(gentle music) >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are at Stanford University, as you know we are every year, having some wonderful conversations with some very inspiring women and men in data science and technical roles. I'm very pleased to introduce Tracy Zhang, my co-host, who is in the Data Journalism program at Stanford. And Tracy and I are pleased to welcome our next guest, Rhonda Crate, Principal Data Scientist at Boeing. Great to have you on the program, Rhonda. >> Tracy: Welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Were you always interested in data science or STEM from the time you were young? >> No, actually. I was always interested in archeology and anthropology. >> That's right, we were talking about that, anthropology. Interesting. >> We saw the anthropology background, not even a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree in anthropology. >> So you were committed for a while. >> I was, I was. I actually started college as a fine arts major, but I always wanted to be an archeologist. So at the last minute, 11 credits in, left to switch to anthropology. And then when I did my master's, I focused a little bit more on quantitative research methods and then I got my Stat Degree. >> Interesting. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on. When I think of Boeing, I always think of aircraft. But you are doing a lot of really cool things in IT, data analytics. Talk about some of those intriguing data science projects that you're working on. >> Yeah. So when I first started at Boeing, I worked in information technology and data analytics. And Boeing, at the time, had cored up data science in there. And so we worked as a function across the enterprise working on anything from shared services to user experience in IT products, to airplane programs. So, it has a wide range. I worked on environment health and safety projects for a long time as well. So looking at ergonomics and how people actually put parts onto airplanes, along with things like scheduling and production line, part failures, software testing. Yeah, there's a wide spectrum of things. >> But I think that's so fantastic. We've been talking, Tracy, today about just what we often see at WiDS, which is this breadth of diversity in people's background. You talked about anthropology, archeology, you're doing data science. But also all of the different opportunities that you've had at Boeing. To see so many facets of that organization. I always think that breadth of thought diversity can be hugely impactful. >> Yeah. So I will say my anthropology degree has actually worked to my benefit. I'm a huge proponent of integrating liberal arts and sciences together. And it actually helps me. I'm in the Technical Fellowship program at Boeing, so we have different career paths. So you can go into management, you can be a regular employee, or you can go into the Fellowship program. So right now I'm an Associate Technical Fellow. And part of how I got into the Fellowship program was that diversity in my background, what made me different, what made me stand out on projects. Even applying a human aspect to things like ergonomics, as silly as that sounds, but how does a person actually interact in the space along with, here are the actual measurements coming off of whatever system it is that you're working on. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially in safety as well, which is a big initiative for Boeing right now, as you can imagine. >> Tracy: Yeah, definitely. >> I can't go into too specifics. >> No, 'cause we were like, I think a theme for today that kind of we brought up in in all of our talk is how data is about people, how data is about how people understand the world and how these data can make impact on people's lives. So yeah, I think it's great that you brought this up, and I'm very happy that your anthropology background can tap into that and help in your day-to-day data work too. >> Yeah. And currently, right now, I actually switched over to Strategic Workforce Planning. So it's more how we understand our workforce, how we work towards retaining the talent, how do we get the right talent in our space, and making sure overall that we offer a culture and work environment that is great for our employees to come to. >> That culture is so important. You know, I was looking at some anitab.org stats from 2022 and you know, we always talk about the number of women in technical roles. For a long time it's been hovering around that 25% range. The data from anitab.org showed from '22, it's now 27.6%. So, a little increase. But one of the biggest challenges still, and Tracy and I and our other co-host, Hannah, have been talking about this, is attrition. Attrition more than doubled last year. What are some of the things that Boeing is doing on the retention side, because that is so important especially as, you know, there's this pipeline leakage of women leaving technical roles. Tell us about what Boeing's, how they're invested. >> Yeah, sure. We actually have a publicly available Global Diversity Report that anybody can go and look at and see our statistics for our organization. Right now, off the top of my head, I think we're hovering at about 24% in the US for women in our company. It has been a male majority company for many years. We've invested heavily in increasing the number of women in roles. One interesting thing about this year that came out is that even though with the great resignation and those types of things, the attrition level between men and women were actually pretty close to being equal, which is like the first time in our history. Usually it tends on more women leaving. >> Lisa: That's a good sign. >> Right. >> Yes, that's a good sign. >> And we've actually focused on hiring and bringing in more women and diversity in our company. >> Yeah, some of the stats too from anitab.org talked about the increase, and I have to scroll back and find my notes, the increase in 51% more women being hired in 2022 than 2021 for technical roles. So the data, pun intended, is showing us. I mean, the data is there to show the impact that having females in executive leadership positions make from a revenue perspective. