>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of data automated and event. Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe. Okay, we're back with Adam Worthington. Who's the CTO and co founder of Ethos Adam. Good to see you. How are things across the pond? >>Thank you. I'm sure that a little bit on your side. >>Okay, so let's let's set it up. Tell us about yourself. What your role is a CTO and give us the low down on those. >>Sure, So we get automatic. As you said CTO and co founder of A were pretty young company ourselves that we're in our sixth year and we specialize in emerging disruptive technologies within the infrastructure Data center kind of cloud space. And my role is the technical lead. So it's kind of my job to be an expert in all of the technologies that we work with, which can be a bit of a challenge if you have a huge portfolio, is one of the reasons we deliberately focusing on on also kind of a validation and evaluation of new technologies. Yeah, >>so you guys are really technology experts, data experts and probably also expert in process and delivering customer outcomes. Right? >>That's a great word there, Dave Outcomes. That's a lot of what I like to speak to customers about on. Sometimes I get that gets lost, particularly with within highly technical field. I like the virtualization guy or a network like very quickly start talking about the nuts and bolts of technology on I'm a techie. I'm absolutely a nerd, like the best tech guitar but fundamentally reporting in technologies to meet. This is outcomes to solve business problems on on to enable a better way. >>Love it. We love tech, too, but really, it's all about the customer. So let's talk about smart data. You know, when you when you throw in terms like this is it kind of Canfield Buzz Wordy. But let's let's get into the meat on it. What does that mean to you? One of the critical aspects of so called smart data >>cool probably hoped to step back a little bit and set the scene a little bit more in in terms of kind of where I came from, the types of problems that I'm really an infrastructure solution architect trace on what I kind of benefits. We organically But over time my personal framework, I focused on three core design principles whatever it was I was designing. And obviously they need different things. Depending on what technology area is that we're working with. That's pretty good on. And what I realized that we realized we started with those principles could be it could be used more broadly in the the absolute best of breed of technologies. And those really disrupt, uh, significantly improve upon the status quo in one or more of those three areas. Ideally or more simple, more on if we look at the data of the challenges that organizations, enterprises organizations have criticized around data and smart fail over the best way. Maybe it's good to reflect on what the opposite end of the story is kind of why data is often quite dumb. The traditional approaches. We have limited visibility into the data that we're up to the story using within our infrastructure as what we kind of ended up with over time, through no fault of the organizations that have happened silos, everyone silos of expertise. So whether that be, that's going out. Specialized teams, socialization, networking. They have been, for example, silos of infrastructure, which trade state of fragmentation copies of data in different areas of the infrastructure on copies of replication in that data set or reputation in terms of application environments. I think that that's kind of what we tend to focus on, what it's becoming, um, resonating with more organizations. There's a survey that one of the vendors that we work with actually are launched vendor 5.5 years ago, a medical be gone. They work with any company called Phantom Born a first of a kind of global market, 900 respondents, all different vectors, a little different countries, the U. S. And Germany. And what they found was shocking. It was a recent survey so focused on secondary data, but the lessons learned the information taken out a survey applies right across the gamut of infrastructure data organizations. Just some stats just pull out the five minutes 85% off the organization surveyed store between two and five stores data in 3 to 5 clouds. 63% of organizations have between four and 16 coffees of exactly the same data. Nearly nine out of 10 respondents believe that organizations, secondly, data's fragmented across silos are touched on is would become nearly impossible to manage over the long term on. And 91% of the vast majority of organizations leadership were concerned about the level of visibility their teams. So they're the kind of areas that a smart approach to data will directly address. So reducing silos that comes from simplifying so moving away from complexity of infrastructure, reducing the amount of copies of data that we have across the infrastructure and reducing the amount of application environment. I mean, Harry, so smarter we get with data is in my eyes. Anyway, the further we moved away from this, >>there was a lot in that answer, but I want to kind of summarize it if I can talk. You started with simplicity, flexibility, efficiency. Of course, that's what customers want. And then I was gonna ask you about you know, what challenges customers are facing, and I think you laid it out here. But I want to I want to pick on a couple of some of the data that you talked about the public cloud treat that adds complexity and diversity in skill requirements. The copies of data is so true, like data is just like like if rebels, If you Star Trek franchise, they just expand and replicate. So that's an expense, and it adds complexity. Silo data means you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who's got the right data. What's the real truth with a lot of manual processes involved in the visibility is obviously critical. So those are the problems on. But course you talked about how you address those, But But how does it work? I mean, how do you know what's what's involved in injecting smarts into your data? Lifecycle >>that plane, Think about it. So insurance of the infrastructure and say they were very good reasons why customers are in situations they have been in this situation because of the limits are traditional prices. So you look at something is fundamental. So a great example, um on applications that utilize the biggest fundamentally back ups are now often what that typically required is completely separate infrastructure to everything else. But when we're talking about the data set, so what would be a perfect is if we could back up data on use it for other things, and that's where a, uh, a technology provider like So So although it better technology is incredibly simple, it's also incredibly powerful and allows identification, consolidation. And then, if you look at just getting insight out of that fundamentally tradition approaches to infrastructure, they're put in a point of putting a requirement. And therefore it wasn't really incumbent exposed any information out of the data that's stored within the division, which makes it really tricky to do anything else outside of the application. That that's where something like Iot how come in in terms of abstracting away the complexity more directly, I So these are the kind of the area. So I think one of my I did not ready, but generally one of my favorite quotes from the French philosopher and a mathematician, Blaise Pascal, he says, I get this right. I have written a short letter, but I didn't have time. But Israel. I love that quite for lots of reasons, that computation of what we're talking about, it is actually really complicated to develop a technology capability to make things simple, more directly meet the needs of the business. So you provide self service capabilities that they just need to stop driving. I mean making data on infrastructure makes sense for the business users. Music. It's My belief is that the technology shouldn't mean that the users of the technology has to be a technology expert what we really want them to be. And they should be a business experts in any technology that you should enable on demand for the types of technologies to get me excited. They're not necessarily from a ftt complicated technology perspective, but those are really focused on impressive the capability. >>Yeah. Okay, so you talked about back up, We're gonna hear from Kohi City a little bit later and beyond backup data protection, Data Management, That insight piece you talked earlier about visibility, and that's what the Iot Tahoe's bringing table with its software. So that's another component of the tech stack, if you will, Um, and then you talk about simplicity. We're gonna hear from pure storage. They're all about simple storage. They call it the modern data experience. I think so. So those are some of the aspects and your job. Correct me. If I'm wrong is to kind of put that all together in a solution and then help the customer realize that we talked about earlier that business out. >>Yeah, it's that they said, in understanding both sides so that it keeps us on our ability to be able to deliver on exactly what you just said. It's being experts in the capabilities and new and better ways to do things but also having the kind of business under. I found it to be able to ask the right questions, identify how new a better price is positions and you touched on. Yet three vendors that we work with that you have on the panel are very genuinely of. I think of the most exciting around storage and pure is a great one. So yes, a lot of the way that they've made their way. The market is through impressive C and through producing data redundancy. But another area that I really like is with that platform, you can do more with less. And that's not just about using data redundancy. That's about creating application environment, that conservative, then the infrastructure to service different requirements are able to do that the random Io thing without getting too kind of low level as well as a sequential. So what that means is that you don't necessarily have to move data from application environment a do one thing. They disseminate it and then move it to the application environment. Be that based environment three in terms of an analytics on the left to right work. So keep the data where it is, use it for different requirements within the infrastructure and again do more with less. And what that does is not just about simplicity and efficiency. It significantly reduces the time to value. Well at that again resonates that I want to pick up a soundbite that resonates with all of the vendors we have on the panel later. This is the way that they're able todo a better a better TCO better our alliance significantly reduce the value of data. But to answer your question, yeah, you're exactly right. So it's key to us to kind of position, understand? Customer climbs, position the right technology. >>Adam. I wonder if you could give us your insights based on your experience with customers in terms of what success looks like. I'm interested in what they're measuring. I'm big on and end cycle times and taking a systems view, but of course you know customers. They want to measure everything, whether it's the productivity of developers or, you know, time to insights, etcetera. What >>are >>they? One of the KP eyes that are driving success and outcomes? >>Those capabilities on historically in our space have always been a bit really. When you talk about total cost of ownership, talk about return on investment, you talk about time to value on. I've worked in many different companies, many different infrastructure, often quite complicated environments and infrastructure. I'm being able to put together anything Security realistic gets proven out. One solution gets turned around our alliance TCO is challenging. But now with these new, a better approach is that more efficient, enables you to really build a true story and on replicate whatever you want. Obviously ran kind of our life, and the key thing is to say from data, But now it's time to value. So what we what? We help in terms of the scoping on in terms of the understanding what the requirements are, we specifically called out business outcomes what organizations are looking to achieve and then back on those metrics, uh, to those outcomes. What that does is a few different things, but it provides a certain success criteria. Whether that's success criteria within a proof of concept of the mobile solutions on being able to speak that language on before, more directly meet the needs of the business kind of crystallized defined way is we're only really be able to do that. Now we work with >>Yeah, So when you think about the business case, they are a why benefit over cost benefit obviously lower tco you lower the denominator, you're going to increase the output in the value. And then I would I would really stress that I think the numerator, ultimately especially in a world of data, is the most important. And I think the TCO is fundamental. It's really becoming table stakes. You gotta have simple. You've gotta have efficient. You've got to be agile. But it enables that that numerator, whether that's new customer revenue, maybe, you know, maybe cost savings across the business. And again that comes from taking that systems view. Do you >>have >>examples that you can share with us even if they're anonymous, eyes the customers that you work with that or maybe a little further down on the journey, or maybe not things that you can share with us that are proof points here. >>Sure, it's quite easy and very gratifying when you've spoken to a customer. We know you've been doing this for 20 years, and this is the way that your infrastructure if you think about it like this, if we implemented that technology or this new approach, then we will enable you to get simple, often ready, populous. Reduce your back. I worked on a project where a customer accused that back book from I think it was. It was nine. Just under 10. It was nine fully loaded. Wraps back. We should just for the it you're providing the fundamental underlying storage architectures. And they were able to consolidate that that down on, provide additional capacity. Great performance. The less than half Uh huh. Looking at the you mentioned data protection earlier. So another organization. This is a project which is just kind of nearing completion of the moment. Huge organization. They're literally petabytes of data that was servicing their back up in archive. And what they have is not just the reams of data, they have the combined thing. I different backup. Yeah, that they have dependent on the what area of infrastructure they were backing up. So whether it was virtualization that was different, they were backing up. Pretty soon they're backing up another database environment using something else in the cloud. So a consolidated approach that we recommended to work with them on they were able to significantly reduce complexity and reduce the amount of time that it system what they were able to achieve. And this is again one of the clients have they've gone above the threshold of being able to back up. When they tried to do a CR, you been everything back up into in a second. They want people to achieve it. Within the timescales is a disaster recovery, business continuity. So with this, we're able to prove them with a proof up. Just before they went into production and the our test using the new approach. And they were able to recover everything the entire interest in minutes instead of a production production, workloads that this was in comparison to hours and that was those hours is just a handful of workloads. They were able to get up and running with the entire estate, and I think it was something like an hour on the core production systems. They were up and running practically instantaneously. So if you look at really stepping back what the customers are looking to the chief, they want to be able to if there is any issues recover from those issues, understand what they're dealing with. Yeah, On another, we have customers that we work with recently what they had huge challenges around and they were understandably very scared about GDP are. But this is a little while ago, actually, a bit still no up. A conversation has gone away. Just everybody are still speaks to issues and concerns around GDP are applying understanding whether they so put in them in us in a position to be able to effectively react. Subject That was something that was a key metric. A target for on infrastructure solution that we work with and we were able to provide them with the insight into their data on day enables them to react to compliance. And they're here to get a subject access request way created in significantly. I'm >>awesome. Thank you for that. I want to pick up on a little bit. So the first example you get your infrastructure in order to bust down those silos and what I've when I talk to customers. And I've talked to a number of banks, insurance companies, other financial services of manufacturers when they're able to sort of streamline that data lifecycle and bring in automation and intelligence, if you will. What they tell me is now they're able to obviously compress the time to value, but also they're loading up on way more initiatives and projects that they can deliver for the business. And you talk for about about the line of business having self served. The businesses feel like they actually are really invested in the data, that it's their data that it's not, you know, confusing and a lot of finger pointing. So so that's that's huge on. And I think that your other example is right on as well of really clear business value that organizations are seeing. So thanks for those you know. Now is the time really, t get these houses in order, if you will, because it really drives competitive advantage, especially take your second example in this isolation economy, you know, being able to respond things like privacy are just increasingly critical. Adam, give us the final thoughts. Bring us home in this segment, >>not the farm of built, something we didn't particularly touch on that I think it's It's fairly fairly hidden. It isn't spoken about as much as I think it is that digital approaches to infrastructure we've already touched on there could be complicated on lack of efficiency, impact, a user's ability to be agile, what you find with traditional approaches. And you already touched on some of the kind of benefits and new approaches that they're often very prescriptive, designed for a particular as the infrastructure environment, the way that it served up to the users in a kind of A packaged either way means that they need to use it in that whatever way, in places. So that kind of self service aspect that comes in from a flexibility standpoint that for me in this platform approach, which is the right way to address technology in my eyes enables it's the infrastructure to be used effectively so that the business uses of the data users what we find in this capability into their hand and start innovating in the way that they use that on the way that they bring benefits a platform to prescriptive, and they are able to do that. So what you're doing with these new approaches is all of the metrics that we touched on fantastic from a cost standpoint, from a visibility standpoint. But what it means is that the innovators in the business want to really, really understand what they're looking to achieve and now tools to innovate with us. Now, I think I've started to see that with projects that were completed, you could do it in the right way. You articulate the capability and empower the business users in the right way. Then very significantly better position. Take advantage of this on really match and significantly bigger than their competition. >>Super Adam in a really exciting space. And we spent the last 10 years gathering all this data, you know, trying to slog through it and figure it out. And now, with the tools that we have and the automation capabilities, it really is a new era of innovation and insights. So, Adam or they didn't thanks so much for coming on the Cube and participating in this program >>Exciting times. And thank you very much today. >>Alright, Stay safe and thank you. Everybody, this is Dave Volante for the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Data Automated. An event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Welcome everyone to the second episode in our Data Automated series made possible with support from Io-Tahoe. Today, we're going to drill into the data lifecycle. Meaning the sequence of stages that data travels through from creation to consumption to archive. The problem as we discussed in our last episode is that data pipelines are complicated, they're cumbersome, they're disjointed and they involve highly manual processes. A smart data lifecycle uses automation and metadata to improve agility, performance, data quality and governance. And ultimately, reduce costs and time to outcomes. Now, in today's session we'll define the data lifecycle in detail and provide perspectives on what makes a data lifecycle smart? And importantly, how to build smarts into your processes. In a moment we'll be back with Adam Worthington from Ethos to kick things off. And then, we'll go into an expert power panel to dig into the tech behind smart data lifecyles. And, then we'll hop into the crowd chat and give you a chance to ask questions. So, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Innovation. Impact. Influence. Welcome to theCUBE. Disruptors. Developers. And, practitioners. Learn from the voices of leaders, who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE. Your global leader in high tech digital coverage. >> Okay, we're back with Adam Worthington. Adam, good to see you, how are things across the pond? >> Good thank you, I'm sure our weather's a little bit worse than yours is over the other side, but good. >> Hey, so let's set it up, tell us about yourself, what your role is as CTO and--- >> Yeah, Adam Worthington as you said, CTO and co-founder of Ethos. But, we're a pretty young company ourselves, so we're in our sixth year. And, we specialize in emerging disruptive technology. So, within the infrastructure data center kind of cloud space. And, my role is a technical lead, so I, it's kind of my job to be an expert in all of the technologies that we work with. Which can be a bit of a challenge if you have a huge portfolio. One of the reasons we got to deliberately focus on. And also, kind of pieces of technical validation and evaluation of new technologies. >> So, you guys are really technology experts, data experts, and probably also expert in process and delivering customer outcomes, right? >> That's a great word there Dave, outcomes. I mean, that's a lot of what I like to speak to customers about. >> Let's talk about smart data you know, when you throw out terms like this it kind of can feel buzz wordy but what are the critical aspects of so-called smart data? >> Cool, well typically I had to step back a little bit and set the scene a little bit more in terms of kind of where I came from. So, and the types of problems I've sorted out. So, I'm really an infrastructure or solution architect by trade. And, what I kind of, relatively organically, but over time my personal framework and approach. I focused on three core design principles. So, simplicity, flexibility and efficiency. So, whatever it was I was designing and obviously they need different things depending on what the technology area is that we're working with. So, that's for me a pretty good step. So, they're the kind of areas that a smart approach in data will directly address both reducing silos. So, that comes from simplifying. So, moving away from complexity of infrastructure. Reducing the amount of copies of data that we have across the infrastructure. And, reducing the amount of application environment for the need for different areas. So, the smarter we get with data it's in my eyes anyway, the further we move away from those traditional legacy. >> But, how does it work? I mean, how, in other words, what's involved in injecting smarts into your data lifecycle? >> I think one of my, well actually I didn't have this quote ready, but genuinely one of my favorite quotes is from the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal and he says, if I get this right, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." So, there's real, I love that quote for lots of reasons. >> Dave: Alright. >> That's direct applications in terms of what we're talking about. In terms of, it's actually really complicated to develop a technology capability to make things simple. Be more directly meeting the needs of the business through tech. So, you provide self-service capability. And, I don't just mean self-driving, I mean making data and infrastructure make sense to the business users that are using it. >> Your job, correct me if I'm wrong, is to kind of put that all together in a solution. And then, help the customer you know, realize what we talked about earlier that business out. >> Yeah, and that's, it's sitting at both sides and understanding both sides. So, kind of key to us in our abilities to be able to deliver on exactly what you've just said, is being experts in the capabilities and new and better ways of doing things. But also, having the kind of, better business understanding to be able to ask the right questions to identify how can you better approach this 'cause it helps solve these issues. But, another area that I really like is the, with the platforms you can do more with less. And, that's not just about reducing data redundancy, that's about creating application environments that can service, an infrastructure to service different requirements that are able to do the random IO thing without getting too kind of low level tech. As well as the sequential. So, what that means is, that you don't necessarily have to move data from application environment A, do one thing with it, collate it and then move it to the