we certainly find a lot of opportunity to innovate with our partners and customers and a result we do offer a broad range of programs, resources, material to meet the diverse needs of those partners and customers. One focus of these programs and enablement models that we offer partners, is to help our partners build their products and build their business with us. And the other focus is to create program structures that help customers find the right partner and the right solution at the right time. But we recognize it's a lot (chuckles) and we want to make sure that our partners are easily able to find what's most relevant to them. And to deliver this more effectively for ISV partners specifically, Doug just announced the launch of ISV Partner Path. As with everything we do at AWS, this new program structure works backwards from our customers and our partners to deliver the needs of both of those audiences. When a customer identifies a need for a solution, they search for that solution based on their business needs and the outcomes that they're looking to deliver rather than searching based on a partner profile. So ISV Partner Path pivots the focus that we have today on partner-level tier badging to instead focus on solution-level validation badging that helps us better align to what our customers are looking for and how they look for software products. The new model responds to that partner and customer feedback that we've heard, it removes APN tier requirements for ISVs and introduces the ability to engage across all of the products, services, and solutions that a partner offers and it pivots the partner badge attainment. So today our partners attain badging based on a tier and moving forward, they'll attain that badging to go to market with solutions that are validated and have gone through a technical assessment to either integrate effectively or run effectively on AWS. So if you were requirements to access APN programs from differentiation to funding and co-selling, partners can engage more quickly in a more meaningful way and in a more clear path to develop their solution offering and go to market with AWS. >> Ryan anything you want to add on in terms of structural support in terms of account management and does everyone get in on a wrap? Is there certain levels of attention? When does that come into play? >> Yeah, I think Barbara has made a great point in that we have a lot of great programmatic resources, but there's also no substitution for engagement with a person. And we have Partner Development Resources available to engage with our partners and help them develop their individualized plans that help them understand how they maximize the opportunity with their customer set and expand their customer sets. This starts as soon as a partner registers with the AWS Partner Network, they're contacted by a Partner Development team member within the first business day. This is a commitment we find incredibly important to the partner. And even when we have five or more new partners registering every single day. We look to go beyond that and it's not just about onboarding to your point John, our partner team works backwards from the customer and the partner to help develop what is that joint plan? How do we focus on what strategic to the partner and what becomes strategic to our customers? With that plan our team works to activate that broadly across the team in support of achieving our joint goals. And then naturally all partnerships, we want join accountability, we want mechanisms to measure success. >> You know I talked to a lot of channel partners over the years in my career, and the Cloud it really highlights the speed and the agility feature, but it all comes down to the same thing. I want to get my solution in front of the customer, I want to make money, I want to make it easy to use, make it easy to consume. I want to leverage the Cloud. This is kind of the process, this is how it always happens. This is what they want and you guys are bringing a lot to the table and that's important. And I think co-selling having the kind of support, making it consumable is easy and super great. So I have to ask you with that, what's your advice for people who are jumping in? Because you're seeing more on boarding of ISVs than ever before. And we've been commenting on theCUBE for multiple years. We've been seeing the uptick in software SaaS ISVs. And remember Amazon is not in the SaaS business a hundred percent. And government just collapsed the platform as a service in the IS categories that highlights the fact that your entire ISV landscape is wide open and growing. So there's new ISV is coming in. (chuckles) What advice would you give them to get started, experience and -- >> Yeah, I can take that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I can take that one thank you. And I actually want to build on something Ryan said, we actually have more than 50 new partners joining the AWS Partner Network every single day. And so having the right structure for those partners to easily navigate and the right resources for them is something that's very top of mind for us. I think I can distill down about two primary pieces of advice from my perspective for a new partner who's trying to figure out how to work with us and get involved. First and foremost, build a relationship with your Partner Manager, help them know and understand your business, the customers that you focus on, the solutions you provide. The Partner Manager is your advocate and could be your mentor in working with AWS. Make sure they know what you're good at. Partners are able to build the best traction with our shared customers and our AWS sales team when it's very clear what they're good at and how their solutions solve specific customer problems. And specialization through programs such as competency, which validate solutions based on industry in this case or workload is really key to helping communicate that specific value. And second, I would say avail yourself of the resources available to you. We offer a number of self-serve resources, such as the new ISV Navigate Track that is launching in conjunction with ISV Partner Path that provides individuals the sort of step by step guidance to move through that engagement with us, they connect them to all the resources that they need. Marketing Central which we discussed earlier to drive marketing campaigns that can be very self-served and driven by the Partner Central, which offers a wealth of content, white papers, et cetera. That's our portal through which partners engage. And you can also access things like training and certification discounts to build your Cloud skills to support your business. But I think both of those are really important things to keep in mind for partners who are just kind of getting started with us as well as partners who've been working with us for a while now. >> Ryan, what do you want to add to that because again, there's more ISVs is coming. And again, Amazon has been very disruptive in it's enablement of partners. Not everyone fits into a nice clean bucket. I mean what looks like a category might be old and being disrupted into to a new category being developed. All these new categories and new solutions. It's hard to put people into buckets. So you have a tough job, how do you give advice to your partners? >> It is tough, and the rate of transformation continues. And the rate of innovation continues to quicken. My advice is lean in with us. We continue to invest our efforts in developing this vibrant community of partners. So lean in, we'll continue to iterate around and optimize our joint plans and activities. And we'd look to be able to continue to drive success for our customers and our partners. >> Well, you guys do a great job. I want to say I've watched the APN grow and change and evolve. Market demand is there and you got the Factory, you got the Boost, you got the Lenses, you got the Partner Network, the people. It's people equation with software so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Okay, great event here, re:Invent 2020 Virtual. This is theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier your host, wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (gentle music)