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Companies are more profitable when there's women at the head, or at least in senior leadership roles. But we're seeing some positive trends, especially in terms of representation of women technologists. One of the things though that I found interesting, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Rhonda, is that the representation of women technologists is growing in all areas, except interns. >> Rhonda: Hmm. >> So I think, we've got to go downstream. You teach, I have to go back to my notes on you, did my due diligence, R programming classes through Boeings Ed Wells program, this is for WSU College of Arts and Sciences, talk about what you teach and how do you think that intern kind of glut could be solved? >> Yeah. So, they're actually two separate programs. So I teach a data analytics course at Washington State University as an Adjunct Professor. And then the Ed Wells program is a SPEEA, which is an Aerospace Union, focused on bringing up more technology and skills to the actual workforce itself. So it's kind of a couple different audiences. One is more seasoned employees, right? The other one is our undergraduates. I teach a Capstone class, so it's a great way to introduce students to what it's actually like to work on an industry project. We partner with Google and Microsoft and Boeing on those. The idea is also that maybe those companies have openings for the students when they're done. Since it's Senior Capstone, there's not a lot of opportunities for internships. But the opportunities to actually get hired increase a little bit. In regards to Boeing, we've actually invested a lot in hiring more women interns. I think the number was 40%, but you'd have to double check. >> Lisa: That's great, that's fantastic. >> Tracy: That's way above average, I think. >> That's a good point. Yeah, it is above average. >> Double check on that. That's all from my memory. >> Is this your first WiDS, or have you been before? >> I did virtually last year. >> Okay. One of the things that I love, I love covering this event every year. theCUBE's been covering it since it's inception in 2015. But it's just the inspiration, the vibe here at Stanford is so positive. WiDS is a movement. It's not an initiative, an organization. There are going to be, I think annually this year, there will be 200 different events. Obviously today we're live on International Women's Day. 60 plus countries, 100,000 plus people involved. So, this is such a positive environment for women and men, because we need everybody, underrepresented minorities, to be able to understand the implication that data has across our lives. If we think about stripping away titles in industries, everybody is a consumer, not everybody, most of mobile devices. And we have this expectation, I was in Barcelona last week at a Mobile World Congress, we have this expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7. I can get whatever I want wherever I am in the world, and that's all data driven. And the average person that isn't involved in data science wouldn't understand that. At the same time, they have expectations that depend on organizations like Boeing being data driven so that they can get that experience that they expect in their consumer lives in any aspect of their lives. And that's one of the things I find so interesting and inspiring about data science. What are some of the things that keep you motivated to continue pursuing this? >> Yeah I will say along those lines, I think it's great to invest in K-12 programs for Data Literacy. I know one of my mentors and directors of the Data Analytics program, Dr. Nairanjana Dasgupta, we're really familiar with each other. So, she runs a WSU program for K-12 Data Literacy. It's also something that we strive for at Boeing, and we have an internal Data Literacy program because, believe it or not, most people are in business. And there's a lot of disconnect between interpreting and understanding data. For me, what kind of drives me to continue data science is that connection between people and data and how we use it to improve our world, which is partly why I work at Boeing too 'cause I feel that they produce products that people need like satellites and airplanes, >> Absolutely. >> and everything. >> Well, it's tangible, it's relatable. We can understand it. Can you do me a quick favor and define data literacy for anyone that might not understand what that means? >> Yeah, so it's just being able to understand elements of data, whether that's a bar chart or even in a sentence, like how to read a statistic and interpret a statistic in a sentence, for example. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And sounds like Boeing's doing a great job in these programs, and also trying to hire more women. So yeah, I wanted to ask, do you think there's something that Boeing needs to work on? Or where do you see yourself working on say the next five years? >> Yeah, I think as a company, we always think that there's always room for improvement. >> It never, never stops. >> Tracy: Definitely. (laughs) >> I know workforce strategy is an area that they're currently really heavily investing in, along with safety. How do we build safer products for people? How do we help inform the public about things like Covid transmission in airports? For example, we had the Confident Traveler Initiative which was a big push that we had, and we had to be able to inform people about data models around Covid, right? So yeah, I would say our future is more about an investment in our people and in our culture from my perspective >> That's so important. One of the hardest things to change especially for a legacy organization like Boeing, is culture. You know, when I talk with CEO's or CIO's or COO's about what's your company's vision, what's your strategy? Especially those companies that are on that digital journey that have no choice these days. Everybody expects to have a digital experience, whether you're transacting an an Uber ride, you're buying groceries, or you're traveling by air. That culture sounds like Boeing is really focused on that. And that's impressive because that's one of the hardest things to morph and mold, but it's so essential. You know, as we look around the room here at WiDS it's obviously mostly females, but we're talking about women, underrepresented minorities. We're talking about men as well who are mentors and sponsors to us. I'd love to get your advice to your younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of where you are now to become a leader in the technology field? >> Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting question because I always try to think, live with no regrets to an extent. >> Lisa: I like that. >> But, there's lots of failures along the way. (Tracy laughing) I don't know if I would tell myself anything different because honestly, if I did, I wouldn't be where I am. >> Lisa: Good for you. >> I started out in fine arts, and I didn't end up there. >> That's good. >> Such a good point, yeah. >> We've been talking about that and I find that a lot at events like WiDS, is women have these zigzaggy patterns. I studied biology, I have a master's in molecular biology, I'm in media and marketing. We talked about transportable skills. There's a case I made many years ago when I got into tech about, well in science you learn the art of interpreting esoteric data and creating a story from it. And that's a transportable skill. But I always say, you mentioned failure, I always say failure is not a bad F word. It allows us to kind of zig and zag and learn along the way. And I think that really fosters thought diversity. And in data science, that is one of the things we absolutely need to have is that diversity and thought. You know, we talk about AI models being biased, we need the data and we need the diverse brains to help ensure that the biases are identified, extracted, and removed. Speaking of AI, I've been geeking out with ChatGPT. So, I'm on it yesterday and I ask it, "What's hot in data science?" And I was like, is it going to get that? What's hot? And it did it, it came back with trends. I think if I ask anything, "What's hot?", I should be to Paris Hilton, but I didn't. And so I was geeking out. One of the things I learned recently that I thought was so super cool is the CTO of OpenAI is a woman, Mira Murati, which I didn't know until over the weekend. Because I always think if I had to name top females in tech, who would they be? And I always default to Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina, Susan Wojcicki running YouTube. Who are some of the people in your history, in your current, that are really inspiring to you? Men, women, indifferent. >> Sure. I think Boeing is one of the companies where you actually do see a lot of women in leadership roles. I think we're one of the top companies with a number of women executives, actually. Susan Doniz, who's our Chief Information Officer, I believe she's actually slotted to speak at a WiDS event come fall. >> Lisa: Cool. >> So that will be exciting. Susan's actually relatively newer to Boeing in some ways. A Boeing time skill is like three years is still kind of new. (laughs) But she's been around for a while and she's done a lot of inspiring things, I think, for women in the organization. She does a lot with Latino communities and things like that as well. For me personally, you know, when I started at Boeing Ahmad Yaghoobi was one of my mentors and my Technical Lead. He came from Iran during a lot of hard times in the 1980s. His brother actually wrote a memoir, (laughs) which is just a fun, interesting fact. >> Tracy: Oh my God! >> Lisa: Wow! >> And so, I kind of gravitate to people that I can learn from that's not in my sphere, that might make me uncomfortable. >> And you probably don't even think about how many people you're influencing along the way. >> No. >> We just keep going and learning from our mentors and probably lose sight of, "I wonder how many people actually admire me?" And I'm sure there are many that admire you, Rhonda, for what you've done, going from anthropology to archeology. You mentioned before we went live you were really interested in photography. Keep going and really gathering all that breadth 'cause it's only making you more inspiring to people like us. >> Exactly. >> We thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing a little bit about you and what brought you to WiDS. Thank you so much, Rhonda. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Tracy: Thank you so much for being here. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Alright. >> For our guests, and for Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. Stick around. Next guest will be here in just a second. (gentle music)