application environment B, to application environment C, in terms of an analytics kind of left to right workload, you keep your data where it is, use it for different requirements within the infrastructure and again, do more with less. And, what that does, it's not just about simplicity and efficiency, it significantly reduces the times of value that that faces, as well. >> Do you have examples that you can share with us, even if they're anonymized of customers that you've worked with, that are maybe a little further down on the journey. Or, maybe not and--- >> Looking at the, you mentioned data protection earlier. So, another organization this is a project which is just coming nearing completion at the moment. Huge organization, that literally petabytes of data that was servicing their backup and archive. And, what they had is not just this reams of data. They had, I think I'm right in saying, five different backup applications that they had depending on the, what area of infrastructure they were backing up. So, whether it was virtualization, that was different to if they were backing up, different if they were backing up another data base environment they were using something else in the cloud. So, a consolidated approach that we recommended to work with them on. They were able to significantly reduce complexity and reduce the amount of time that it took them. So, what they were able to achieve and this was again, one of the key departments they had. They'd gone above the threshold of being able to backup all of them. >> Adam, give us the final thoughts, bring us home in this segment. >> Well, the final thoughts, so this is something, yeah we didn't particularly touch on. But, I think it's kind of slightly hidden, it isn't spoken about as much as I think it could be. Is the traditional approaches to infrastructure. We've already touched on that they can be complicated and there's a lack of efficiency. It impacts a user's ability to be agile. But, what you find with traditional approaches and we've already touched on some of the kind of benefits to new approaches there, is that they're often very prescriptive. They're designed for a particular firm. The infrastructure environment, the way that it's served up to the users in a kind of a packaged kind of way, means that they need to use it in that, whatever way it's been dictated. So, that kind of self-service aspect, as it comes in from a flexibility standpoint. But, these platforms and these platform approaches is the right way to address technology in my eyes. Enables the infrastructure to be used flexibly. So, the business users and the data users, what we find is that if we put in this capability into their hands. They start innovating the way that they use that data. And, the way that they bring benefits. And, if a platform is too prescriptive and they aren't able to do that, then what you're doing with these new approaches is get all of the metrics that we've touched on. It's fantastic from a cost standpoint, from an agility standpoint. But, what it means is that the innovators in the business, the ones that really understand what they're looking to achieve, they now have the tools to innovate with that. And, I think, and I've started to see that with projects that we've completed, if you do it in the right way, if you articulate the capability and you empower the business users in the right way. Then, they're in a significantly better position, these businesses to take advantages and really sort of match and significantly beat off their competition environment spaces. >> Super Adam, I mean a really exciting space. I mean we spent the last 10 years gathering all this data. You know, trying to slog through it and figure it out and now, with the tools that we have and the automation capabilities, it really is a new era of innovation and insight. So, Adam Worthington, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE and participating in this program. >> Yeah, exciting times and thank you very much Dave for inviting me, and yeah big pleasure. >> Now, we're going to go into the power panel and go deeper into the technologies that enable smart data lifecyles. And, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (light music) >> Voiceover: Are you interested in test-driving the Io-Tahoe platform? Kickstart the benefits of Data Automation for your business through the IoLabs program. A flexible, scalable, sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice. With setup, service and support provided by Io-Tahoe. Click on the link and connect with a data engineer to learn more and see Io-Tahoe in action. >> Welcome back everybody to the power panel, driving business performance with smart data lifecyles. Lester Waters is here, he's the Chief Technology Officer from Io-Tahoe. He's joined by Patrick Smith, who is field CTO from Pure Storage. And, Ezat Dayeh who is Assistant Engineering Manager at Cohesity. Gentlemen, good to see you, thanks so much for coming on this panel. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Yes. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Let's start with Lester, I wonder if each of you could just give us a quick overview of your role and what's the number one problem that you're focused on solving for your customers? Let's start with Lester, please. >> Ah yes, I'm Lester Waters, Chief Technology Officer for Io-Tahoe. And really, the number one problem that we are trying to solve for our customers is to help them understand what they have. 'Cause if they don't understand what they have in terms of their data, they can't manage it, they can't control it, they can't monitor it, they can't ensure compliance. So, really that's finding all that you can about your data that you have and building a catalog that can be readily consumed by the entire business is what we do. >> Patrick, field CTO in your title, that says to me you're talking to customers all the time so you've got a good perspective on it. Give us you know, your take on things here. >> Yeah absolutely, so my patch is in the air and talk to customers and prospects in lots of different verticals across the region. And, as they look at their environments and their data landscape, they're faced with massive growth in the data that they're trying to analyze. And, demands to be able to get inside are faster. And, to deliver business value faster than they've ever had to do in the past, so. >> Got it and then Ezat at Cohesity, you're like the new kid on the block. You guys are really growing rapidly. You created this whole notion of data management, backup and beyond, but from Assistant Engineering Manager what are you seeing from customers, your role and the number one problem that you're solving? >> Yeah sure, so the number one problem I see you know, time and again speaking with customers it's all around data fragmentation. So, due to things like organic growth you know, even maybe budgetary limitations, infrastructure has grown you know, over time, very piecemeal. And, it's highly distributed internally. And, just to be clear you know, when I say internally you know, that could be that it's on multiple platforms or silos within an on-prem infrastructure. But, that it also does extend to the cloud, as well. >> Right hey, cloud is cool, everybody wants to be in the cloud, right? So, you're right it creates maybe unattended consequences. So, let's start with the business outcome and kind of try to work backwards. I mean people you know, they want to get more insights from data, they want to have a more efficient data lifecyle. But, so Lester let me start with you, in thinking about like, the North Star, creating data driven cultures you know, what is the North Star for customers here? >> I think the North Star in a nutshell is driving value from your data. Without question, I mean we differentiate ourselves these days by even the nuances in our data. Now, underpinning that there's a lot of things that have to happen to make that work out well. You know for example, making sure you adequately protect your data. You know, do you have a good storage system? Do you have a good backup and recovery point objectives, recovering time objectives? Do you, are you fully compliant? Are you ensuring that you're ticking all the boxes? There's a lot of regulations these days in terms, with respect to compliance, data retention, data privacy and so fourth. Are you ticking those boxes? Are you being efficient with your data? You know, in other words I think there's a statistic that someone mentioned to me the other day that 53% of all businesses have between three and 15 copies of the same data. So you know, finding and eliminating those is part of the problems you need to chase. >> I like to think of you know, you're right. Lester, no doubt, business value and a lot of that comes from reducing the end to end cycle times. But, anything that you guys would add to that, Patrick and Ezat, maybe start with Patrick. >> Yeah, I think getting value from data really hits on, it hits on what everyone wants to achieve. But, I think there are a couple of key steps in doing that. First of all is getting access to the data. And that's, that really hits three big problems. Firstly, working out what you've got. Secondly, after working out what you've got, how to get access to it. Because, it's all very well knowing that you've got some data but if you can't get access to it. Either, because of privacy reasons, security reasons. Then, that's a big challenge. And then finally, once you've got access to the data, making sure that you can process that data in a timely manner. >> For me you know, it would be that an organization has got a really good global view of all of its data. It understands the data flow and dependencies within their infrastructure. Understands the precise legal and compliance requirements. And, has the ability to action changes or initiatives within their environment. Forgive the pun, but with a cloud like agility. You know, and that's no easy feat, right? That is hard work. >> Okay, so we've talked about the challenges and some of the objectives, but there's a lot of blockers out there and I want to understand how you guys are helping remove them? So, Lester what do you see as some of the big blockers in terms of people really leaning in to this smart data lifecycle. >> Yeah silos, is probably one of the biggest one I see in businesses. Yes, it's my data not your data. Lots of compartmentalization. And, breaking that down is one of the challenges. And, having the right tools to help you do that is only part of the solution. There's obviously a lot of cultural things that need to take place to break down those silos and work together. If you can identify where you have redundant data across your enterprise, you might be able to consolidate those. >> Yeah so, over to Patrick, so you know, one of the blockers that I see is legacy infrastructure, technical debt sucking all the budget. You got you know, too many people having to look after. >> As you look at the infrastructure that supports peoples data landscapes today. For primarily legacy reasons, the infrastructure itself is siloed. So, you have different technologies with different underlying hardware, different management methodologies that are there for good reason. Because, historically you had to have specific fitness for purpose for different data requirements. >> Dave: Ah-hm. >> And, that's one of the challenges that we tackled head on at Pure. With the flash plate technology and the concept of the data hub. A platform that can deliver in different characteristics for the different workloads. But, from a consistent data platform. >> Now, Ezat I want to go to you because you know, in the world, in your world which to me goes beyond backup and one of the challenges is you know, they say backup is one thing, recovery is everything. But as well, the CFO doesn't want to pay for just protection. Now, one of the things that I like about what you guys have done is you've broadened the perspective to get more value out of your what was once seen as an insurance policy. >> I do see one of the biggest blockers as the fact that the task at hand can you know, be overwhelming for customers. But, the key here is to remember that it's not an overnight change, it's not you know, the flick of the switch. It's something that can be tackled in a very piecemeal manner. And, absolutely like you've said you know, reduction in TCO and being able to leverage the data for other purposes is a key driver for this. So you know, this can be resolved. It can be very you know, pretty straightforward. It can be quite painless, as well. Same goes for unstructured data, which is very complex to manage. And you know, we've all heard the stats from the analysts, you know data obviously is growing at an extremely rapid rate. But, actually when you look at that you know, how is it actually growing? 80% of that growth is actually in unstructured data and only 20% of that growth is in structured data. So you know, these are quick win areas that the customers can realize immediate TCO improvement and increased agility, as well. >> Let's paint a picture of this guys, if I can bring up the lifecyle. You know what you can see here is you've got this cycle, the data lifecycle and what we're wanting to do is inject intelligence or smarts into this lifecyle. So, you can see you start with ingestion or creation of data. You're storing it, you've got to put it somewhere, right? You've got to classify it, you've got to protect it. And then, of course you want to you know, reduce the copies, make it you know, efficient. And then, you want to prepare it so that businesses can actually consume it and then you've got compliance and governance and privacy issues. And, I wonder if we could start with you Lester, this is you know, the picture of the lifecycle. What role does automation play in terms of injecting smarts into the lifecycle? >> Automation is key here, you know. Especially from the discover, catalog and classify perspective. I've seen companies where they go and we'll take and dump all of their data base schemes into a spreadsheet. So, that they can sit down and manually figure out what attribute 37 means for a column name. And, that's only the tip of the iceberg. So, being able to automatically detect what you have, automatically deduce where, what's consuming the data, you know upstream and downstream, being able to understand all of the things related to the lifecycle of your data backup, archive, deletion, it is key. And so, having good toolage areas is very important. >> So Patrick, obviously you participate in the store piece of this picture. So, I wondered if you could just talk more specifically about that, but I'm also interested in how you affect the whole system view, the end-to-end cycle time. >> Yeah, I think Lester kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of the importance of automation. Because, the data volumes are just so massive now that you can't effectively manage or understand or catalog your data without automation. Once you understand the data and the value of the data, then that's where you can work out where the data needs to be at any point in time. >> Right, so Pure and Cohesity obviously partnered to do that and of course, Ezat you guys are part of the protect, you're certainly part of the retain. But also, you provide data management capabilities and analytics, I wonder if you could add some color there? >> Yeah absolutely, so like you said you know, we focus pretty heavily on data protection as just one of our areas. And, that infrastructure it is just sitting there really can you know, the legacy infrastructure it's just sitting there you know, consuming power, space, cooling and pretty inefficient. And, automating that process is a key part of that. If I have a modern day platform such as you know, the Cohesity data platform I can actually do a lot of analytics on that through applications. So, we have a marketplace for apps. >> I wonder if we could talk about metadata. It's increasingly important you know, metadata is data about the data. But, Lester maybe explain why it's so important and what role it plays in terms of creating smart data lifecycle. >> A lot of people think it's just about the data itself. But, there's a lot of extended characteristics about your data. So, imagine if for my data lifecycle I can communicate with the backup system from Cohesity. And, find out when the last time that data was backed up or where it's backed up to. I can communicate, exchange data with Pure Storage and find out what tier it's on. Is the data at the right tier commencer with it's use level? If I could point it out. And, being able to share that metadata across systems. I think that's the direction that we're going in. Right now, we're at the stage we're just identifying the metadata and trying to bring it together and catalog it. The next stage will be okay, using the APIs and that we have between our systems. Can we communicate and share that data and build good solutions for customers to use? >> I think it's a huge point that you just made, I mean you know 10 years ago, automating classification was the big problem. And you know, with machine intelligence you know, we're obviously attacking that. But, your point about as machines start communicating to each other and you start you know, it's cloud to cloud. There's all kinds of metadata, kind of new metadata that's being created. I often joke that some day there's going to be more metadata than data. So, that brings us to cloud and Ezat, I'd like to start with you. >> You know, I do think that you know, having the cloud is a great thing. And, it has got its role to play and you can have many different you know, permutations and iterations of how you use it. And, you know, as I've may have sort of mentioned previously you know, I've seen customers go into the cloud very, very quickly and actually recently they're starting to remove workloads from the cloud. And, the reason why this happens is that you know, cloud has got its role to play but it's not right for absolutely everything. Especially in their current form, as well. A good analogy I like to use and this may sound a little bit clique but you know, when you compare clouds versus on premises data centers. You can use the analogies of houses and hotels. So, to give you an idea, so you know, when we look at hotels that's like the equivalent of a cloud, right? I can get everything I need from there. I can get my food, my water, my outdoor facilities, if I need to accommodate more people, I can rent some more rooms. I don't have to maintain the hotel, it's all done for me. When you look at houses the equivalent to you know, on premises infrastructure. I pretty much have to do everything myself, right? So, I have to purchase the house, I have to maintain it, I have buy my own food and water, eat it, I have to make improvements myself. But, then why do we all live in houses, not in hotels? And, the simple answer that I can only think of is, is that it's cheaper, right? It's cheaper to do it myself, but that's not to say that hotels haven't got their role to play. You know, so for example if I've got loads of visitors coming over for the weekend, I'm not going to go and build an extension to my house, just for them. I will burst into my hotel, into the cloud. And, you use it for you know, for things like that. So, what I'm really saying is the cloud is great for many things, but it can work out costlier for certain applications, while others are a perfect fit. >> That's an interesting analogy, I hadn't thought of that before. But, you're right, 'cause I was going to say well part of it is you want the cloud experience everywhere. But, you don't always want the cloud experience, especially you know, when you're with your family, you want certain privacy. I've not heard that before, Ezat. So, that's a new perspective, so thank you. But, Patrick I do want to come back to that cloud experience because in fact that's what's happening in a lot of cases. Organizations are extending the cloud properties of automation on-prem. >> Yeah, I thought Ezat brought up a really interesting point and a great analogy for the use of the public cloud. And, it really reinforces the importance of the Hybrid and the multicloud environment. Because, it gives you that flexibility to choose where is the optimal environment to run your business workloads. And, that's what it's all about. And, the flexibility to change which environment you're running in, either from one month to the next or from one year to the next. Because, workloads change and the characteristics that are available in the cloud change. The Hybrid cloud is something that we've lived with ourselves at Pure. So, our Pure management technology actually sits in a Hybrid cloud environment. We started off entirely cloud native but now, we use the public cloud for compute and we use our own technology at the end of a high performance network link to support our data platform. So, we're getting the best of both worlds. I think that's where a lot of our customers are trying to get to. >> All right, I want to come back in a moment there. But before we do, Lester I wonder if we could talk a little bit about compliance and governance and privacy. I think the Brits on this panel, we're still in the EU for now but the EU are looking at new rules, new regulations going beyond GDPR. Where does sort of privacy, governance, compliance fit in for the data lifecycle. And Ezat, I want your thought on this as well? >> Ah yeah, this is a very important point because the landscape for compliance around data privacy and data retention is changing very rapidly. And, being able to keep up with those changing regulations in an automated fashion is the only way you're going to be able to do it. Even, I think there's a some sort of a maybe ruling coming out today or tomorrow with a change to GDPR. So, this is, these are all very key points and being able to codify those rules into some software whether you know, Io-Tahoe or your storage system or Cohesity, it'll help you be compliant is crucial. >> Yeah, Ezat anything you can add there, I mean this really is your wheel house? >> Yeah, absolutely, so you know, I think anybody who's watching this probably has gotten the message that you know, less silos is better. And, it absolutely it also applies to data in the cloud, as well. So you know, by aiming to consolidate into you know, fewer platforms customers can realize a lot better control over their data. And, the natural affect of this is that it makes meeting compliance and governance a lot easier. So, when it's consolidated you can start to confidently understand who's accessing your data, how frequently are they accessing the data. You can also do things like you know, detecting an ominous file access activities and quickly identify potential threats. >> Okay Patrick, we were talking, you talked earlier about storage optimization. We talked to Adam Worthington about the business case, you've got the sort numerator which is the business value and then a denominator which is the cost. And, what's unique about Pure in this regard? >> Yeah, and I think there are multiple dimensions to that. Firstly, if you look at the difference between legacy storage platforms, they used to take up racks or aisles of space in a data center. With flash technology that underpins flash played we effectively switch out racks for rack units. And, it has a big play in terms of data center footprint and the environmentals associated with a data center. If you look at extending out storage efficiencies and the benefits it brings. Just the performance has a direct effect on staff. Whether that's you know, the staff and the simplicity of the platform so that it's easy and efficient to manage. Or, whether it's the efficiency you get from your data scientists who are using the outcomes from the platform and making them more efficient. If you look at some of our customers in the financial space their time to results are improved by 10 or 20 x by switching to our technology. From legacy technologies for their analytics platforms. >> So guys, we've been running you know, CUBE interviews in our studios remotely for the last 120 days. This is probably the first interview I've done where I haven't started off talking about COVID. Lester, I wondered if you could talk about smart data lifecycle and how it fits into this isolation economy and hopefully what will soon be a post-isolation economy? >> Yeah, COVID has dramatically accelerated the data economy. I think you know, first and foremost we've all learned to work at home. I you know, we've all had that experience where you know, people would hum and har about being able to work at home just a couple of days a week. And, here we are working five days a week. That's had a knock on impact to infrastructure to be able to support that. But, going further than that you know, the data economy is all about how a business can leverage their data to compete in this new world order that we are now in. COVID has really been a forcing function to you know, it's probably one of the few good things that have come out of COVID is that we've been forced to adapt. And, it's been an interesting journey and it continues to be so. >> Like Lester said you know, we're seeing huge impact here. You know, working from home has pretty much become the norm now. You know, companies have been forced into making it work. If you look at online retail, that's accelerated dramatically, as well. Unified communications and video conferencing. So, really you know, that the point here is that, yes absolutely we've compressed you know, in the past maybe four months what probably would have taken maybe even five years, maybe 10 years or so. >> We've got to wrap, but so Lester let me ask you, sort of paint a picture of the sort of journey the maturity model that people have to take. You know, if they want to get into it, where do they start and where are they going? Give us that view. >> Yeah, I think first is knowing what you have. If you don't know what you have you can't manage it, you can't control it, you can't secure it, you can't ensure it's compliant. So, that's first and foremost. The second is really you know, ensuring that you're compliant once you know what you have, are you securing it? Are you following the regulatory, the regulations? Are you able to evidence that? How are you storing your data? Are you archiving it? Are you storing it effectively and efficiently? You know, have you, nirvana from my perspective is really getting to a point where you've consolidated your data, you've broken down the silos and you have a virtually self-service environment by which the business can consume and build upon their data. And, really at the end of the day as we said at the beginning, it's all about driving value out of your data. And, automation is key to this journey. >> That's awesome and you've just described like sort of a winning data culture. Lester, Patrick, Ezat, thanks so much for participating in this power panel. >> Thank you, David. >> Thank you. >> All right, so great overview of the steps in the data lifecyle and how to inject smarts into the processes, really to drive business outcomes. Now, it's your turn, hop into the crowd chat. Please log in with Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, ask questions, answer questions and engage with the community. Let's crowd chat! (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector summit online. That's the virtual conference. Public Sector Summit is the big get together for Teresa Carlson and her team and Amazon Web services from the public sector, which includes all the government agencies as well as education state governments here in United States and also abroad for other governments and countries. So we're gonna do an analysis of Teresa's keynote and also summarize the event as well. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. I'm joined with my co host of the Cube, Dave Volante Stew Minimum. We're gonna wrap this up and analyze the keynote summit a really awkward, weird situation going on with the Summit because of the virtual nature of it. This event really prides itself. Stew and Dave. We've all done this event. It's one of our favorites. It's a really good face to face environment, but this time is virtual. And so with the covert 19 that's the backdrop to all this. >>Yeah, so I mean, a couple of things, John. I think first of all, A Z, you've pointed out many times. The future has just been pulled forward. I think the second thing is with this whole work from home in this remote thing obviously was talking about how the cloud is a tailwind. But let's face it. I mean, everybody's business was affected in some way. I think the cloud ultimately gets a tail wind out of this, but but But I think the third thing is security. Public sector is always heavily focused on security, and the security model has really changed overnight to what we've been talking about for years that the moat that we've built the perimeter is no longer where organizations need to be spending money. It's really to secure remote locations. And that literally happened overnight. So things like a security cloud become much, much more important. And obviously endpoint security and other other things that we've talked about in the Cube now for last 100 days. >>Well, Steve, I want to get your thoughts cause you know, we all love space. Do we always want to go the best space events that they're gonna be virtual this year as well? Um, But the big news out of the keynote, which was really surprising to me, is Amazon's continued double down on their efforts around space, cyber security, public and within the public sector. And they're announcing here, and the big news is a new space business segment. So they announced an aerospace group to serve those customers because space to becoming a very important observation component to a lot of the stuff we've seen with ground station we've seen at reinvent public sector. These new kinds of services are coming out. It's the best, the cloud. It's the best of data, and it's the best of these new use cases. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, interesting. John, of course. You know, the federal government has put together Space Forces, the newest arm of the military. It's really even though something it is a punchline. There's even a Netflix show that I believe got the trademark board because they registered for it first. But we've seen Amazon pushing into space. Not only there technology being used. I had the pleasure of attending the Amazon re Marcia last year, which brought together Jeff Bezos's blue origin as well as Amazon AWS in that ecosystem. So AWS has had a number of services, like ground Station that that that are being used to help the cloud technology extend to what's happening base. So it makes a lot of sense for for the govcloud to extend to that type of environment aside you mentioned at this show. One of the things we love always is. You know, there's some great practitioner stories, and I think so many over the years that we've been doing this show and we still got some of them. Theresa had some really good guests in her keynote, talking about transformation and actually, one of the ones that she mentioned but didn't have in the keynote was one that I got to interview. I was the CTO for the state of West Virginia. If you talk about one of those government services that is getting, you know, heavy usage, it's unemployment. So they had to go from Oh my gosh, we normally had people in, you know, physical answering. The phone call centers to wait. I need to have a cloud based contact center. And they literally did that, you know, over the weekend, spun it up and pulled people from other organizations to just say, Hey, you're working from home You know you can't do your normal job Well, we can train your own, we can get it to you securely And that's the kind of thing that the cloud was really built for >>and this new aerospace division day this really highlights a lot of not just the the coolness of space, but on Earth. The benefits of there and one of Amazon's ethos is to do the heavy lifting, Andy Jassy told us on the Cube. You know, it could be more cost effective to use satellites and leverage more of that space perimeter to push down and look at observation. Cal Poly is doing some really interesting work around space. Amazon's worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Labs. They have a lot of partnerships in aerospace and space, and as it all comes together because this is now an augmentation and the cost benefits are there, this is going to create more agility because you don't have to do all that provisioning to get this going spawned. All kinds of new creativity, both an academic and commercial, your thoughts >>Well, you know, I remember the first cloud first came out people talked a lot about while I can do things that I was never able to do before, you know, The New York Times pdf example comes to mind, but but I think what a lot of people forget is you know the point to a while. A lot of these mission critical applications Oracle databases aren't moving to the cloud. But this example that you're giving and aerospace and ground station. It's all about being able to do new things that you weren't able to do before and deliver them as a service. And so, to me, it shows a great example of tam expansion, and it also shows things that you never could do before. It's not just taking traditional enterprise APs and sticking them in the cloud. Yeah, that happens. But is re imagining what you can do with computing with this massive distributed network. And you know, I O. T. Is clearly coming into into play here. I would consider this a kind of I o t like, you know, application. And so I think there are many, many more to come. But this is a great example of something that you could really never even conceive in enterprise Tech before >>you, Dave the line on that you talked about i o t talk a lot about edge computing. Well, if you talk about going into space, that's a new frontier of the edge that we need to talk about >>the world. Glad it's round. So technically no edge if you're in space so again not to get nuance here and nerdy. But okay, let's get into the event. I want to hold on the analysis of the keynote because I think this really society impact public service, public sector, things to talk about. But let's do a quick review of kind of what's happened. We'll get to the event. But let's just review the guests that we interviewed on the Cube because we have the cube virtual. We're here in our studios. You guys were in yours. We get the quarantine cruise. We're still doing our job to get the stories out there. We talked to Teresa Carlson, Shannon Kellogg, Ken Eisner, Sandy Carter, Dr Papa Casey Coleman from Salesforce, Dr Shell Gentleman from the Paragon Institute, which is doing the fairground islands of researcher on space and weather data. Um, Joshua Spence math you can use with the Alliance for Digital Innovation Around some of this new innovation, we leave the Children's National Research Institute. So a lot of great guests on the cube dot net Check it out, guys. I had trouble getting into the event that using this in Toronto platform and it was just so hard to navigate. They've been doing it before. Um, there's some key notes on there. I thought that was a disappointment for me. I couldn't get to some of the sessions I wanted to, um, but overall, I thought the content was strong. Um, the online platform just kind of wasn't there for me. What's your reaction? >>Well, I mean, it's like a Z. That's the state of the art today. And so it's essentially a webinar like platforms, and that's what everybody's saying. A lot of people are frustrated with it. I know I as a user. Activity clicks to find stuff, but it is what it is. But I think the industry is can do better. >>Yeah, and just to comment. I'll make on it, John. One of things I always love about the Amazon show. It's not just what AWS is doing, But, you know, you walk the hallways and you walk the actual So in the virtual world, I walk the expo floor and its okay, Here's a couple of presentations links in an email address if you want to follow up, I felt even the A previous AWS online at a little bit more there. And I'm sure Amazon's listening, talking to all their partners and building out more there cause that's definitely a huge opportunity to enable both networking as well. As you know, having the ecosystem be able to participate more fully in the event >>and full disclosure. We're building our own platform. We have the platforms. We care about this guys. I think that on these virtual events that the discovery is critical having the available to find the sessions, find the people so it feels more like an event. I think you know, we hope that these solutions can get better. We're gonna try and do our best. Um, so, um well, keep plugging away, guys. I want to get your thoughts. They have you been doing a lot of breaking analysis on this do and your interviews as well in the technology side around the impact of Covert 19 with Teresa Carlson and her keynote. Her number one message that I heard was Covad 19 Crisis has caused a imperative for all agencies to move faster, and Amazon is kind of I won't say put things to the side because they got their business at scale. Have really been honing in on having deliverables for crisis solutions. Solving the problems and getting out to Steve mentioned the call centers is one of the key interviews. This is that they're job. They have to do this cove. It impacts the public services of the public sector that she's that they service. So what's your reaction? Because we've been covering on the commercial side. What's your thoughts of Teresa and Amazon's story today? >>Yeah, well, she said, You know, the agencies started making cloud migrations that they're at record pace that they'd never seen before. Having said that, you know it's hard, but Amazon doesn't break out its its revenue in public sector. But in the data, I look at the breaking analysis CTR data. I mean, it definitely suggests a couple of things. Things one is I mean, everybody in the enterprise was affected in some way by Kobe is they said before, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a little bit of a pause and aws public sector business and then it's picking up again now, as we sort of exit this isolation economy. I think the second thing I would say is that AWS Public sector, based on the data that I see, is significantly outpacing the growth of AWS. Overall number one number two. It's also keeping pace with the growth of Microsoft Azure. Now we know that AWS, on balance is much bigger than Microsoft Azure and Infrastructures of Service. But we also know that Microsoft Azure is growing faster. That doesn't seem to be the case in public sector. It seems like the public sector business is is really right there from in terms of growth. So it really is a shining star inside of AWS. >>Still, speed is a startup game, and agility has been a dev ops ethos. You couldn't see more obvious example in public sector where speed is critical. What's your reaction to your interviews and your conversations and your observations? A keynote? >>Yeah, I mean something We've all been saying in the technology industry is Just imagine if this had happened under 15 years ago, where we would be So where in a couple of the interviews you mentioned, I've talked to some of the non profits and researchers working on covert 19. So the cloud really has been in the spotlight. Can I react? Bask scale. Can I share information fast while still maintaining the proper regulations that are needed in the security so that, you know, the cloud has been reacting fast when you talk about the financial resource is, it's really nice to see Amazon in some of these instances has been donating compute occasional resource is and the like, so that you know, critical universities that are looking at this when researchers get what they need and not have to worry about budgets, other agencies, if you talk about contact centers, are often they will get emergency funding where they have a way to be able to get that to scale, since they weren't necessarily planning for these expenses. So you know what we've been seeing is that Cloud really has had the stress test with everything that's been going on here, and it's reacting, so it's good to see that you know, the promise of cloud is meeting that scale for the most part, Amazon doing a really good job here and you know, their customers just, you know, feel The partnership with Amazon is what I've heard loud and clear. >>Well, Dave, one of these I want to get your reaction on because Amazon you can almost see what's going on with them. They don't want to do their own horn because they're the winners on the pandemic. They are doing financially well, their services. All the things that they do scale their their their position, too. Take advantage. Business wise of of the remote workers and the customers and agencies. They don't have the problems at scale that the customers have. So a lot of things going on here. These applications that have been in the i t world of public sector are old, outdated, antiquated, certainly summer modernize more than others. But clearly 80% of them need to be modernized. So when a pandemic hits like this, it becomes critical infrastructure. Because look at the look of the things unemployment checks, massive amount of filings going on. You got critical service from education remote workforces. >>these are >>all exposed. It's not just critical. Infrastructure is plumbing. It's The applications are critical. Legit problems need to be solved now. This is forcing an institutional mindset that's been there for years of, like, slow two. Gotta move fast. I mean, this is really your thoughts. >>Yeah. And well, well, with liquidity that the Fed put into the into the market, people had, You know, it's interesting when you look at, say, for instance, take a traditional infrastructure provider like an HP era Dell. Very clearly, their on Prem business deteriorated in the last 100 days. But you know HP Q and, well, HBO, you had some some supply chain problem. But Dell big uptick in this laptop business like Amazon doesn't have that problem. In fact, CEOs have told me I couldn't get a server into my data center was too much of a hassle to get too much time. It didn't have the people. So I just spun up instances on AWS at the same time. You know, Amazon's VD I business who has workspaces business, you know, no doubt, you know, saw an uptick from this. So it's got that broad portfolio, and I think you know, people ask. Okay, what remains permanent? Uh, and I just don't see this This productivity boom that we're now finally getting from work from home pivoting back Teoh, go into the office and it calls into question Stu, when If nobody is in the corporate office, you know the VP ends, you know, the Internet becomes the new private network. >>It's to start ups moving fast. The change has been in the past two months has been, like, two years. Huge challenges. >>Yeah, John, it's an interesting point. So, you know, when cloud first started, it was about developers. It was about smaller companies that the ones that were born in the cloud on The real opportunity we've been seeing in the last few months is, you know, large organizations. You talk about public sector, there's non profits. There's government agencies. They're not the ones that you necessarily think of as moving fast. A David just pointing out Also, many of these changes that we're putting into place are going to be with us for a while. So not only remote work, but you talk about telehealth and telemedicine. These type of things, you know, have been on our doorstep for many years, but this has been a forcing function toe. Have it be there. And while we will likely go back to kind of a hybrid world, I think we have accelerated what's going on. So you know, there is the silver lining in what's going on because, you know, Number one, we're not through this pandemic. And number two, you know, there's nothing saying that we might have another pandemic in the future. So if the technology can enable us to be more flexible, more distributed a xai I've heard online. People talk a lot. It's no longer work from home but really work from anywhere. So that's a promise we've had for a long time. And in every technology and vertical. There's a little bit of a reimagining on cloud, absolutely an enabler for thinking differently. >>John, I wonder if I could comment on that and maybe ask you a question. That's okay. I know your host. You don't mind. So, first of all, I think if you think about a framework for coming back, it's too said, You know, we're still not out of this thing yet, but if you look at three things how digital is an organization. How what's the feasibility of them actually doing physical distancing? And how essential is that business from a digital standpoint you have cloud. How digital are you? The government obviously, is a critical business. And so I think, you know, AWS, public Sector and other firms like that are in pretty good shape. And then there's just a lot of businesses that aren't essential that aren't digital, and those are gonna really, you know, see a deterioration. But you've been you've been interviewing a lot of people, John, in this event you've been watching for years. What's your take on AWS Public sector? >>Well, I'll give an answer that also wants to do away because he and I both talk to some of the guests and interview them. Had some conversations in the community is prep. But my take away looking at Amazon over the past, say, five or six years, um, a massive acceleration we saw coming in that match the commercial market on the enterprise side. So this almost blending of it's not just public sector anymore. It looks a lot like commercial cause, the the needs and the services and the APS have to be more agile. So you saw the same kind of questions in the same kind of crazy. It wasn't just a separate division or a separate industry sector. It has the same patterns as commercial. But I think to me my big takeaways, that Theresa Carlson hit this early on with Amazon, and that is they can do a lot of the heavy lifting things like fed ramp, which can cost a $1,000,000 for a company to go through. You going with Amazon? You onboard them? You're instantly. There's a fast track for you. It's less expensive, significantly less expensive. And next thing you know, you're selling to the government. If you're a start up or commercial business, that's a gold mine. I'm going with Amazon every time. Um, and the >>other >>thing is, is that the government has shifted. So now you have Covad 19 impact. That puts a huge premium on people who are already been setting up for digital transformation and or have been doing it. So those agencies and those stakeholders will be doing very, very well. And you know that Congress has got trillions of dollars day. We've covered this on the Cube. How much of that coverage is actually going for modernization of I T systems? Nothing. And, you know, one of things. Amazon saying. And rightfully so. Shannon Kellogg was pointing out. Congress needs to put some money aside for their own agencies because the citizens us, the taxpayers, we got to get the services. You got veterans, you've got unemployment. You've got these critical services that need to be turned on quicker. There's no money for that. So huge blind spot on the whole recovery bill. And then finally, I think that there's a huge entrepreneurial thinking that's going to be a public private partnership. Cal Poly, Other NASA JPL You're starting to see new applications, and this came out of my interviews on some of the ones I talked to. They're thinking differently, the doing things that have never been done before. And they're doing it in a clever, innovative way, and they're reinventing and delivering new things that are better. So everything's about okay. Modernize the old and make it better, and then think about something new and completely different and make it game changing. So to me, those were dynamics that are going on than seeing emerge, and it's coming out of the interviews. Loud and clear. Oh, my God, I never would have thought about that. You can only do that with Cloud Computing. A super computer in the Cloud Analytics at scale, Ocean Data from sale Drone using satellite over the top observation data. Oh, my God. Brilliant. Never possible before. So these are the new things that put the old guard in the Beltway bandits that check because they can't make up the old excuses. So I think Amazon and Microsoft, more than anyone else, can drive change fast. So whoever gets there first, well, we'll take most of the shares. So it's a huge shift and it's happening very fast more than ever before this year with Covert 19 and again, that's the the analysis. And Amazon is just trying to like, Okay, don't talk about us is we don't want to like we're over overtaking the world because outside and then look opportunistic. But the reality is we have the best solution. So >>what? They complain they don't want to be perceived as ambulance station. But to your point, the new work loads and new applications and the traditional enterprise folks they want to pay the cow path is really what they want to dio. And we're just now seeing a whole new set of applications and workloads emerging. What about the team you guys have been interviewing? A lot of people we've interviewed tons of people at AWS reinvent over the years. We know about Andy Jassy at all. You know, his his lieutenants, about the team in public sector. How do they compare, you know, relative to what we know about AWS and maybe even some of the competition. Where do you Where do you grade them? >>I give Amazon and, um, much stronger grade than Microsoft. Microsoft still has an old DNA. Um, you got something to tell them is bring some fresh brand there. I see the Jedi competition a lot of mud slinging there, and I think Microsoft clearly got in fear solution. So the whole stall tactic has worked, and we pointed out two years ago the number one goal of Jet I was for Amazon not to win. And Microsoft looks like they're gonna catch up, and we'll probably get that contract. And I don't think you're probably gonna win that out, right? I don't think Amazon is gonna win that back. We'll see. But still doesn't matter. Is gonna go multi cloud anyway. Um, Teresa Carlson has always had the right vision. The team is exceptional. Um, they're superb experience and their ecosystem partners Air second and NASA GPL Cal Poly. The list goes on and on, and they're attracting new talent. So you look at the benchmark new talent and unlimited capability again, they're providing the kinds of services. So if we wanted to sell the Cube virtual platform Dave, say the government to do do events, we did get fed ramp. We get all this approval process because Amazon customer, you can just skate right in and move up faster versus the slog of these certifications that everyone knows in every venture capitalists are. Investor knows it takes a lot of time. So to me, the team is awesome. I think that the best in the industry and they've got to balance the policy. I think that's gonna be a real big challenge. And it's complex with Amazon, you know, they own the post. You got the political climate and they're winning, right? They're doing well. And so they have an incentive to to be in there and shape policy. And I think the digital natives we are here. And I think it's a silent revolution going on where the young generation is like, Look at government served me better. And how can I get involved? So I think you're going to see new APS coming. We're gonna see a really, you know, integration of new blood coming into the public sector, young talent and new applications that might take >>you mentioned the political climate, of course. Pre Cove. It'll you heard this? All that we call it the Tech lash, right, The backlash into big tech. You wonder if that is going to now subside somewhat, but still is the point You're making it. Where