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hi, welcome to the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21. I need some Martin Brian Berg joins me next director at Accenture leading the EMEA Splunk partnership. Brian, welcome to the program. Talk to me a little bit about the Splunk Accenture partnership. This goes back about five years, I believe. >>Yeah, let me provide a bit of, uh, of a history. Uh, we have been starting with Splunk very intensively more than five years ago. Uh, we have been working very closely together to create something like an incubator approach to really serve the markets as, as best as possible. It was really successful. So exponential growth far beyond the markets, uh, for the last five years. So I'm really proud to be part of that journey. And, uh, the partnership is kind of anchored around three core components. The first component is what we typically call matching up our deep Accentia industry expertise with cloud spend Splunk technology. So it really gives a unique differentiator in the market combining that unique industry understanding and the Splunk technology, which is really capable to have an end to end platform for our clients. I'll give you an example a couple of years ago with, and starting to work in Germany was Dr. >>Bank cargo, which is one of the leading European, uh, freights or companies that, where we really put the Splunk that Phonto to the stretch and are using even IOT data like vegan shots, sensors, or locomotive data to create very fancy, you know, the use cases. So that, that's just an example how the deep industry expertise of Accentia and the blank technology expertise can work together. So the second part, maybe just to mention that is that Accenture in the partnership is developing industrialized solutions and that is, uh, needing to Accentia IP, which very rapidly can serve our customers in creating value and to transforming our clients on their journey. A great example is our supply chain of ring. We have developed a supply chain control tower, which has these days, obviously with the pandemic situation and the supply chain issues, uh, impacting our economic, uh, return. Uh, recovery is a very specific and very strong case. You can really use Splunk as a real time supply chain tour, and that's kind of the industrialized vertical solutions, which we also, uh, did in our partnership at last. Let me comment on that one, the kind of service pillar is really around cloud. So we are focusing heavily on the cloud business. As we see Splunk also an enabler of the cloud journey for our clients >>And both Splunk and Accenture on their own, uh, digital transformation Splunk going to some subscription only back in 2019, Accenture beginning, it's a cloud transformation, 2015. Talk to me about the cloud first initiative. You launched this about a year ago. So during a very challenging time, talk to me about the objectives of the cloud first initiative, how you're working together with Splunk and what some of the value is in it for the customers. >>So Accenture really sings clouds. You see it that we did a very aggressive transformation. The shift we even changed our organization, organizational structure, how we serve our customers within our cloud service to approach. So we combine our expertise from our strategy and consulting experts with implementation and delivery expertise, to have the full end, to end perspective on what we need to transform and transition our clients into the cloud journey. Um, and we are heavily investing into the cloud markets. Uh, we are doing research, uh, in the market to understand also the client needs and the market developments. For example, we recently launched a European, uh, study called cloud continuum where we interviewed more than 4,000 executives around the globe on what are the key priorities along their cloud journey? What is it really that makes it unique and differentiated? Uh, and we see what are the driving factors in the cloud market in Europe, it's a bit special as compared to the us, uh, the key priority driver of our clients moving into the cloud is cost competitive toughness. So they are really moving into the cloud to save costs. The cost play only the second, uh, kind of the answer was like 38% of respondents has been elaborating around increasing customer value. And here you see already the difference between Europe and us, uh, it's, it's much, much lagging behind in terms of understanding the data in your cloud to create new business opportunities and new business value for your customers, which, uh, which is typically, uh, an opportunity, but also challenge >>One of the challenges that organizations often face regardless of where they are in the world is looking at cloud from a price point perspective rather than a transformational journey perspective. But it sounds like you've actually seen the opposite with this survey that you mentioned. >>Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a fair point. So as set, uh, in, in Europe, we are having many clients and customers focusing on the cost competitiveness, but that typically just one key challenge. Uh, another challenge, especially in Europe is around complexity of our data regulation of trust and compliance. So that very often leads to, again, silos in the cloud architecture. So typically something you would want to overcome with the cloud journey and again, in a kind of siloed infrastructure. So we are having, we have seen that more than 60% of our customers have stirred parts of that data and on-premise data stores. They have kind of hybrid cloud environments. We have more than 48% of our customers in kind of a cloud environment. So you will see that the cloud journey again is a very complex task complex journey, and you are ending up very often in a new silos and he explained comes into play because blank can enable you to have the end to end perspective across your full stack, including a multi and hybrid cloud environment. And that's why the reason why we are looking for a strong interlock of our Splunk business into our cloud first approach to really bring that value into our cloud journey of our customers. >>So the, the complexity is, has been increasing. You mentioned a very high percentage of customers in that hybrid multi-cloud environment. How do you Accenture in Splunk, how does this cloud first initiative help address the complexities that cloud that a multi-cloud environment brings and unlock the opportunities in all of this data? >>Yeah, I mean, there's different ways to see that in my perspective, the cloud transformation, the cloud journey always requires a smart data cloud strategy as a core tool. I call it the core to win because without the cloud data strategy, you are losing really the benefit of the cloud journey in terms of the full value potential of your data. Um, I do see like an evolutionary path of the cloud transformation. First of all, is bringing and transitioning our clients into the cloud. And Splunk would be at the first milestone, the end to end perspective of having the cloud transplant, the cloud ops of ability and club monitoring capability. So it's combining the end-to-end picture and mighty cloud hybrid cloud environment in a single pane of glass, which is really unique from a technology perspective. But in the second step, it could even go further and talking about machine learning technologies about AI and bringing that to the next level on that evolutionary path. >>That's what we typically call AI ops. And that again makes a difference in terms of automation, in terms of efficiencies, in terms of prediction capabilities, which is a huge advantage and value potential for our clients. And the third step is coming back a bit to your point in terms of leaving the data value, uh, in the cloud. So if you are getting more and more advanced, you have so much data in your cloud that you could even use it for new business models for new customer service use cases. Uh, and that's kind of the kind of evolutionary past what I call the data to everything cloud, which is very similar to where Splunk is positioning and using all that data and to end for really bringing value and additional value, add to your customers. There's a >>Tremendous amount of value in that data. If it can be analyzed the value unlocked and analyzed and acted on in real time so that organizations can make business decisions on products and services. And obviously from a competitive differentiation perspective, there's a tremendous amount, a tremendous amount of value. And unlocking that data. What are you seeing in the last, in the last year, since there's been so much acceleration where the customers are coming to you saying Accenture Splunk, help us figure out how to migrate to the cloud. We've got to go quickly, we've got these competitive pressures, we've got a very dynamic world market. What's that pathway like? >>Yeah, it's a very interesting time. So typically you see this cloud transformation journeys as a journey of several years. And in the pandemic situation, you have seen that a couple of months for some of our clients, because it's really important to survive in this very disruptive economic situations. So obviously you start first with, uh, getting the basics done with kind of getting the migration done, getting the migration to the cloud and uplifting our client's technology to the next. So the new kind of cloud paradigm, but, uh, assets that kind of next evolutionary path would be increased. Automation would be increased usage of all the cloud data for additional value add and additional business models. Our client use cases. So that's kind of the starting discussion always is how to bring it to the cloud and how to create that flexibility. That also that grows flexibility in terms of being more resilient, being more agile as a customer, but a Splunk can do much, much more. And that's the story we want to, and we want to explain to the market that the basic steps are the right ones and Splunk is getting you there, especially in multi hybrid thought environments. But the very next step is really untapping. The value. >>A lot of organizations have been challenged culturally in the last year and a half with suddenly this distribution of the workforce. And now here we are still in a distributed environment, maybe getting towards a hybrid model, but cultural change is challenging for organizations in any industry where is cultural change as a part of the pathway that Accenture and Splunk help customers to create >>Absolutely spot on sex dealer for the question. And going back to the research research I was talking earlier on, we have also seen that 46% of our clients are