would we be without without technology generally and big tech stepping up? Of course, now that you know who knows, right, Biden looks like he's, you know, in the catbird seat. But there's a lot of time left talking about Liz more on being the Treasury secretary. You know what she'll do? The big tech, but But nonetheless I think I think really it is time to look at big tech and look at the Tech for good, and you give them some points for that. Still, what do you think? >>Yeah, first of all, Dave, you know, in general, it felt like that tech lash has gone down a little bit when I look online. Facebook, of course, is still front and center about what they're doing and how they're reacting to the current state of what's happening around the country. Amazon, on the other hand, you know, a done mentioned, you know, they're absolutely winning in this, but there hasn't been, you know, too much push back if you talk culturally. There's a big difference between Amazon and AWS. There are some concerns around what Amazon is doing in their distribution facilities and the like. And, you know, there's been lots of spotlights set on that, um, but overall, there are questions. Should AWS and Amazon that they split. There's an interesting debate on that, Dave, you and I have had many conversations about that over the past couple of years, and it feels like it is coming more to a head on. And if it happens from a regulation standpoint, or would Amazon do it for business reason because, you know, one of Microsoft and Google's biggest attacks are, well, you don't want to put your infrastructure on AWS because Amazon, the parent company, is going to go after your business. I do want to pull in just one thread that John you and Dave were both talking about while today you know, Amazon's doing a good job of not trying todo ambulance case. What is different today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It used to be that I t would do something and they didn't want to talk to their peers because that was their differentiation. But Amazon has done a good job of explaining that you don't want to have that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So now when an agency or a company find something that they really like from Amazon talking all their peers about it because they're like, Oh, you're using this Have you tried plugging in this other service or use this other piece of the ecosystem? So there is that flywheel effect from the cloud from customers. And of course, we've talked a lot about the flywheel of data, and one of the big takeaways from this show has been the ability for cloud to help unlock and get beyond those information silos for things like over 19 and beyond. >>Hey, John, if the government makes a ws spin out or Amazon spin out AWS, does that mean Microsoft and Google have to spin out their cloud businesses to? And, uh, you think that you think the Chinese government make Alibaba spin out its cloud business? >>Well, you know the thing about the Chinese and Facebook, I compare them together because this is where the tech lash problem comes in. The Chinese stolen local property, United States. That's well documented use as competitive advantage. Facebook stole all the notional property out of the humans in the world and broke democracy, Right? So the difference between those bad tech actors, um, is an Amazon and others is 11 enabling technology and one isn't Facebook really doesn't really enable anything. If you think about it, enables hate. It enables some friends to talk some emotional reactions, but the real societal benefit of historically if you look at society, things that we're enabling do well in free free societies. Closed systems don't work. So you got the country of China who's orchestrating all their actors to be state driven, have a competitive advantage that's subsidised. United States will never do that. I think it's a shame to break up any of the tech companies. So I'm against the tech lash breakup. I think we should get behind our American companies and do it in an open, transparent way. Think Amazon's clearly doing that? I think that's why Amazon's quiet is because they're not taking advantage of the system that do things faster and cheaper gets that's there. Ethos thinks benefits the consumer with If you think about it that way, and some will debate that, but in general Amazon's and enabling technology with cloud. So the benefits of the cloud for them to enable our far greater than the people taking advantage of it. So if I'm on agency trying to deliver unemployment checks, I'm benefiting the citizens at scale. Amazon takes a small portion of that fee, so when you have enabling technologies, that's how to me, The right capitalism model works Silicon Valley In the tech companies, they don't think this way. They think for profit, go big or go home and this has been an institutional thing with tech companies. They would have a policy team, and that's all they did. They didn't really do anything t impact society because it wasn't that big. Now, with networked economies, you're looking at something completely different to connected system. You can't handle dissidents differently is it's complex? The point is, the diverse team Facebook and Amazon is one's an enabling technology. AWS Facebook is just a walled garden portal. So you know, I mean, some tech is good, some text bad, and a lot of people just don't know the difference what we do. I would say that Amazon is not evil Amazon Web services particular because they enable people to do things. And I think the benefits far outweigh the criticisms. So >>anybody use AWS. Anybody can go in there and swipe the credit card and spin up compute storage AI database so they could sell the problems. >>The problems, whether it's covert problems on solving the unemployment checks going out, are serving veterans or getting people getting delivering services. Some entrepreneurs develop an app for that, right? So you know there's benefits, right? So this you know, there's not not Amazon saying Do it this way. They're saying, Here's this resource, do something creative and build something solve a problem. And that was the key message of the keynote. >>People get concerned about absolute power, you know, it's understandable. But if you know you start abusing absolute power, really, I've always believed the government should come in, >>but >>you know, the evidence of that is is pretty few and far between, so we'll see how this thing plays out. I mean, it's a very interesting dynamic. I point about why should. I don't understand why AWS, you know, gets all the microscopic discussion. But I've never heard anybody say that Microsoft should spend on Azure. I've never heard that. >>Well, the big secret is Azure is actually one of Amazon's biggest customers. That's another breaking analysis look into that we'll keep on making noted that Dave's do Thanks for coming to do great interviews. Love your conversations. Final words to I'll give you What's the big thing you took away from your conversations with your guests for this cube? Virtual coverage of public sector virtual summit >>so biggest take away from the users is being able to react to, you know, just ridiculously fast. You know it. Talk about something where you know I get a quote on Thursday on Friday and make a decision, and on Monday, on up and running this unparalleled that I wouldn't be able to do before. And if you talk about the response things like over nine, I mean enabling technology to be able to cut across organizations across countries and across domains. John, as you pointed out, that public private dynamic helping to make sure that you can react and get things done >>Awesome. We'll leave it there. Stew. Dave. Thanks for spending time to analyze the keynote. Also summarize the event. This is a does public sector virtual summit online Couldn't be face to face. Of course. We bring the Cube virtual coverage as well as content and our platform for people to consume. Go the cube dot net check it out and keep engaging. Hit us up on Twitter if any questions hit us up. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios and Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio as kind of our on going leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis, and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks, and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters if you will. And we've got a great cube alarm in our database. He's a fantastic resourcer. We're excited to get him on. Share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the Head of Remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so thank you and. First off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal, in kind of a regular review. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work-from-home universe just a few short months later. I mean, you've been doing this for ever. So it's kind of a wile old veteran of the work-from-home, or not even from home, just work from some place else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? >> Yeah, on the working front. If you're one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate, make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's going to help a lot. Help from a focus standpoint and just. You don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much, that's where isolation kicks in. That's where burnout kicks in. You want to do whatever you can to avoid. You got to remember, when you're not physically walking out of a office and disconnecting from work. You have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't. I would actually black something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family. Resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of very deliberately. Now on the team leading front. I'm going to say it may feel a little counter intuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are. The more you really need to let go and allow them to have mechanism for feeding back to you. Managers job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director, you're actually being an unblocker. A really active listener. And for people who have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is going to feel very strange, jarring and counter intuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is. >> You know that's funny, we had someone on as part of this the other day, talking about leaders need to change their objectives that they're managing to, from kind of activity based, to deliverals based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020, that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikos on, we had him on too. My favorite comment was, "It's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, "but when you're at home all you have is your deliverable." so it really, it seems like there's kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. >> You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well. But not only just do remote well, just run your business well. Even if you plan on going back to office. On some level there's a lot of things you can do now to help pave the infrastructure to creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you have it in a writing down. The metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results. I've often been asked, "How do you know if "someone's been working remotely?" And my response is, how do you know if they were working in the office. If you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they're clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out. It's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their worth. The manager has to be very articulant about what that value looks like. >> Right, and not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but. You guys have a remote play book GitLab has published, which is terrific. People should go online, it's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. It's a terrific resource, it's a open source, you got to love the open source, eat those. But one of the slides that jumped out to me, and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having, is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together. Has to go up dramatically, which is a little counter intuitive, but what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication. Not just you kind of standard meeting, or you standard status on a project, or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff. But you outlined a whole variety of types of communication. Objectives or methods, or feel if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind keep this team building going forward. >> So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting. And communications is just a very obvious. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to spontaneity Inter-personal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about, or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends, or sports, or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and disfunction when people don't know how to communicate and on what channel. So at GitLab we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or a merge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expired our Slack messages after 90 days, specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up, and in that case it's a very, it's a tool, GitLab, that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules, but actually it's very much appreciated by our global team. We have over 1200 people, in more that 65 countries. And they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. And our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulant about that. >> So I want to double down on that. On 'A secret is peace', 'cause you brought this up, or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu, and Stu raised an interesting point, right. Unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones, and this and that, there has grown an expectation that used to be business, okay was, "I'll get back to you within 24 hours "if you leave me a voicemail." And lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos, and sticking stuff in the yellow envelop with the string, right, as multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to, "I need to hear back form you now." And often it feels like, if your trying to have just some uninterrupted work time, to get something done. It's like, why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency. And you talked about, you can't operate that on a global, asynchronous team because everyone's in different timezones. And just by rule, there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay, and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A, forces people to ask in advance, not immediately when you need it. But also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communications. I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world. >> The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone. Which is, at GitLab we try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding, where to get onboarded at GitLab, you get an onboarding issue within GitLab, with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take. And humans are a part of it, but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was, we're talking about asking questions. Or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But at GitLab we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes, protocols and solutions. Basically everything that we've ever seen or done, needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members just magically need less information, it's just that instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation. And the more rich that your documentation is, the less you have to bother other people, and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first. That allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things, not just answering your question for the thousandth time. >> Right, another thing you covered, which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously, before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is, it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home. Didn't like to work from home. Loves going to the office, has their routine. Been doing it for decades, to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about. And B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder, kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future. Now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. >> Look Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us, but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay ground work, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time. A month, ideally a quarter. So that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening. And then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant. Things are just. There's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction, but now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, "You know what, I'm seeing the myths that I've perpetrated "break down in front of me." And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This isn't remote work, this is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable the human society has been. In just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity, to ask themselves the right question, and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy, will actually come out stronger on the other side. >> Yeah, as you said. This is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no planning ahead, you're spouse or significant other's also working from home. And has the same Zoom schedule as you do, for some strange reason, right. The kids are home as you said, and your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months. And behaviors turn into habits. People are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward. How do you see the evolution. How are people taking baby steps, if you will. To incorporate more of this learning as we go forward. And incorporate into more of their regular, everyday procedures. >> I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, "Hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. "I'm spending a lot less on gas. "I just feel better as a person because I don't show up "to work everyday with road rage. "So how can I keep this going." And I genuinely think what's going to happen in four or five months, we're going to have millions of people collectively look at each other and they say, "The boss just called me back into the office "but I just did my job from home. "Even in suboptimal conditions. "I saw my family more, I exercised more. "I had more time to cook and clean. "How about no, I'm not going to go back to the office "as my default location." And I think what's going to happen is the 80, 20 rule is going to flip. Right now people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable company's coming or something like that. Going forward it think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only going to commute to the office, or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wine and dine them, or something like that. And the second order of this is, people that are only living in expensive cities because of their location. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're going to cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho, and Ohio. Maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia, or foreign places. Because now you have them thinking of, "What could life look like if I decouple geography at work. "I still want to work really hard "and contribute this knowledge. "But I can go to a place with better air quality, "better schools, better opportunity to actually "invest in a smaller community, "where I can see real impact." And I think that's just going to have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work. Now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past. And now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you aren't just your work, you're more than your work. And what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere. >> Right, right. And as you said, there's so many kind of secondary benefits in terms of traffic and infrastructure, and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20 I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it a 20 percent. But if people, even in this hybrid steps, do more once a week, twice a week. Once every two weeks, right. The impact on the infrastructure and peoples lives is going to be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about, and I thought it was fascinating, about the norms and really coming out from a work from home first, or a work from anywhere first. Your very good at specifying anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop. Could be an office, could be a WeWork. Could be wherever. Because if you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting, which probably impacts a lot of teams, is when some of the team's in the office and some of the team isn't. The typical move, right, is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you get like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads on Zoom. And you said, "You know, no. "Let's all be remote. So if we just be happen to be sitting at our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from Cloud got to Cloud-e to Cloud first, why not Cloud. And then you know, kind of mobile and does it work in a mobile. No, no, no it has to. It's mobile first. Really the shift to not, can it be done at home, but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home, a really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. >> Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point, is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEO's sitting on the hot seat on CNBC, when it's their turn for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Is if your spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R&D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of this. Where you really have to justify, even from a cost stand point, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography. The thing about remote first is that it's not a us versus them. A lot of what we've learned at GitLab, and how we operate so efficiently. They work really well for remote teams, and they are remote first. But they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have, so that there's always an artifact. There's always a documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other. You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote forced. Remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well. But I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. Offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office, when travel restrictions are lifted. It think the key here is that its going to be a lot more fluent. You're never going to know on a day to day basis, who is coming into the office, and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. >> Right, right. So before we. I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject, in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, we used to go to pretty much. Probably 80% of our business was at events, or at peoples offices, or facilities. Now it's all dial-in. You talked a lot about people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits and pieces of infrastructure for their home office, that they just don't have the same set ups. You're talking about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light. That there's a few things you can invest in, not tremendous amounts of money. But a couple of hundred bucks here and there, to make a big difference on the home work environment. And how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. >> 100%, look if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe 20 thousand dollars put together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't going to kill your back. You want to help people create healthy ergonomics. Sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity. You force someone to just be hunched over on their couch, in front of a 13 inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that. That's not a great long term solution. I think the people group actually has a higher burden to bare all the way around. You know when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level. It comes down to the people group, to not letting that just go to spontaneity. You want to have a happy hour virtually, you're going to have to put a calendar invite on peoples calendar. You're going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's going to have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So, from hardware all the way to communication. The people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, "Okay, what can we unlock in this new world." >> Right, I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal, or steel, or a factory. >> No, if anything COVID has humanized this in a way, and I think it's actually a really big silver lining, where we're all now peering into each others homes. And it is glaringly obvious, that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that always been the case, but there's something about a sterile or co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door. And you just kind of get down to business. Why is that, we have technology at out fingertips. We can be humans with each other. And that going to actually encourage more empathy. As we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. I mean, I have people, friends, located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with. A closer, more intimate connection with that a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what makes them tick. >> Right, right. All right Darren, so before I let you go and again thank you for the time, the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ETHOS and the sharing. It's made such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook, so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing 'em. >> Absolutely, so we're an open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info that will redirect you right into the All Remote section of GitLab handbook. All of which is open source. Right at the top you can download the remote playbook, which is PDF that we talked about. Download that, it takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about everything. And how we operate synchronously. How we handle meeting, and even hiring and compensation. allremote.info and of course you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @darrenmurph. >> All right, well thanks a lot Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder. Waiting for the lockdown and the quarantine to end so you can get back on the airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. >> Can't wait man, I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane, with someone reclined into my nose. But honestly, I can't wait. Take me anywhere. >> I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right, thanks a lot, Darren. >> Absolutely, take care all. >> All right, he's Darren. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, from our Palo Altos Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering theCUBE, New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to theCUBE here in New York City. We're live from CUBE NYC, this is our big data now: AI, now all things cloud 9 years covering the beginning of Hadoop. Now into cloud and data as the center of the value I'm John Furrier with David Vellante. Our special guest is Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks CUBE alumni, been on many times Great supporter of theCUBE, legend in OpenSource Great to see you. >> It's great to be here, thanks. Yes, absolutely. >> So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is that OpenSource certainly has been a big part of the Ethos, just seeing it in all sectors, again, growing even in Blockchain, Open Ethos is growing. The role of data now certainly in the center. You guys have been on this vision of open data, if you will and making data, and move and flight, maybe rest all these things are going on. Certainly the Hadoop world has changed, not just Hadoop and data lakes anymore, it's data. All things data, it's happening. This is core to your business, you guys have been banging this drum for a long time. Stock's at an all-time high. Congratulations on the business performance. So it's working, things are working for you guys. >> I think the model in this strategy are really coming together nicely. And to your point, it's about all the data. It's about the entire life-cycle of the data and bringing all data under management through its entire life-cycle. And being able to give the enterprise that accessibility to that data across each tier on-prem, private cloud, and across all the multi-clouds. And that's really changed, really in many regards, the overall core architecture of Hadoop and how it needs to manage data. And how it needs to interact with other data sources. And our model and strategy is been about not going above the Hadoop stack, but actually going out to the edge, and bringing data under management from the point of origination through its entire movement life-cycle until it comes at rest, and then have the ability, to deploy and access that data across each tier and across a multi-cloud environment. And it's a hybrid architecture world now. >> You guys have been on this trend for a while now, it's kind of getting lift obviously you're seeing the impact that cloud, impact AI cause the faster computer you have, the faster you can process data, the faster the data can be used, machine learning it's a nice flywheel. So again, that flywheel is being recognized. So I have to ask you, what is in your opinion, been the impact of cloud computing, specifically the Amazons, and the Azures, and now Google where certainly AI is in the center of their proposition, now hybrid cloud is validated with Amazon announcing RDS on the premises on VMWARE. That's the first Amazon ever, ever on premises activity. So this is clearly a validation of hybrid cloud. How has the cloud impacted the data space, and if you will, it used to be data warehousing, cloud has changed that. What's your opinion? >> Well what's it's done is given a, an architectural extension to the enterprise of what their data architecture needs to be, and the real key is, it's now, it's not about hybrid or cloud or on-prem, it's about having a data strategy overall. And how do I bring all my different assets, and bring a connected community together, in real-time? because what enterprise is trying to do is, connect and have higher velocity and faster visibility between the enterprise, the product, their customer, and their supply chain. And to do that, they need to be able to aggregate data into the best economic platform from the point of origination, maybe starting from the component on their product, a single component, and be able to bring all that data together through its life-cycle, aggregate it, and then deploy it on the most economically feasible tier. Whether that's on-prem, or a private cloud, or across multiple public clouds. And our platform with HDF, HDP, and data plane and complete that hybrid data architecture. And by doing that, the real value is then the cloud, AI and machine learning capabilities have the ability now to access all data across the enterprise, whether it be their tier in the cloud, or whether that be on-prem. And our strategy is around bringing that and being that fabric, to bring all the interconnectivity irrespective of whether it sits on the edge and the cloud is somewhere in between. Because the more accessibility AI has to data, the faster velocity of driving value back in to that AI cycle. >> Yeah, people don't want to move data if they don't have to And so, and we've been on this for a while, that this idea that you want to bring the cloud model to your data, and not the data to the cloud always. And so, how do you do that? How do you make it this kind of same, same environment? What role does HortonWorks play in it? >> Well the first thing we want to do is, bring the data under management from and through its life-cycle where HDF goes to the edge, brings the data through its movement cycle, aggregates the streams. HDP is the data at rest platform that can sit on-prem and a public cloud or a private cloud. And then data plains that fabric, that ensures that we have connectivity to all types of data across all tiers. And then serves as the common security and governance framework, irrespective of which tier that is. And that's very very important. And then that then gives the AI platforms the ability to bring AI onto a broader array of data, that they can then have a higher and better impact on it than just having an isolated AI impact on just a single tier I data in the cloud. >> Well that messages seems to be resonating, we talked earlier about the stock price, but also I think Neil Bushery and Frank Sluben popularized the metric of number of seven-figure deals. You guys are closing some big deals, and remember in the early days Robert Vor Breath, people are like how these guys going to sell anything, it's all open-source and you're doing a lot of a million plus dollar deals. So it's resonating not only with the streep but also with enterprises, your thoughts. >> Last quarter we, I think the key is that the industry really understands, the investors understand, the enterprises really now understand the importance of hybrid and hybrid cloud. And it's not going to be all about managing data lakes on-prem. All the data's not going to go and have this giant line of demarkation and now all reside in the cloud. It has to coexist across each tier and our role is to be that aggregation point. >> And you've seen the big cloud players now, all it's the big three, all have on-prem strategies. Azure with Azure Stack, Google we saw Kubernetes on-prem, and even AWS now, the last load up putting RDS on-prem announced that VMWorld. So they've all sort of recognized that not everything's going to go into the cloud. So that's got to be, you know good confirmation for you guys >> It's great validation. What is also says though is, we must have cloud first architecture and a cloud first approach with all of our tech. And the key to that is, from our standpoint, within our strategy is to containerize everything. And we had an announcement earlier this week that was really a three-way announcement between us, Red Hat, and IBM; and the essence of that announcement is we've adopted the Kubernetes distro from Red Hat. To where we're are containerizing all of our platforms with Red Hat's Kubernetes distribution. And what that does, is gives us the ability to optimize our platforms for OpenShift, the Red Hat pass, and optimize then the deployment of that and the IBM private cloud, right. And naturally data plane will also then give us the ability, to extend those workloads; those very granular workloads up in to the public clouds, and we can even leverage their native objects stores. >> So that's an interesting love triangle right? You and Red Hat are kind of birds of a feather with open-source. IBM has always been a big proponent of open-source, you know funded Linux in the early days. And then brings this, a massive channel and brand, you know to that world. >> Yes. And you know this is really going to accelerate our movement into a cloud first architecture, with pure containerization. And the reason that's so important is, it gives us that modularity to move those applications and those workloads, across whichever tiers most appropriate architecturally for it to run and be deployed. >> You know we said this on theCUBE many many years ago, and continues to be this theme, enterprise is one really wanting hardened solutions, but they don't mind experimenting. And Stu Miniman and I, were always talking about and comparing OpenStack ecosystem to what's happened in the Hadoop ecosystem. There's some pockets of relevance and it's a lot of work to build your own, and OpenStack has a great solution for certain use cases, now mostly on the infrastructure side But when cloud came in and changed the game, because you saw things like Kubernetes. I mean we're here at the Hadoop show that started with Hadoop, now it's AI, the word Kubernetes is being talked about. You mentioned hybrid cloud, these aren't words that were spoken at an event like this. So the IT problem in multi-cloud has always been a storage issue. So you do some storage work, you got to store the data somewhere, but now you're talking about Kubernetes. You're talking about orchestration around workloads, the role of data in workloads. This is what enterprise IT actually cares about right now. This is not like, a small little thing, it's a big deal because data is not only in the workloads, they're using instrumentation with containers, with service meshes around the coin. You're starting to see policy, this is hardcore B2B enterprise features. >> This is where with what we're seeing is a massive transformational shift of how the IT architecture's going to look for the next 20 years. Right. The IT world it is been horribly constrained from this very highly configured, very procedural-based applications and now they want to create high velocity engagement between the enterprise, their product, their customer and supply chain. They were so constrained with these very procedural-based applications and containerization gives the ability now to create that velocity and to move those workloads, and those interactions between that four pillars. >> Now let's talk about the edge. Cause the pendulum is clearly swinging sort of back to some decentralization going on, and the edge to us is a data play. We talk about it all the time. What are your thoughts on the edge, where does HortonWorks fit? What's your vision of the data modeling and how that evolves? >> That goes back to, the insight to that would be our strategy and what we did and had the great fortune, quite frankly, of having the ability to merge on Yara and HortonWorks back in 2015. And we wanted, and the whole goal of that besides working with a great team, Joe Witt had built, is being able to get to the edge. And what we wanted to have the ability to do, was to operate on every sensor, on every device at the edge for the customer so that they could bring the data under management whenever that may be, through its entire life-cycle; so from point of origination through its movement until it comes at rest. So our belief is that if we can bring enough intelligence and faster insights as that data is being generated, and as events or conditions are happening, moving, or changing before it ever comes to rest we can process and take prescriptive action. Leveraging AI and machine learning as it's in its life-cycle we can dramatically decrease the amount of data we have to bring to rest. We can just bring the province the metadata to rest and have that insight. And we try to get to these high velocity, real-time insights starting with the data on the edge. And that's why we think it's so important to manage the entire life-cycle. And then, what's even more important is then put that data, on to what ever tier. That may be bring it back to rest in a day like on-prem, right, to aggregate with other like data structures. Or it may be, take it into cold storage on a native object store in a cloud, that has the lowest cost of storage structure for a particular time. >> Or take an action on the edge and leave it there. >> Yeah. You guys definitely think about the edge in a big way, that's pretty obvious. But what I want to get your thoughts on is an emerging area we're watching, and I'll call it for lack of a better description, programmable data. And you mentioned data architecture is being setup probably set a 10, 20 year run for enterprises they setup their data architecture with the cloud architects. Making data programmable is kind of a dev-ops concept right. And this is something that you guys have thought about with the data plane, what's your reaction to this notion of making data programmable? When you start talking about Kubernetes, you're going to have statefull applications, stateless applications, you have new dynamics I call it API 2.0 happening. Whole new infrastructure happening, data has to be programmable, going to need policy around it, the role of data's certainly changing rather than storing it somewhere. What's your view of programmable data, making it programmable? >> Well you've got to be able to, to truly have programmable data, you can't have slices of accessibility or window. You have to understand the lineage of that entire data, and the context of that data through its entire life-cycle. That's step and point number one. Point number two is, you have to be able to have that containerized so that you can take the module of data that you want to take prescriptive action against, or create action against a condition. And to be able to do that in granular bites or chunks, right. And then you've got to have accessibility to all the other contextual data, which means whether that's as its in motion as its at rest or, as its contextual cousin if you will, that sits up in an object store on another tier in a public cloud. Right. But what's important is that you have to be able to control and understand the entire lineage of that. And therefore, that's where our second step in this is data plane. And having the ability to have a full security model through that entire architectural chain, as well as the entire governance and lineage leveraging, leveraging atlas through data plane. And that then gives you the ability to take these very prescriptive actions that are driven through AI and machine learning insights. >> And that makes you very agile, love it. I mean the ethos of open-source and dev-ops is literally being applied to every thing. We see it with at the network layer, you see it at the data layer, you're starting to see this concept of dev and ops being applied in a big way. >> The next you know, previous years we've talked about what we're trying to accomplish. And we've started HortonWorks, it was about changing the data architecture for the next 20 years and how data was going to be managed. And that's had, to your earlier point we opened up the show, that's had twists and turns. Hadoop's evolved, the nature and velocity of data has evolved in the last five, six, seven, eight years you know. It's about going to the edge, it's about leveraging the cloud and we're very excited about where we're positioned as this massive transformation's happening. And what we're seeing is the iteration of change, is happening at an incredibly fast pace. Even much more so than it was two, three years ago. >> Yeah, the clock speeds definitely up, their data is working. People putting it to work. What works... >> They're able to get more value faster because of it. >> The AI is great. >> The data economy is here and now. And the enterprise understands it. So they want to now move aggressively to change and transform their business model to take advantage of what their data is giving them the ability to do. >> That's great. They always want the value, and they want it fast and anything gets in the way they'll remove the blockers as what we say. >> Alright, it's theCUBE here Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks giving his vision but also an update on the company; data at the center of the value proposition. This is about AI, it's about big data, it's about the cloud. It's theCUBE bringing you, theCUBE data here in New York City. CUBENYC, that's the hashtag; check us out on Twitter. Stay with us for a live coverage all day today and tomorrow here in New York City. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's The Cube! Covering PolyCon 18. Brought to you by PolyMath. >> Welcome back everyone, we're live here in the Bahamas with The Cube's exclusive coverage of PolyCon 18, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, both co-founders of SiliconANGLE. We start our coverage of the crypto-currency ICO, blockchain, decentralized world internet that it is becoming. It's the beginning of our tour, 2018. Our next guest is Hartej Sawhney who's the advisor at Pink Sky Capital, but also the co-founder of Hosho.io. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Hey thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks guys. >> We had a great chat last night, and you do some real good work. You're one of the smartest guys in the business. Got a great reputation. A lot of good stuff going on. So, take a minute to talk about who you are, what you're working on, what you're doing, and the projects you're involved in. >> So first of all, thank you so much for having me, it's really exciting to see the progress of high-quality content being created in the space. So my name is Hartej Sawhney. We have a team based in Las Vegas. I've been based in Las Vegas for about five years. But I was born and raised in central New Jersey, in Princeton. And my co-founder is Yo Sup Quan. We started this company about seven months ago and my co-founder's background was he's the co-founder of Coin Sighter in Exchange out of New York, which exited to Kraken. After that he started Launch Key which exited to Iovation. And prior to this company, my previous company was Zuldi, Z-U-L-D-I .com where we had a mobile point of sale system specifically for high volume food and beverage companies and businesses. So we were focused on Fintech and mobile point of sale and payment processing. So both of us have a unique background in both Fintech and cyber-security and my co-founder Yo, he's a managing partner of a crypto hedge fund named Pink Sky Capital. And he was doing diligence for Pink Sky, and he realized that the quality of the smart contracts he was seeing for deals that he wanted to participate as an investor in, and I'm an advisor in that hedge fund, we both realized that essentially the quality of these smart contracts is extremely low. And that there was nobody in this space that we saw laser focused on just blockchain security. And all the solutions that would be entailed in there. And so we began focusing on just auditing smart contracts, doing a line-by-line code review of each smart contract that's written, conducting a GAS analysis, and conducting a static analysis, making sure that the smart contract does what the white paper says, and then putting a seal of approval on that smart contract to mitigate risk. So that the code has not been changed once we've done an analysis of it, that there's no security vulnerabilities in this code, and that we can mitigate the risks for exchanges and for investors that someone has done a thorough code analysis of this. That there's no chance that this is going to be hacked, that money won't be stolen, money won't be lost, and that there's no chance of a security vulnerability on this. And we put our company's name and reputation on this. >> And what was the problem that is the alternative to that? Was there just poorly written code? Was it updated code? Was it gas was too expensive? They were doing off-chain transactions. I mean what are some of the dynamics that lead you guys down this path? I mean this makes sense. You're kind of underwriting the code, or you're ensuring it or I don't know what you call it, but essentially verifying it. What was the problem? And what were some of the use cases of problems? >> I would say that the underlying problem today in this whole industry, of the blockchain space, is that the most commonly found blockchain is Ethereum. The language behind Ethereum is called Solidity. Solidity is a brand new software language that very few people in the world are sufficient programmers in Solidity. On top of that, Solidity is updated, as a language on a weekly basis. So there are a very limited number of engineers in the world who are full-stack engineers, that have studied and understand Solidity, that have a security background, and have a QA mindset. Everything that I just said does exist on this Earth today and if it does, there's a chance that that person has made too much money to want to get out of bed. Because Ethereum's price has gone up. So the quality of smart contracts that we're seeing being written by even development shops, the developers building them are actually not full-stack engineers, they're web developers who have learned the language Solidity and so thus we believe that the quality of the code has been significantly low. We're finding lots of critical vulnerabilities. In fact, 100% of the time that Hosho has audited code for a smart contract, we have found at least a couple of vulnerabilities. Even as a second or the third auditor after other companies conduct an audit, we always find a vulnerability. >> And is it correct that Solidity is much more easy to work with than say, Bitcoin scripting language, so you can do a lot more with it, so you're getting a lot more, I don't want to say rogue code, but maybe that's what it is. Is that right? Is that the nature of the theory? >> Compared to Bitcoin script, yes. But compared to JavaScript, no. Because Fortune 500 companies have rooms full of Java engineers, Java developers. And now the newer blockchains are being written, are being written on in block JavaScript, right? So you have IBM's Hyperledger program, you have EOS, you have ICX, Cardano, Stellar, Waves, Neo, there's so many new projects that are coming, that all of them are flexing about the same thing. Including Rootstock, RSK. RSK is a project where they're allowing smart contracts to be tied to the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time ever. Right, so Fortune 500 companies may take advantage of the fact that they have Java developers to take advantage of already, that already work for them, who could easily write to a new blockchain, and possibly these new blockchains are more enterprise grade and able to take more institutional capital. But only time will tell. And us as the auditor, we want to see more code from these newer blockchains, and we want to see more developers actually put in commits. Because it's what matters the most, is where are the developers putting in commits and right now maximum developers are on the Ethereum blockchain. >> Is that, the numbers I mean. Just take a step there. So the theory of blockchain. Percentage of developers vis-a-vis other platforms percentages-- >> By far the most is on developed on Ethereum. >> And in terms of code, obviously the efficiencies that are not yet realized, 'cause there's not enough cycles of coding going on, it's evolution, right? >> Yes. >> Seems to be the problem, wouldn't you say? So a combination of full-stack developer requirements, >> Yes. >> To people who aren't proficient in all levels of the stack. >> Yes. >> Just are inefficient in the coding. It's not a ding on the developers, it's just they're writing code and they miss something, right? Or maybe they're not sufficient in the language-- >> It's a new language. The functions are being updated on a weekly basis, so sometimes you copied and pasted a part of another contract, that came from a very sophisticated project, so they'll say to us, well we copied and pasted this portion from EOS, so it should be great. But what that's leading to is either A, they're using a function that's now outdated, or B, by copying and pasting someone else's code from their smart contract, this smart contract is no longer doing what you intended it to do. >> So now Hartej, how much of your capability is human versus machine? >> Yeah I was going to ask that. >> ML, AI type stuff? >> So we're increasingly becoming automated, but because of the over, there's so much demand in the space. And we've had so much demand to consistently conduct audits, it's tough to pull my engineers away from conducting an audit to work on the tooling to automate the audit, right? And