really challenged by the complexity of the transition it's complexity of their business, of their business processes, but also the complexity of the operational change. And that really is a major pitfall and th and the major challenge for us. It's not only a technological challenge, but also it's a change and kind of transition management where we also have specified specialized ones items for an hour at, you know, practice our terms and, and change our practice, which are supporting our clients along that transition journey from a cultural perspective, because I mean, you can change your, your it infrastructure. You can create a new architecture in the cloud, but it's really about getting the business into the next level of understanding these complex data situations and processes and leveraging the value of the cloud. So that's a huge business change as well. >>It is a huge business change, which is challenging for a lot of folks again, given the distributed nature with which in which we are still working. Talk to me about an example of a, of a successful customer that, uh, Accenture and Splunk have worked with in the last year. Who's really embraced the cloud first initiative and is transforming their organizations to not only survive these challenging times, but to thrive as well. >>Yeah, one of my favorite examples is a leading hotel chain. Obviously the hotel industry has been heavily impacted by COVID. Uh, so, uh, there was a need to change to a need to get more resilient, more agile and more flexible. You think the cloud transformation story also, again, as a cost transformation play, but also changing the way the business is working. So we started with a typical cloud transformation journey. Uh, we evolved it towards what we, what we call the AI ops scenario in terms of really using machine learning technologies and AI, to get more prediction, more automation, more efficiencies. So we could even reduce, uh, the operational cost by more than 5%, which is a huge baseline and leading a global companies, uh, which frees up a lot of money, which you can then reinvest for kind of new, smarter business use cases in addressing your clients and understanding your clients and ultimately generating new value for your clients. So that's a very nice example of how you could start with an it transformation journey, changing into the cloud architecture, using AI ops, to freeing up resources for new addresses for kind of new addressable cut customer use cases and business benefits. >>What's the go to market like working customers go to learn more and get started. Are they starting with Accenture? And they starting with Splunk? Can I do both? >>We have a very collaborative partnership with Splunk. We have a strong partnership team as we speak. We have more like more than 4,000 people working on Splunk projects globally. So it's a very strong capability. Um, you can reach out to Accentia and, uh, you can reach out to Splunk. It's kind of a collaborator strategic go-to-market approach nursing. That's also a bit the advantage of the Splunk Accenture partnership that we are very closely, very collaboratively going to the market. Yes, exemptions bringing IP and assets, empty industrialized delivery methodology. We are able to really scale up globally across the market and Splunk is bringing their technology and the expertise. I think it's a winning combination >>And winning complication and not collaboration is certainly critical to enable that. Brian last question would be, as we approach the end of calendar year 2021, what are some of the things on the horizon for the cloud first initiative that you're excited about as we enter 2022, >>I think it's really getting traction. Now. We have seen a lot of our clients going into the cloud, but asset, from my perspective, it's just the start of the journey. So once you get that kind of, uh, interesting milestone start, you can create the automation efficiencies. You can create the data value and use the data very for new CRM scenarios, new years use cases. And that's where it really gets interesting and fun and innovative in getting all these data across your company and understanding and being creative, how you can use that to benefit your customer and to bring that customer experience to the next level. And that's what I'm looking really forward to coming from the it transformation, the cloud transformation journey to the customer experience and to improving the customer perspective. >>Improving the customer perspective is key. As, as the customer experience, we're all customers in our daily lives and our personal lives and our business lives. And we have this expectation that any organization we're dealing with is going to be able to give us a stellar experience. Brian, thank you for joining me on the cube today, sharing the latest and greatest and the Splunk Accenture partnership, the value that you're delivering for customers and some of the things that you're excited about as we go forward. We appreciate your time. >>Thanks for >>Having me. My pleasure for Brian Berg. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>>We'll go back to the queue. It's continuous coverage of AWS storage day. We're here in Seattle home with the Mariners home, with the Seahawks home of the Seattle storm. If you're a w NBA fan your cloud migration, according to our surveys and the ETR data that we use last year was number two initiative for it. Practitioners behind security. Welcome to this power panel on migration and transfer services. And I'm joined now by Matt Matthews. Who's the general manager of AWS transfer a family of services sitting. Roy is the GM of the snow family. And Randy boudin is the general manager of AWS data sync, gents. Welcome to good to see you. Thank you. So, Matt, you heard my narrative upfront, obviously it's top of mind for it. Pros, what are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, uh, certainly, um, many customers are currently executing on data migration strategies, uh, to the cloud. And AWS has been a primary choice for cloud storage for 15 years. Right. Um, but we still see many customers are evaluating, um, how to do their cloud migration strategies. And they're looking for, you know, um, uh, understanding what services can help them with those migrations. >>So said, well, why now? I mean, a lot of people might be feeling, you know, you got, you've got a hesitancy of taking a vaccine. What about hesitancy making a move? Maybe the best move is no movable. W why now? Why does it make sense? >>So AWS offers compelling, uh, cost savings to customers. I think with our global footprint that our 11 nines of durability are fully managed services. You're really getting the centralization benefits for the cloud, like all the resiliency and durability. And then besides that you are unlocking the on-prem data center and data store costs as well. So it's like a dual prong cost saving on both ends >>Follow up on that. If I may, I mean, again, the data was very clear cloud migration, top priority F for a lot of reasons, but at the same time migration, as you know, it's almost like a dirty word sometimes in it. So, so where do people even start? I mean, they've got so much data to migrate. How can they even handle >>That? Yeah. I'd recommend, uh, customers look at their cool and cold data. Like if they look at their backups and archives and they have not been used for long, I mean, it doesn't make sense to kind of keep them on prem, look at how you can move those and migrate those first and then slowly work your way up into like warm data and then hot data. >>Okay, great. Uh, so Randy, we know about the snow family of products. Of course, everybody's familiar with that, but what about online data migration? What can you tell us there? What's the, what are customers thinking >>About? Sure. So as you know, for many their journey to the cloud starts with data migration, right? That's right. So if you're, if you're starting that journey with, uh, an offline movement, you look to the snow family of products. If you, if you're looking for online, that's when you turn to data, sync data thinks that online data, movement, service data is it makes it fast and easy to move your data into AWS. The customers >>Figure out which services to use. Do you, how do you advise them on that? Or is it sort of word of mouth, peer to peer? How do they figure it out that that's squint through that? Yeah, >>So it comes down to a combination of things. So first is the amount of available bandwidth that you have, the amount of data that you're looking to move and the timeframe you have in which to do that. Right. So if you have a, high-speed say gigabit, uh, uh, network, uh, you can move data very quickly using data sync. If, if you have a slower network or perhaps you don't want to utilize your existing network for this purpose, then the snow family of products makes a lot of sense. Call said, that's it? Call center. That's >>My answer. Yeah, there you go. Oh, you'll >>Joke. Right. See Tam that's Chevy truck access method. You put it right on there and break it over. How about, you know, Matt, I wonder if we could talk maybe about some, some customer examples, any, any favorites that you see are ones that stand out in various industries? >>Yeah. So one of the things we're seeing is certainly getting your data to the cloud is, is important, but also customers want to migrate their applications to the cloud. And when they, when they do that, they, uh, the many applications still need ongoing data transfers from third parties, from ex partners and customers and, and whatnot. So, great example of this is, uh, FINRA and their partnership with AWS. So a FINRA is the single largest, um, uh, regulatory body for securities in the U S and they take in 335 billion market events per day, over 600,000 of their member brokers, registered brokers. So, uh, they use, um, AWS transfer family, uh, secure file transfers, uh, to get that data in an aggregated in, in S3, so they can, um, analyze it and, and, uh, really kind of, uh, understand that data so they can protect investors. So that's, that's a great example. >>So it's not just seeding the cloud, right? It's the ongoing population of it. How about, I mean, how do you guys see this shaping up the future? We all talk about storage silos. I see this as, you know, the cloud is in some ways a silo Buster. Okay. We've got all this data in the cloud now, but you know, you can not apply machine learning. There are other tooling, so what's the north star here. >>Yeah. It's really the north star of getting, you know, we want to unlock, uh, not only get the data in the cloud, but actually use it to unlock the benefits of the cloud has to offer. Right. That's really what you're getting at, aggregating all that data, uh, and using the power of the cloud to really, um, you know, harness that power to analyze the data. It's >>A big, big challenge that customers have. I mean, you guys are obsessed listening to customers, you know, w what kinds of things do you see in the future? Sid and Randy, maybe, maybe