so we are building a lot of proprietary tooling to speed up the process, to automate conducting a GAS analysis, where we make sure you're not clogging up the blockchain by using too much GAS. Static analysis, we're trying to automate that as fast as possible. But what's a bit more difficult to automate, at least right now, is when we have a qualified full-stack engineer read the white paper or the source of truth and make sure the smart contract actually does it, that is, it's a bit longer tail where you're leveraging machine learning and AI to make that fully automated. (talking over each other) >> But maybe is that, I'm sorry John. Is that the long term model or do you think you can actually, I mean there's people that say augmented intelligence is going to be a combination of humans and machines, what do you think? >> I think it's going to be a combination for a long time. Every single day that we audit code, our process gets faster and faster and faster because once we find a vulnerability, finding that same vulnerability next time will be faster and easier and faster and easier. And so as time goes on, we see it as, since the bundle of our work today is ICOs, token generation events, there are ERC 20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. And we don't know how long this party will last. Like maybe in a couple years or a couple months, we have a big twist in the ICO space that the numbers will drastically go down. The long tail of Hosho's business for us, is to keep track of people writing smart contracts, period. But we think they are going to become more functional smart contracts where the entire business is on a smart contract and they've cut out sophisticated middle men. Right and it may be less ICOs, and in those cases I mean, if you're a publicly traded company, and you're going from R&D phase where you wrote a smart contract and now actually going to deploy it, I think the publicly traded company's going to do three to five audits. They're going to do multiple audits and take security as a very major concern. And in the space today, security is not being discussed nearly as much as it should. We have the best hedge funds cutting checks into companies, before the smart contract is even written, let alone audited. And so we're trying to partner with all the biggest hedge funds and tell the hedge funds to mandate that if you cut a check into a company that is going to do a token generation event, that they need to guarantee that they're going to at least value security, both in-house for the company and for the smart contract that's going to be written. >> How much do you charge for this? I mean just ballpark. Is it a range of purchase price, sales price? What's the average engagement go for, is it on a scope of work? Statement of work? Or is it license? I mean how does it work? >> So first it depends is it a penetration test of the website or the exchange? Penetration testing of exchanges are far more complex than just a website. Or if it's a smart contract audit, is it an ICO or is it a functional smart contract? In either case for the smart contract audit, we have to build a long set of custom tooling to attack each and every smart contract. So it's definitely very case-by-case. But a ballpark that we could maybe give is somewhere around the lines of 10 to 15 thousand dollars per 100 lines of functional code. And we ask for about three weeks of lead time for both a smart contract audit and a penetration test. And surprisingly in this space, some of the highest caliber companies and high caliber projects with the best teams, are coming to us far too late to get a security audit and a penetration test. So after months of fundraising and a private pre-sale and another pre-sale, and going and throwing parties and events and conferences to increase the excitement for participating in their token sale, what we think is the most important part, the security audit for a smart contract is left to the last week before your ICO. And a ridiculous number of companies are coming to us within seven days of the token sale, >> John: Scrambling. >> Scrambling, and we're saying but we've seen you at seven conferences, I think that we need to delay your ICO by two or three weeks. We can assure you that all of your investors will say thank you for valuing security, because this is irreversible. Once this goes live and the smart contract is deployed. >> Horse is out of the barn. >> It's irreversible. >> Right right. >> And once we seal the code, no one should touch it. >> It's always the case with security, it's bolted on at the last minute. >> It's like back road recovery too, oh we'll just back it up. It's an architectural decision we should have made that months ago. So question for you, the smart contract, because again I'm just getting my wires crossed, 'cause there's levels of smart contracts. So if we, hypothetical ICO or we're doing smart contracts for our audience that's going to come out soon. But see that's more transactional. There's security token sales, >> Yes. >> That are essentially, can be ERC 20 tokens, and that's not huge numbers. It could be big, but not massive. Not a lot transaction costs. That's a contract, right? That's a smart contract? >> People are writing smart contracts to conduct a token generational event, most commonly for an ERC 20 token, that's correct. >> Okay so that's the big, I call that the big enchilada. That's the big-- >> Right now that is the most important, the most common. >> Okay so as you go in the future, I can envision a day where in our community, people going to be doing smart contracts peer-to-peer. >> Sure. >> How does that work? Is that a boiler plate? Is is audited, then it's going to be audited every time? Do the smart contracts get smaller? I mean what's your vision on that? Because we are envisioning a day where people in our audience will say hey Hartej, let's do a white paper together, let's write it together, have a handshake, do a smart contract click, click. Lock it in. And charge a dollar a download, get a million downloads, we split it. >> I envision a day where you can have a more drag and drop smart contract and not need a technical developer to be a full-stack engineer to have to write your smart contract. Yes I totally envision that day. >> John: But that's not today. >> We are very far from that today. >> Dave, kill that project. >> We're so far, we're very far from that. We're light years far from that. >> Okay well look. If we can't eliminate the full-stack engineers, I'm okay with that. Can we eliminate the lawyers? At least minimize them. >> We can minimize them possibly, but we have five stacks of lawyers for our company, I don't see them going anywhere. We need lawyers all the time. >> I see that in the press sometimes, yeah it's going to get disrupted. I don't see it happening. Okay we were having a great conversation off-camera about what makes a good ICO. You see, you have a huge observation space. And you were very opinionated. A lot of companies are out there just floating a token because they're trying to raise money. And they could do the same thing with Ethereum or Bitcoin. >> That's correct. >> Your thoughts? >> My thoughts are that it's very important for companies who are sophisticated, I think, to start by giving away a little bit of equity in the business. And that if you want to be in the blockchain space, and you really firmly believe you have a model to have a token within a decentralized application, I would still start by finding quality investors in the space, in the world. They might be still in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley didn't just disappear overnight now that the blockchain is out. I am all for the fact that Silicon Valley no longer has as much of a grip on tech because of their blockchain world. And they're not seeing as much deal flow, and there's not as much reliance on venture capitalists, that's exciting to me. But let's not forget the value, that top-tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Vinod Khosla. and Fintech VCs like Commerce Ventures and Nyca Partners in New York, Propel VC, these are good Fintech VC arms that continue to time and time again add immense value to companies. >> And they have networks. They add value. >> They have strong-valued networks, but they're just not going to disappear. And those VCs, if they've invested into a company, took a board seat, fostered their growth, taught them what it means to actually be a real business that's growing at 7-15% week over week, maybe two years down the line, after they've given away a board seat to someone like Nyca Partners, I would be interested in understanding what your token economics look like. Now that you have a revenue generating business, how you've placed a token model into this already running business that makes 25 to 50 grand a month and you have a team of 10, self-sustaining themselves off of revenue. Much more intriguing of a conversation. What's happening today in the space is, hey my buddy Jim and Steve and I came up with an idea for this business. There's going to be a token, and we're starting a private pre-sale tomorrow. I'm going to give you 300% bonus and will you be my advisor? And they're going to start raising capital because of an idea. You know what we used to say in the Silicon Valley startup world, you can raise on just a PowerPoint. I think in the blockchain world, you could raise on just an idea? And then maybe a white paper? And the white paper is one page? And so you've raised a bunch of capital, you have a white paper. >> Now you got to build it. >> Now you got to build, you got to write a smart contract, you got to build it, you got to do it, and then everyone loses excitement and it goes back to our previous conversation the development talent. So, another thing not being discussed in the space is company employee retention, right? So if you have a growing number of ICOs, that have very large budgets because investors have found a way to sink millions of dollars into a company early, you've got $5 million in the hands of a company to start, well this company can afford to pay someone a very ridiculous salary to come join them to write the smart contract now. So they could offer an engineer 500 Eth a month to come join them for three months. So you have good engineers just bouncing from one ICO to the next and as soon as the ICO goes live, they quit. This is a problem to companies who are-- >> It's migration, out migration. >> How do you retain, even capital? >> Companies like Hosho, ShapeShift, companies that are selling picks and shovels of the industry, that want to be household names in the space, we have to really think about how we're going to retain our employees in the space. >> So the recruitment and bringing on the new generation, we were also talking off camera about Bill Tye and the younger generation and kind of riffing on the notion that, because there is a new set of mission-driven developers and builders, on the business side as well. Your thoughts and reaction to what you see and what you see that's good and what you see that we need more of? >> So the most powerful thing in the blockchain space that I think is so exciting is that you have a lot of people between the age of 25 and 35 that don't come from money, that didn't go to Stanford, didn't go to Y Combinator, they're probably not white, from-- >> John: Ivy League schools. >> Ivy League schools. I'm not trying to make it about race, but if you're a white male and went to Stanford and went to Y Combinator, chances of you raising VC money on sand hill are a lot higher, right? And you have a guy looking like me who didn't go to Stanford, doesn't come from money, running up and down sand hill, I have personally faced that battle and it wasn't easy. And we were based in Vegas and so being based in Vegas, I'd also have to deal with so why do you live in Vegas? When are you going to move to Silicon Valley? And if we invest in you, you're going to open an office in sand hill right? And now in the blockchain world, what's exciting is you have so many heavy-hitters running as founders, some of the most successful companies in the space, who don't come from money and a big prestigious background, but they're honest, they're hard-working, they're putting in 12 to 15 hours of work every single day, seven days a week. And to space, six weeks is like six years. And we all have a level of trust that goes back to times when we were all running struggling startups. And so our bond is, to me, even more significant than what must have been between Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel in the PayPal Mafia. We have our own mafias being formed of much stronger bonds of younger people who will be able to share much more significant deal flow so if the PayPal Mafia was able to join forces to punch out companies like eBay and Square, wait 'til companies in this space, we have young, heavy-hitters right now who are non-reliant on some of the more traditional older folks. Wait 'til you see what happens in the next couple years. >> Hartej, great conversation. And I want to get one more question in. We've seen Keiretsu Forum, mafias, teams more than ever as community becomes an integral part of vetting and by the way trust, you have unwritten rules. I mean baseball, Dave and I used to do sports analogies. >> Self-governance. >> Reggie Jackson talked about unwritten rules and it works. If you beam the batter, the other guy, your best star, your side's going to get beamed. That's an unwritten rule. These are what keeps things going, balanced through the course of a season. What are the unwritten rules in the Ethos right now? >> Honesty, transparency, and that's the key. We need self-governance. This is a very unregulated market. There's rules being broken by people who are ignorant to the rules. The most common rule I've seen being broken is by people who are not broker dealers, running around fundraising capital, they don't even know what an institutional advisor license is. They don't know what a Series 7 and a Series 63 is. I asked a guy just last night, he said I'm pooling capital, I'm syndicating, let me know if you want in on the deal. And I said when did you take your Series 7? He goes what's that? Get away from me. You're an American, you need to look up what US securities laws are and make sure that you're playing by the rules and if someone who doesn't know the rules has entered our inner circle of investors, of advisors, of people sharing deal flow, we have a good network of people that are closing the loop for companies, whether it's lawyers, investors, exchanges, security auditors, people who write smart contracts, dev shops, people who write white papers, PR marketing, people who do the road show, there's a full circle-- >> So people are actually doing work to put into the community, to know your neighbor if you will, know the deals that are going down, to identify potential trip wires that are being established by either bad actors or-- >> KYC, AML, this is a new space that's also attracting people that have a criminal background. Right? And that's just a harsh reality of the space. That in the United States if you have a felony on your record, maybe getting a job has become really difficult and you figured let's do an ICO, no one's going to check my record. That is a reality of the space. Another reality is the money that was invested into this entire ICO clean. Right, that's a massive issue for the US government right now. It's been less than 15 hours since the SEC has issued actually subpoenas to people on this exact topic, today. >> This is a great topic, we'd like to do more on. >> Dozens of them. >> We'd like to continue to keep in touch with you on The Cube. Obviously you're welcome anytime, loved your insight. Certainly we'd love to have you be an advisor on our mission, you're welcome anytime. >> For sure, let's talk about it. Come out to Las Vegas. Hosho's always happy to host you. >> John And Dave: We're there all the time. >> The Cube lives at the sands. >> It's our second home. >> Come by Hosho's office and let us know. Vegas is our home. We are hosting a conference in Vegas after DEFCON. So DEFCON is the biggest security conference in the world. You have the best black hats and white hats show up as security experts in Vegas and right on the tail end of it, Hosho's going to host a very exclusive invite-only conference. >> What's it called? Just Hosho Conference? >> Just Blockchain. It'll be called the just, it'll be by the Just Blockchain Group and Hosho's the main backer behind it. >> Well we appreciate your integrity and your sharing here on The Cube, and again you're paying it forward in the community, that's great. Ethos we love that. That's our mission here, paying it forward content. Here in the Bahamas. Live coverage here at PolyCon 18. We're talking about securitized token, a decentralized future for awesome things happening. I'm Jeff Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE! Covering POLYCON18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is exclusive live CUBE coverage here in the Bahamas for POLYCON18, it's a crypto event. Just talking economics. It's all the players in the space really discussing the future. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest, Bill Tai, friend, Facebook friend, industry legend, venture capitalist, kite surfer. His Twitter handle is @kitevc. Follow him. He's also involved in Bitfury and a lot of Bitcoin-related activities. Been a mentor to others. Great to have you, Bill. >> Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on the show. >> You tweeted in 2010, "This Bitcoin thing is interesting. "Check out this white paper." Can? >> Yeah, that was a >> Seminal moment. >> You know, back then I didn't know it would be, maybe a seminal moment. I was just lonely. (laughing) So, and the back story there, a very good friend of mine is Philip Rosedale, and he had approached me when he was starting a site called Second Life, where you basically create a digital avatar, maybe of yourself, maybe not, and you have this kind of, you know, world where you have people in an unstructured environment. And in the very early days of Second Life, when people were kind of just milling about, I said to Philip, I said, "Hey, Philip. "You know, maybe we should create a currency." I said, you know like, "If you think about it. "Think about what is Las Vegas? "Las Vegas is this pile of sand "but there is this metropolis on it. "How did that happen?" I said, "You know, if you took ten people, "sat them in a circle, and you put one poker chip "in the system, and said 'Pass it to the right,' "and everybody did that a million times a year. "Everybody would have a million dollars of income. "And then you could take chunks off "and build a casino, and build a resort, "and you'd have Las Vegas." So I said, "Let's do that." And so the Linden dollar was born. And so, soon, there was this thriving economy in Second Life that just, it was quite amazing to see. And so, when Bitcoin came out in 2009, as soon as I heard about it, I wanted to see what it was. So I went to the site and I read the paper, and it just seemed really cool. And so I started to play with it a little bit, and by 2010, I just thought it was really cool, but no one else had seen it. >> Yeah. >> So I took to Twitter to say, (laughing) "Is anyone out there "using this P to P digital currency?" You know, and >> It's funny. Our first web, You know, I started SiliconANGLE in 2009. David and I partnered in 2010. Our first website, the developer didn't want PayPal. He wanted Bitcoin. It was 22 cents, I think, at the time and we used the site for about half a year, and then we changed it and went back paid fiat. But if you think about where these come from, you brought up Second Life. Okay, online virtual world, really ahead of its time, but really set the stage for what we're seeing now. Gaming people who know virtual currencies, thrive on crypto. >> Yeah. Yes. >> So I'd like to get your perspective. Because, I know you've done a lot of investing in mobile and gaming, and what not. Where does that cross over? Because there's been a lot of virtual currencies going on in games. >> Yes. >> For a long, long time. >> Yes. >> How is that influencing and impacting this industry? >> Well, you know it's, I guess you have to ask, when you ask, you know, where does the real and where does the digital, like do they cross? And what are they? What is currency? Is the U.S. dollar real, right? And actually, let me pause for a second and reach down to my phone, because did you see a tweet today from Sheila Bair? I have to read this. Okay, so I just saw a tweet from @zerohedge earlier today. Sheila Bair, on Bitcoin, Quote, "I don't think we should ban it. "The green bills in your pocket don't have "an intrinsic value either." >> Well, look, the government wants to get rid of paper money. The people want to get rid of paper money. Why not? >> What is it really? Right? I mean so >> Backed by the U.S. military maybe, I don't know, I mean what >> What is it? >> What is it? Right. >> That's a good question. >> So I don't really see a difference. You know, they're kind of the same thing. You know, it's just something that people believe in, as the embodiment of value exchange. Whatever it is. So if it's a green piece of paper, or it's not. If it's shell, if it's a pebble. There is a fascinating book that you can read called The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. He's at Stanford now at the Hoover Institute, but he got widely known after the great financial crisis unfolded. He basically wrote a book called The Ascent of Money which tracks the history of value exchange across civilized communities, for thousands of years, from pebbles to shells, to feathers, to credit, to default swaps. And coined the term "Cimerica," which is sort of the interdependence of the cash flow. And what became apparent to me when I read that, was that the world of ICOs is actually no different than anything we've experienced in civilized humanity. You know, if you think about, even in the United States, in the 1800s, at one time there were over 200 currencies circulating at the same time. If you think about the formation of the United States as colonies, a bunch of guys get off the boats. They draw lines around the forest. Here's Connecticut, here's Vermont, here's New York, here's Virginia. Let's do an ICO. They all did an ICO. If you think about it, they created their own unit of currency per their community and geography, no different than what's happening today. >> When Lincoln was shot, there was a five dollar confederate bill in his wallet, right? I mean, the confederates had their own money. >> Yeah, and also you brought a point up in the conference you were in in Dubai, which I thought was really intriguing, and provocative, but also kind of real. The Oil Dollar Association post-World War II, >> Yeah >> Essentially wasn't actually securitizing oil That was an ICO. >> It was the tokenization of oil, right. Yeah, so, you know, the modern currency system that we have today, that is commonly known as the Petrodollar, so it's actually a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you think about, of course, the quote "U.S. dollar" was around a little bit longer than 1944, but it was really at Brett Woods that the dollar had its sort of birth to become the world's standard currency. And, you know, this is maybe a little bit of an over-simplification, but think about the picture after World War II. So, you basically have every major productive economy have war, destroy themselves. The U.S. enters late, finishes it all off completely, and you basically have 100 million people milling about. A little bit like Second Life, right? So, what do you do? Got to make them productive. Create a currency, set of currencies. So for every community of interest, like every token community of interest, you say, "Well, here's a lira, here's a franc, "Here's a pound, here's a mark. "Let's take gold, "reference the dollar to gold, and reference "every one of these currencies against the dollar. "Gentlemen, start your engines." Right? >> There you go. >> So how is that different than an ICO? Okay, so that was fixed to gold for a long time until people started to game it. And when the French accumulated a lot of dollars and they realized, whoa, there's more dollars than there is gold, I'm just going to go cash all this in. So they literally came over to take all the gold, and then the president took it off the gold standard. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> So it had to couple with something. So what it the utility token that that became? That became referenced to petroleum because the U.S. had basically forced everybody in the Middle East to accept dollars as payment and what that did was it created the dollar as a storage of energy. So you could basically take a token of oil and, as a separate nation, you could store that through your trade, if you had sort of a surplus, and you provided yourself energy security. >> Well, most currencies, right, historically have had a pretty short shelf life. Presumably the same will be true in the Blockchain world. >> Don't know. >> The crypto world. >> Yeah, it's, if you look at the history of humans over six million years, and it's arguable it's at four or six, or whatever it is, you're right. Like there have always been multiple currencies all the time. And very rarely have they ever become sort of like super-dominating currencies. That is also a very recent phenomena. I think, driven by the industrial revolution, and a combination of the Petrodollar and scale economics and manufacturing. So, so that >> Yeah, and overwhelmingly here, at this event, people feel like security tokens, as an asset class, are going to vastly overtake utility tokens. >> You know, actually, securities are a whole, I mean regular securities, (laughing) that's an interesting subject altogether. Right, okay, so there was a time, in my lifetime, when I was a securities analyst at Alex Brown in the '80s, and in that period of time, everything traded at ten times earnings, right? So you had a barometer for, a stock should be valued at this, because is should have a PE of actual real earnings. >> Dave Vellante: Independent of its growth or anything else, right? >> Yes, and if it grew, you had a PEG ratio, so you'd have a little bit higher growth, and so a little higher PE, but what's happened to securities over time, of that ilk, okay, you had to get these companies profitable to get them public in that era, and then over time the sort of like network effects have come in, and communities of interest have formed around companies. So, and the structure of securities has moved from give me something with earnings multiply it by a number to get the value, to give me a share of something that has no voting rights and no earnings. Does that sound like a token? That's Snapchat, right? (laughing) >> So you literally have, you know, Google, Facebook, all these companies now issue shares that don't have the characteristics of equity shares. They don't vote. What are they now, right? So tokenization is sort of a natural extension of that. >> Dave Vellante: Do you see that as a >> They don't have dividends either >> You see that as a fundamental shift in the value equation, the perceived value equation? Both? Is it sustainable? >> I think it's basically, so, you know, I go back and forth on this, because is it a trend line or is it a return in the past? Right? So what is a confederate dollar that was in Abraham Lincoln's pocket? It's a belief. So what is a share of Snapchat? It's a belief. It doesn't have earnings >> John Furrier: And a token is a belief. >> Right. >> But the trend is securing something, right? So the trend we're seeing is, obviously the ruling, first of all the ruling in Switzerland was interesting. You now have a trading so an asset, so security, asset, and then trading. So they kind of went a little bit deeper, which I think is helpful. >> Yeah. >> For the community. But what are they securing? So the trend, as we see, is percentage of revenue, non dilutive and equity in the classic sense, so kind of a token. And then some sort of either buyback options, people are doing things like that. Do you see patterns like that? What are you seeing for? >> Well. >> I mean a security token makes sense. It's all credited. The paperwork's known. >> Yeah, so, you know, it feels like, so some people refer to sort of Bitcoin as digital gold, you know, and in that sense, like gold is a commodity but is the root of securities, you know, whether it's gold ETF's or something, because you perceive a limited supply, and you perceive a storage of value, so that is where I think Bitcoin sits. But then I think this whole other category of utility tokens, that may be considered security tokens by definition of law, that resembles the petrodollar. And as we were talking about earlier, you know gold used to represent or a dollar used to represent a share of gold, but it didn't anymore. So what was underpinning it? It was basically, in my opinion, the ability for that token to have utility as an instrument to purchase oil for your energy security. And so, I think that's kind of where the utility tokens are today. >> You're a leader in the industry, and you're well-known. Communities need to thrive. And factions form, curriencies form, and can be very productive, and also can be counterproductive. >> Yeah. >> So what is the unwritten rules that you guys are putting forth. Are people meeting? Are you talking? And sometimes, as people make money, which a lot of people are making a lot of money right now. I mean, for some people, it's the first time. Didn't have money, make money. You know, egos kind of come in. So all of these are normal things. But again, this is a societal community dynamic, >> Yes. >> But super important. Institutional investors are coming in. >> Right. >> Big money. This isn't Burning Man. This isn't. Burning Man's cool, but you can't model this industry after Burning Man. Maybe you could. I don't know. What is your take? >> Well, you know, it's, I think that the guiding principle really needs to be looking out for the greater good, because I think that is the issue that everyone is trying to solve for. And it's not just endemic to Bitcoin and Blockchain. It's a societal issue that's been with us since the creation of civilization. And I don't know how to solve for that, but I think you need people to stand up and just make sure that people are thinking about that all the time. You know, and I think, over my career, I think I started as kind of like a geek hacker, sitting in the back of the room, working on little microchips and building stuff, and I still do that on weekends sometimes, but, you know, for whatever reason, I've been thrust into this role now where I do have a set of communities of interest that started actually around kiteboarding, but it became sort of a larger community around entrepreneurship. And we've actually, I have a 501(c)(3) that supports ocean causes and entrepreneurial things, and it's called ACTAI Global, and we have a couple value statements. We actually, we're codifying it, so we actually have a little pin, you know the ACTAI stands for Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators, and all of us collectively, we combine our energy to work on causes. Some of the things that we support are around ocean conservation and the preservation of ecosystems, but we also work on a lot of other entrepreneurial efforts to help each other. But the thing that I've realized with our group is we've been very productive as a community, and you see a lot of companies that are born in our community, funded in our community, like, you know, whether it's Canva or Zoom, or any number of projects that turn into community-based companies because the group of people, they think and they stand for something greater than themselves. So that's kind of one principle. It's sort of like, how do you, how do you place your values as something to support the greater community, and that's something that I think, if everybody would just think about that a little bit, and stand for something greater than themselves, the world would be a better place. And on that note, the second ethos that we operate to is that we strive to leave every person or place we touch better than before we touched it. So when you see us like kiting at a beach, you'll see us picking up garbage, too. You know? We don't go someplace without trying to improve it a little bit. And I think we help each other on the companies, too. And I think the last thing that people really should try to do, everybody in this world of technology, has a little bit of a superpower, whatever that is. You know, they wouldn't be doing the things that they're doing if they weren't totally insanely focused on a piece of technology. They know something that other people don't. And if everybody would just try a little bit to use the powers the universe has granted them, to empower others, to unlock other people, the world would be a better place. So I think, you know, I think all of these factions, if we could just get people to stand for something greater than themselves, work to make people and places better off than before they touched them, and empower other people, I think we'll have some great outcomes. >> You know, empathy, empathy is a wonderful thing. And also you mentioned, know your neighbor. You know, that's a big thing. We're doing our part here in theCUBE, bringing our mission content. Bill, been great to have you on. And we'll get that clip out on the network about your mission. Great stuff. >> Thank you, thanks. >> And great to see you >> It's an awesome philosophy. >> be successful, you're a great leader. People look up to you, and certainly we're glad to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Hey, more live coverage after this short break here on theCUBE in the Bahamas for crypto currency, token economics, POLYCON18. We'll be back with more after this short break.

(fast-paced instrumental music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation, here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, Co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and host of theCUBE for our special CMO signal series we're launching. Really talkin' to the top thought leaders in marketing, in the industry, really pushing the envelope on a lot of experimentation. And Robson Grieve, Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, is here. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. >> Thank you, excited to be with you. >> So, New Relic is a very progressive company. You have a founder who's very dynamic, writes code, takes sabbaticals, creates product, he's a musician, is prolific. That kind of sets the tone for your company, and you guys are also state of the art DevOps company. >> Robson: Yes. >> So, pressure's on to be a progressive marketer, you guys are doing that. >> Yeah, I think some of the great things about that DevOps culture are process wise it allows us to experiment with different ways of working. And we've obviously talked a little bit about Agile and the way a different way of thinking about how you actually do the work can change the way you output the kind of things you're willing to make, the way the teams work together. And the degree to which you can integrate marketing and sales, really, around shorter time frames, faster cycle times. And so, we have a great culture around that. We also have a really great culture around experimentation. I think that's one of the biggest things that Lou talks a lot about is, let's try things, let's look for experiments, let's see where we can find something unexpected that could be a big success, and let's not be afraid for something to go wrong. If you can do that, then you have way higher odds of finding the Geo TenX. >> And you guys are also in the analytics, you also look at the signal, so you're very data driven, and I'll give you a prop for that, give you a plug. (Robson laughing) New Relic, a very data driven company. But today we're seeing a Seed Changer, a revolution in the tech industry. Seeing signals like cryptocurrency, blockchain, everyone's goin' crazy for this. They see disruption in that. You've got AI and a bunch of other things, so, and you got the Cloud computing revolution, so all of this is causing a lot of horizontally, scalable change, which is breaking down the silos of existing systems. >> Yeah. >> But, you can't just throw systems away. You have systems in marketing. So, how are you dealing with that dynamic, because we're seeing people going, hey, I just can't throw away my systems, but I got to really be innovative and agile to the real-time nature of the internet now, while having all those analytics available. >> Yeah. >> How do you tackle that, that issue? >> Yeah, there's a couple ways to think about analytics. Number one is, what do you need to know in real-time to make sure things are working and that your systems are up and running and operating effectively? And that runs through everything from upfront in web experiences and trial experiences, that kind of thing. Through to how our leads and customers progressing through a funnel, as they get passed around the various parts of a company. But then the second approach we take to data is, after all that's happened, how can we look backwards on it and what patterns emerge when you look at it over the scale of longer period of time. And so, that's the approach today. You're right, you can't just everything and throw it out and start over again, 'cause some startups stop by with a really cool idea. But, you have to be aggressive about experimentation. I think that's the, back to that big idea that we talked about experimentation. We are trying out a lot of different things all the time. Looking for things that could be really successful. Of course, Intercom is one that we started to experiment with a little bit for in product communications and we've expanded over time as we found it more and more useful. And, so that's not, we haven't taken and just ripped something else out of it, made some giant bet on something brand new. We've tried it, we've gotten to know it, and then we found ways to apply that. We're doing that with a number of different technologies right now. >> Yeah, you're in a very powerful position, you're Chief Marketing Officer, which has to look over a lot of things now, and certainly with IT and Cloud. You're essentially in the middle of the fabric of the organization. Plus, people are knockin' on your door to sell you stuff. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So, what is-- >> That's happened. (laughing) >> It happens all the time, he's got the big budget. >> What are they saying to you? Who's knockin' on your door, right now? Who's peppering you. Who's tryin' to get on your calendar? Who's bombarding you? Where are you saying, Hey, I'm done with that, or Hey, I'm lookin' for more of that. How do you deal with that tension, 'cause I'm sure it must be heavy. >> Yeah, I think there is definitely a lot of optionality in the market, for sure. I think there's a new wave of martech vendors. Many of whom are sitting right in between sales ops and marketing ops. That's a layer we're really interested in. Systems that can help us better understand the behavior of sale's reps, and how they're using things that we're making, and then systems that you can better understand, indications of prospect intent. >> So, funnel and pipeline, or those kinds of things? >> Yeah, we think about it more from the context of authentic engagement. And so, we don't want to apply too much of a-- >> Structure to it. >> Structure, a sales structure to it. We want to try to follow the customer's intent through the process, 'cause the best prospect is someone who is authentically engaged in trying to find a solution to their problem. And so, if we can avail ourselves to people in a thoughtful, and creative, and authentic way, when they need us, when they're trying to solve that problem, then I think that they can become much more successful prospects. >> I love your angle on agile marketing. I think that's table steaks, not that you got to behave that way, and I'd love to get your thoughts, I'll get your thoughts later on the management style and how you make that happen. But, you mentioned engagement, this is now the new Holy Grail. There's a lot of data behind it, and it could be hidden data, it could be data decentralized all over the place. This is the hottest topic. How do you view engagement as a CMO, and the impact to the organization? What are you lookin' for, what's the key premise for your thesis of getting engagement? >> It's really the number one, two, and three topic we're talking about right now, and we think about it on the content side. How do we get ourselves really producing a constant stream of content that has value to people? That either helps them solve a problem right now, or helps them think about an architectural issue in a different way. We're trying to invest more and more technical resources in people who can produce things that are relevant to all the different kinds of users that we have. DevOps people, SREs, our traditional developer customers. We want to go deep and be super relevant at a content level for them. But then once they start to spend time with us, we want to then have a progressive way to pull them deeper and deeper into our community. And so, the things that we can do, something's in digital for that, but then often there's a pop off line, and we do a lot of workshops, a lot of education. >> Face-to-face? >> Face-to-face, where we're in communities, we look at a map at the start of the year and say, where do we have big user communities, and then we drop events into those places where we take our educators and our product experts and get customers to share with each other. And that becomes a really great platform to put them together and have them help each other, as well as learn more about what our product does. >> So, it sounds like you're blending digital with face-to-face? >> Robson: Yeah, absolutely. >> That's a key part of your strategy? >> Key part is to make sure that we're getting time and attention from the people who are making decisions, and what technologies they're going to buy, but also that we're really investing time in the people who are using it in their everyday lives to do their job better. That's a really-- >> Give some examples of outcomes that you've seen successful from that force. That's a really unique, well unique is pretty obvious if you think about it, but some people think digital is the Holy Grail, let's go digital, let's lower cost. But, face-to-face can be expensive, but you're blending it. What's the formula and what are some of the successes that you've seen as a result. >> Yeah, we tend to try to create events that are good for a very specific audience. So, if you think about a targeting formula that you would use in digital that will make digital really efficient, that same idea works really well for an event. So, if you got a user community that's really good at doing one thing with your product and you feel like if they knew a few more things that they could get better. Then we help them really advance to the next level, and so we run certification programs, where we'll pull together a group of confident users and help them get to the next level. And things like that allow us to make a really targeted event that allows us to reach out to a group and move them to a higher level of competency. To have competency focus is a big deal. Can we help you get better at your job? But then communities, is the other big one. Can we help you connect with people who are doing the same things? Solving the same kinds of problems and are interested in the same topics as you are. >> It sounds like the discovery path of the user, the journey, your potential. >> Yeah, it's important to us for sure. >> And content sounds like it's important too. >> It helps with your engagement. How you dealing with the content? Is that all on your properties? How about off property measurement? How do you get engagement for off property? >> Yeah, we're experimenting a lot in that area, of off property. I think we've had tons of success inside our own website and our blogs, and those kinds of-- >> You guys do pop out a lot of content, so it's content rich. >> Yes, we definitely have a lot, we hopefully, our attitude is, we want to turn our company inside out, so we want to take all of our experts-- >> Explain that, that's important topic, so, you guys are opening up what? >> We have got customer support people, we have technical sales, and technical support engineers, we've got marketing people who are thought leaders in Cloud and other architecture topics. We really want to take all the expertise that they've got and we want to share it with our community. >> John: How do you do that, through forums, through their Twitter handles? >> Through all of the above, really. Through their Twitter handles, through content that they write and produce through videos, through a podcast series that we run. We're really trying to expand as much as possible, but then inside our user help community, anytime somebody solves a problem for one customer, we want to add it to that-- >> Sounds like open-source, software. (laughing) >> From a knowledge perspective, that's really an important idea for us. >> Yeah, that's awesome. You worry about the risk. I like the idea of just opening it up. You're creating building blocks of knowledge, like code. It's almost like an open-source software, but no, it's open knowledge. >> We think if we can help people get really successful at the work they're trying to do, that it's going to do great things for us as a brand. >> What's the rules of the road, because obviously you might have some hay makers out there. Some employee goes rogue, or you guys just trusting everyone, just go out and just do it. >> Well, it's constant effort to distribute publishing rights and allow people to take more and more ownership of it, and to maintain some editorial controls, because I think quality is a big thing. It's probably a bigger concern for us then somebody going rogue. At some level, if that happens to you, you can't stop it. >> So, is this a new initiative or is it progression? >> It's been ongoing for awhile. It's progression of an effort we started probably 18 months ago, and it's a wonderful way for an engineering team, and a product management team, and a marketing team to get together around a really unified mission as well. So our content project is just one of those things that I think really pulls us together inside the company in a really fun way as well. >> It's interesting, you seeing more and more what social peers want to talk to each other and not the marketing guy, and say, Hey, get the Kool-Aid, I like the product, I want to talk to someone to solve my problem. >> Want to have a real conversation about it, and I think that's our job, is to not think of it as marketing, but to think of it as just facilitating a real conversation about how our product works for somebody. >> I'd love to talk about leadership as the Chief Marketer for New Relic in the culture that you're in, which is very cool to be in on the front-end, in the front lines doing cool things. What do you do? How do you manage yourself, how do you manage your time? What do you do, how do you organize the troops, how do you motivate them? What's your management style for this marketing in the modern era? >> I think, number one, we're trying to create an organization that is full of opportunities for people, so it's something that we've done. I've been there for about two and a half years, and we've really looked hard for people who have tons of potential and finding great things to work on. On new projects, and then let them try out ideas that they've got. So, if they can own an idea, give it a shot, and even if it doesn't work, they'll learn a bunch from the process of trying. >> What are the craziest ideas you've heard from some of your staff? (laughing) >> Oh boy, you know a lot of them involve video. There's always a great idea for a video that's risky. And we've made-- >> So the Burger King one with Net Neutrality going around the web is the funniest video I've seen all week. >> Robson: Yeah, yeah. >> Could be risky, could be also a double-edged sword, right? >> Yeah, video is one of those places where you have to check yourself a little bit, 'cause it could be a great idea, and so sometimes you have to actually make it and look at it, and say, would we publish this or not? And, yeah, so that's definitely the place to be. >> So common sense is kind of like your. >> Yeah, you start with common sense, for sure. And, I think we want to be a part of it being culturally responsible in Silicon Valley right now, is really making sure that we're attentive to making sure that we're putting in the right kind of workplace environment for people. And so, our content and the way we go to market has to reflect that as well, so there's a bunch of filters that you put on it, but you have to take risks and try to make things, and if they work great, and if they don't then the cost of that is less than. The cost of failure is so low in some of these things, so you just have to try. >> Well, you know, we're into video here at theCUBE. I have to ask you, do you see video more and more in the marketing mix and if so, how does that compare to old methods? We've seen the media business change and journalism, certainly on the analyst community. Who reads white papers? Maybe the do, maybe they don't. Or, how do they engage? What content formally do you see as state of the art engagement? Is is video, is it a mix, how do you view that? >> It's a mix, really. I think video's really powerful. And it can be great to tree topics and short form in a really powerful way. I think we can stretch it out a little bit in terms of how to and teaching and education also. But, there are times when other things like a white paper are still relevant. >> Yeah, they got to do their homework and get ready for the big test. >> Yes. >> How to install. (laughing) >> Exactly, yeah. >> Okay, big surprises for you in the industry, if you could look back and talk to yourself a few years ago and say, Wow, I didn't know that was going to happen, or I kind of knew this was going to be a trend we would be on. Where is the tailwinds, where's the headwinds in the industry as a marketer to be innovated, to be on the cutting edge, to deliver the value you need to do for your customers and for the company? >> Yeah, I think there's a bunch of great tailwinds organizationally and in the approach to work. And you talked about Agile. I think it's been a great thing to see people jump in and try to work in a different way. That's created tons of scale for a department like ours, where we're tryin' to go to more countries, and more places constantly. Having a better way to work, where we waste less effort, where we find problems and fix things way faster, has given us the chance to build leverage. And I think that's just that integration of engineering, attitudes, with marketing processes has been a, is an awesome thing. Everybody in our marketing department, or at least a lot of people have read the DevOps handbook, and we've got a lot of readers, so the devotes of that thought process that don't suit an engineering jobs. >> DevOps, Ethos, I think is going to be looked at as one of those things, that's a moment in history that has changed so much. I was just at Sundance Film Festival, and DevOps, Ethos is going to filmmaking. >> Robson: Yeah. >> And artistry with a craft and how that waterfall for the Elite Studios is opening up an amateur market in the Indy, so their Agile filmmakers and artists now doing cool stuff. So, it's going to happen. And of course, we love the infrastructures code. We'll talk about that all day long We love DevOps. (Robson laughing) So I got to ask you the marketing question. It will be a theme of my program of the CMO is, if I say marketing is code, infrastructure is code, enabled a lot of automation, some abstracted a way horizontally scaled, and new opportunities, created a lot of leverage, a lot of value, infrastructures code, created the Cloud. Is there a marketing as code Ethos, and what would that look like? If I would say, apply DevOps to marketing. If you could look at that, and you could say, magic wand. Give me some DevOps marketing, marketing as code. What would you have automated in a way that would be available to you? What would the APIs look like? What's your vision for that? >> What about the APIs, that's a good question. >> John: I don't think they exist yet, but we're fantasizing about it. (laughing) >> Yeah, I think the things that tend to slow marketing departments down really are old school, things like approvals. And how hard it is to get humans to agree on things that should be really easy. So, if the first thing you-- >> Provisioning an order. (laughing) >> The first thing you could do is just automate that system of agreeing that something's ready to go and send it out that I think you'd create so much efficiency in side marketing departments all over the world. Now that involves having a really great, and API's a great thought in that, because the expectations have to get matched up of what's being communicated on both sides, so we can have a channel on which to agree on something. That to me is-- >> Analytics are probably huge too. You want to have instant analytics. I don't care which database it came from. >> Yes, exactly. And that's the sense of DevOps and can use. But then you got some feedback on, did it work, was it the right thing to do, should we do more of it, should we fix it in some specific way? Yeah, I think that's-- >> I think that's an interesting angle, and the face-to-face thing that I find really interesting, because what you're doing is creating that face-to-face resource, that value is so intimate, and it's the best engagement data you can get is face-to-face. >> Yeah, I think it also allows us to build relationships to the point where we are getting invited into slack channels to help companies in real-time sometimes. I think there's a real-- >> So humanizing the company and the employees is critical. >> Yeah. >> You can't just be digital. >> Yes, it's a big deal. >> Awesome. Robson, thank so much for coming on theCUBE. The special CMO series. Is there a DevOps, can we automate away, what's going to automate, where's the value going to be in marketing? Super exciting, again, martech. Some are sayin' it's changing rapidly with the Cloud, AI, and all these awesome new technologies. What's going to change, that's what we're going to be exploring here on the CMO CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)

(relaxing guitar music) >> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in Los Angeles, this is CUBE's live coverage of Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, as part of the Linux Foundation I'm here with Stu Miniman, co-host now to Wikibon. [Unintelligible] Technical product marketing for Linux containers with Red Hat, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for coming on, appreciate Red Hat has been, again, the gold standard when it comes to Open Source, this conference really is about Linux, so you can't go any further than to look at the shining example of success that is Red Hat. From when I was growing up, back in the day, when Open Source was radical, Tier 2, Tier 3 some would argue, alternative to the big boys who were the proprietary operating systems. Now, Tier 1, well documented, don't need to recycle all that, but the fact is, Rell is a Tier 1, supports multiple, seven, ten, how many years now has support Rell, is it over twelve? >> Yeah, we're 15 years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at this point. >> Oh yeah, come on, John, remember when Red Hat Advance Server came out in, what was that, 2002, 2001, turned into Rell eventually. John, I was working for an infrastructure company and keepingupwiththecolonel.org was a total nightmare, and it needed some adult supervision, and that's what Red Hat brought. >> Yeah, of course, Stu, and this is well-known, every bang, this is Tier 1, is part of the operational infrastructure, so it's got to be stable, but now you've got all this growth going on, certainly we heard Zemlin talking about it on [Unintelligible] he's the Executive Director, saying, look it, we're going to have potentially by 2026 400 million libraries in Open Source. So certainly the Open Source realm is growing. >> Sure. >> Operating systems still has got to power all these applications and see what the best of both worlds, you want the stability foundational aspect of the operating system, while still encouraging experimentation, failure, growth, iteration, so Agile and DevOps Ethos is about Open Source, it is about trying it, same time you got to keep the lights on, they want downtime. What's your reaction, how do you guys look at that going forward? You want to enable more, but you don't want to break stuff. >> Yeah, I mean, that's really kind of one of the hearts of most of our customers' problems right, is if you put it in terms of spend, 75-80% of what people spend money on in IT right now, is keeping the lights on. That's really long-term not sustainable. Right, for anybody involved. So one of the things that we need to do, as an operating system, and as a... Broader than an just an operating system as a distribution, where customers come to us and not want just OS bits, but they also want tooling and application components. How do we draw that line between things that move a little bit faster and upstream, that are popular and people want and need access to, at the same time providing that really long-term, stable system user space that really shouldn't change over a long period of time, because that's what provides that sort of application stability that we can ride out over a long period of time. >> Matt, in the Keynote this morning, Jim put out a lot of stats, talking about 10,000 lines of code outed daily. 2,500 lines of code removed daily. 450 organizations contributing, so much going on in the space. What are they working on? What are some of the big issues, because it's stability, we've added growth, sure there's cool things like Coobernetties and containers, I remember that the hot t-shirt at the Red Hat Summit this year was Linux's containers, containers are Linux. So, we know a little bit about that story, so what sort of things is the community working on these days? >> Sure, so like you said, a lot of shiny objects, right? Even those objects, to be honest, they're not that shiny, you look at some of the original support for what's now Linux Containers, we're talking 2006, if you really want to draw the line, 2002, but there's a lot of things going on in new hardware enablement, it's not just new applications that are taking advantage of these different kinds of technologies, we've got new vendors coming out, ARM is about set to take off and add some new challenges and choices to the Enterprise customers. We've got a lot of folks who are working in networking, the networking is stacked within Rell has changed dramatically over the past ten years, and with Open Stack and things that are driving through DPDK, and into virtual functions and things along those lines, there's a lot of core stability and core change and things that we think of as stable over time. >> Matt, isn't some of those new work loads we spent a lot of time this last year hearing about edge computing, IoT, being something that's pretty important going forward, Linux looks like it's going to be a lot of these places, mobile, it's already all there. We talked this morning, 2017's the year of the Linux Desktop, just because there's so many devices now that are Linux, so how does the workload impact that? >> Yeah, so everything these days is really starting to get to the point where almost everything is a distributed workload. We've definitely left the single systems, single workload paradigm, and even the traditional up through the past few years, n-tier, we have app, web, and database, that's really starting to get pushed out across multiple devices. Not only is it getting compute closer to the edge with some of the IT devices, but simply looking at how we do reliability, stability, you mentioned DevOps, that whole ability to move that reliability layer away from relying on expensive components and hardware, or expensive components and software, they really distribute that layer of knowledge that the application and use more replaceable, more commodity sorts of productions. >> Matt, [Unintelligible] operations is, one of my degree in my undergraduate in computer science, and back in the 80s everything was just build your own operating systems, again, this is where systems come back. But even with the Cloud today is really a systems game, and all of us guys and gals from the old days are now in vogue again because the Cloud is an operating system. Now you got sub-systems, you got, maybe it's distributed a little bit more decentralized, but again, it's the same game, different era, if you will. So you're starting to see the absence on operating systems, so the question is Intel and the Grading Table, Paul Merit used to call Intel the hardened top, where a lot of proprietary stuff underneath that crust that no one really cares-- [Audio Cuts Out]

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, DC, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its partner ecosystem. >> Well welcome back to our nations' capitol, Washington, DC, hosting this week's AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. You're live, here on the Cube, which of course is the flagship broadcast of the Siliconangle TV, where my partner in crime John Fourier always likes to say, we extract the single from the noise, don't we John? >> That's right, we're here. >> Yeah, we are. >> In D.C. >> In DC and it's a little warm, it's a little toasty inside but outside especially. 95 and humidity, Jeff Raleigh could attest to that. He just pulled into town from Columbus, Ohio. Jeff, good to see you, the Senior VP and GM of Cloud at Ellucian, so thank you for being with us Jeff. >> Absolutely, John and John, happy to be here. >> You bet, so Ellucian, a leader in higher education software, we've talked a little bit about the company. 2,400 institutions around the world with which you work. Most of those, about 2,000 here in the US. Let's talk about that work, the kind of nature of the work first and then we'll jump into a little bit about how they're playing in the Cloud these days. >> Sure absolutely happy to, so the Ellucian's got a sole focus in higher education. So it's really the only industry that we serve. We serve the industry really from a software, enterprise software prospective. So that's really helping from an ERP perspective, HR finance, but really our bread and butter is the student system and it's really the systems around helping students achieve success. As they, go to a community college or go to a four year public or four year private. It's really about helping those students drive success. And actually get the successful outcomes. And we do that with registration, with advisement, with recruiting systems, so there's a full breadth of software that an institution needs in order to help a student successfully go through that process of getting a degree and ultimately getting a job. >> Well John and I can both relate to that. He's got a daughter who's transferring over to Cal Berkeley. Going to be going to school there. I've got a niece starting at UNC Wilmington that I'm helping out, I love the registration help. So, you and I need to talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> A question is how do you get the kids into the schools they want, is there a back door Trojan horse? >> We can't manipulate that much. But you talk about your company does data rich inside pour, which I thought that was an interesting way to kind of look at things. Like we have this huge treasure trove of information and data but yet maybe there's somewhat of a disconnect in interpreting that data and then putting it value, putting it to use. What do you see with regard to that in the higher education space? >> You know, I think John, that's a great question. That's actually a really big focus of ours in terms of unlocking that data. If you think about the systems that have been on campus for 30 years right. You've got all kinds of information about the students that have attended, the classes that they take and how well they've succeeded, the types of advising that they needed. But how do you unlock all of the rich information so that you can take that information, drive some insight and then just drive better outcomes? We've been working on a platform, we call it Ethos and what we basically built is a new data model for higher education where we've looked at all of those different systems and we've basically harmonized to a new data model that really sits above all of those systems. And we begin now to extract all of that information out from those systems, into a data model that's really designed around bringing role based or persona based insight. And we call it role based analytics. That basically is designed around answering the top five to seven questions that all of the people that are on campus have. So if you're a registrar and you want to know what classes should I be adding that I need extras of. Well, that's a tough question to answer, we unlock the answer to that through the Ethos platform and the new persona based analytics that we're developing. Cause when we sit down and we talk to presidents of a school or we talk to the provost, one of the things that they want is they want to know that the people that they have working on campus for student outcomes are getting access to the information that they need to do their jobs better. And so that's been a clear mandate from our customers to help them do a better job of using the information that they're collecting. >> How do you guys deal with the data science side of this Because it's interesting is that you're using data aggressively, Cloud's perfect for that. You got a lot of compute available, how are you guys taking that legacy environment and kind of putting overlay on top of a really high, functional analytic system? >> That's a great question John. So what we do is we enable all of our software, whether it be on premise software, most of our customers still run a lot of their software on premise. And what we've built for those systems is a set of restful APIs that we deliver wherever that software runs to push that data into an AWS cloud environment where we begin putting that data in the columnar databases that are really built and constructed to help get insight very, very quickly from that data. The most important part of doing that is really sitting down and talking to the person that has the question to understand, what's the question that you're trying to answer that you haven't been able to answer? And then building the visualization that they need that actually helps them answer that question. But we took it one step further, and what we did is we basically said, we know through our research that that first question really just always yields another question. Which then yields another question and so what we did is we built a heuristic capability into the analytic platform that based on the user, based on who they are, based on the role that they had at a school and based on other people that look like them and act like them and have that role. The system begins to learn the questions that are being asked and then where are they navigating to? What are the next questions, so that we actually begin presenting the users not just with the answer to the first question that they have, but actually to, we believe that now that you've got the answer to this, that this is where you're going to go next from an inside perspective. The next types of questions so we begin to guide the users and that's really where that guided nature comes from. >> So what's the next question John's going to ask then? >> This brings up the whole cognitive computing thing. The idea that predictive analytics are one thing, you've got prescription analytics also you've got the notion of recommendation engines. All kinds of cool things that are just sitting out there waiting to be applied, the question is how do you get the data, that's the number one problem. >> That's a good one, so we've got, one of the solutions that we have in our CR Import folio is called Advise. And what we do with that product is we actually bring all of the student data, so we bring their attendance data, we bring their health records, we bring all of the grades that they have. And we then build cohorts where we have like students. And what we begin to do is we begin to build a predictive model to find students that are at risk. That based on these attendance patters in these classes, we know that this set of students is likely to have a poor outcome. And so what we want to do is not just identify that, well, now they're at risk but it's the predictive side of, well what should you do, what is the actual intervention that you need to take that's going to drive a better outcome? So the solution actually takes all the data and does two things. First, it identifies who are the students that we want to be working with, could be at risk, could be hypos right, could by high potential students that we want to accelerate. But then it's about driving the actual actions and the interactions with those students. It is not just about identifying well, Johnny's going to be in trouble, it's well, okay, what should we do for Johnny to help him get out of trouble? And so it's both sides of that. So, it is about polling all of the data which means you need to understand where the data lives. We have an advantage there over, pretty much everyone else in higher education because those 2,400 institutions that we have, they are running a massive amount of our software from a portfolio perspective. So we know where the data is, so we know how to go out and get it. And then if you look at our partner, ecosystem we have over 130 partners that also serve higher education with us. And we know what data they have and we are enabling all of those partners to leverage the Ethos platform. To be able to share that data, both from an integration and interoperability perspective. But also to feed that cloud analytic solution as well. >> One of the cool things you're doing with AWS, I'll say, they pretty much run the table on public cloud, we see the numbers there. They're in the chapter of their company or divisions, like the way a company, I call the team period. I call it the enterprise years. Govnow is like really going, it's like reinvent size. It's getting to that level, what's the impact that that's having and what are some of the things that you're doing with AWS inside the public sector that's notable. >> That's a great question, I think one of the big things is we have a really, really strong go to market partnership with AWS. And I say the go to market side because we've had a really strong technical partnership with them for many years. Where we've been working with them as they've developed new services and we've been able to leverage those services to build micro applications, to build elastic applications, all of that. And that's great form a technical perspective but now it's about bringing all of that to market. We have a very strong joint partnership with. >> John: How many years has it gone back? >> About two and a half, three years. So our enterprise agreement is two and half years old. We were doing work with them before that. But it's about two and a half years old and when I look at that, we deploy all of our cloud applications solely on AWS. So they are the sole cloud provider for us. We've expanded our cloud offering outside of the United States, we're in Dublin, we have a data center in Sydney, Australia. And we are just expanded into their new data center in the eastern Canada area in Montreal. And that's helped us from a go to market because what they bring for us, is they bring that credibility of delivering cloud infrastructure. We bring credibility of delivering higher education solutions that solve specific problems that only exist in higher education. It's that combination when you go to market to basically say the world's leading infrastructure cloud provider partnered with the world's leading solution provider in higher education. That's an unbeatable solution for us. >> So I got to ask you the question that people might ask. Hey, I've not been following AWS public sector. I see the Wall Street Journal articles, they're killing it. How would you describe their current state of innovation, their current presence in the public sector market as of right now? >> I think the lens that I really have is really around that higher education, so community colleges, public four year schools and they are highly focused on it. They have a team of dedicated people that are just focused on higher education. They work with us kind of from a joint perspective and I know that my cloud business that I'm responsible for, it is the fastest growing part of Ellucian today. So in June of 2016, we actually surpassed, form a growth perspective we started growing much faster than the on premise side of our business. And that's in large part because of what AWS has enabled us to do, so from a training perspective, from a sales motion perspective, from a marketing and positioning perspective. It's a big focus for them. >> Would you consider them, like the perception of them would be they're getting traction, they've cleared the runway, they're at cruising altitude. Where are they in the mind share of higher eds? >> I definitely think, they've cleared the runway. They are clearly going past that 10,000 foot and up there. For us, one of the main reasons we chose AWS was that factor, they already had traction. They were well known and well understood and that really helps us. Prior to that, we were doing a co location where we were managing a bunch of infrastructure, that was a hard sell, cause let's face it, we're software people, not infrastructure people. When we started bringing AWS to the table and basically talking about that's where we deploy. That took a lot of questions around scale, security, elasticity and it basically put it all to rest. So we no longer have to contend with those questions because AWS is well known in the higher education space. So it really worked well for us. >> So when you sit down with a new client or new perspective client, the two of you, you come in with this great resume and I think is where it's kind of interesting to me, universities are these fountains of innovation and creative thinking. IT, maybe not so much, because it's very institutional. There's a lot of legacy baggage they're bringing along. So what are the impediments that you run into in terms of talking to folks who might be, not doubters, but maybe a little resistant to change or maybe have a little change aversion. I mean how do you go about bringing them along on that journey? >> What's interesting in terms of higher education is there's actually a couple things that are happening that really help us with that, that are happening. But to answer the first question John which was when we get into that, not really a battle. But when we get into that dialogue, where they're like well I'm not really sure that moving to the cloud is the right thing. There's an analyst that covers higher education and she's made a statement that basically is, by 2020, a no cloud policy on campus is going to be much like a no internet policy on campus. Just not going to be a thing. And a lot of that is because a lot of providers are only building cloud solutions. That's all you're going to have access to. One of the things that's happening in higher education is in the IT space particularly, they're having a hard time finding those IT professionals. Because higher education isn't seen IT wise as a sexy place to go. And so a lot of those people that have been working in higher education for 25, 30 years, they're reaching that retirement age, and so. >> John: The main frame guys. >> Right, the main frame guys, the Unix guys. And where do you go find replacements for those. And so, they're recognizing that, okay, well that's going to be a problem for us. And right there's a lot of the infrastructure, on premise infrastructure is getting old. So does it make sense to put that capital investment into infrastructure or I got other capital investment for research and research equipment that I'd much rather put, if I'm a president, I'd much rather put the money there. That also leads to an easier conversation around that journey to the cloud, that journey of taking your enterprise systems and moving them to cloud environments. The other thing that we find is, the conversation is never really around cost savings. What it's really around is the redeployment of those IT resources to be better business partners, to be business analysts, to be people that can actually be change agents at the university to bring about change cause they're no longer managing operating systems or writing network patches or security patches. They've offloaded that to us and we've offloaded part of that work to AWS. >> Well, we appreciate the perspective. Like you said, it sounds like you've got quite a corner on the market, 2,400 partners, if you will out there. Many of those overseas, so congratulations on that front. >> Thank you. >> And I wish you continued success and thanks for joining us on The Cube, first time I think right? >> Yep, first time. >> We have rookies across the board. >> But you're now a Cube alumni. >> I appreciate it. >> Look forward to having you back. >> Thanks John and John, appreciate it. >> Back with more from Washington, DC at the AWS Public Sector Summit, 2017. You're watching live on the Cube. (upbeat music)