see if you can start, >>Uh, I'll start with the I'll kind of dovetail, on example, a Matthews, uh, I'll talk about a customer join, who moved 3.4 petabytes of data to the cloud joined was a streaming service provider out of Germany. They had prohibitive on-prem costs. They saved 500 K per year by moving to the cloud. And by moving to the cloud, they get much more of the data by being able to fine tune their content to local audiences and be more reactive and quicker, a reaction to business changes. So centralizing in the cloud had its benefits of access, flexibility, agility, and faster innovation, and faster time to market. Anything you'd add, right. >>Yeah, sure. So we have a customer Takara bio they're a biotech company. Uh, they're working with genome sequencing, right? So data rich information coming out of those sequencers, they're collecting and analyzing this data daily and sending it up into AWS for analysis, um, and, uh, by using data sync in order to do that, they've improved their data transfer rate by three times. And they've reduced their, uh, overhead six by 66% in terms of their process. >>Guys get, must be blown away by this. I mean, we've all sort of lived in this, so I'm prem world and you sort of lay it out infrastructure, and then you go onto the next one, but the use cases are so diverse. The industry, examples. Matt will give you the last >>Word here. Yeah, no, w w what are we looking to do? You know, we, we always want to listen to our customers, uh, but you know, collectively our, our services and working across other services, AWS, we really, uh, want to help customers not only move their data in the crowd, but also unlock the power of that data. And really, um, you know, uh, we think there's a big opportunity across their migration and transfer services to help customers choose, choose the right service, uh, based on their, where they are in their cloud migration, uh, and, and all the different things they're dealing with. >>I've said a number of times the next 10 years is not going to be like the last 10 years. It's like the cloud is growing up. You know, it's out of the infancy stage. Maybe it's an adolescent. So I don't really know exactly, but guys, thanks so much for coming to the cube and sharing your insights and information. Appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. More great content from AWS storage day in Seattle.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich and today we'll highlight the best cybersecurity solution. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike and Jennifer Dvorak information security architect for the State of Arizona. Thank you so much for being with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yep, thank you. >> Perfect. Well you know obviously a really wild year with COVID and it certainly pushed a lot of boundaries. Cyber security resiliency also a hot topic as ransomware really spiked up. How have you addressed this concern and really accelerated this push with COVID-19 in the backdrop? I'd love it if either one of you would just like to jump in here. >> Well, CrowdStrike was one of our initiatives for 2020 and it was significantly increased, accelerated due to COVID. So we had to roll out in a matter of weeks when we had a matter of months previously and it really provided us the visibility that we needed for folks taking their computers home. We had no way of triaging any of our incidents when the computers were at home. So rolling out CrowdStrike as quickly as possible it gave us remote access, it gave us visibility and that was huge for our organization. >> Tina, if you could weigh in on this as well, that would be terrific. >> Sure absolutely. And you know, Jen with the State of Arizona is one of our premier customers but across the board with the 2021 global threat report that we issue each year, what we saw there was a fourfold increase in the number of intrusions. So to your point about the threat activity and it's not getting better. So what CrowdStrike is on a mission to do is stop regions and protect organizations against these bad actors so that they're, that we minimize disruptions. It's really been tremendous to see and build a ecosystem from a platform approach that started with visibility on the end point that Jen was just alluding to. >> And Jennifer, I'd love to get your insight how the public sector and the private sector can work better in tandem with each other in order to protect customers and also communities against ransomware attacks and other kinds of cybersecurity threats that we've seen coming from Russia for instance. >> Certainly so our state CISO Tim Roemer, he has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors. So that's one of his strategic initiatives and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We don't want to just spend money and then the vendor runaway, we want somebody that's going to be with us every step of the way. We've had some incidents this past year and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don't typically work with a lot. And that was really helpful because we were able to act quickly and address the issues that arose. So just having somebody that's looking out for your best interests and being a true partner is what we're really looking for. And that's the only way that we can circumvent these ransomware attacks. >> And Tina I'd love it if you'd weigh in as well. How do you see your role in this effort to protect the public evolving now in 2021? >> So I love that question and especially with the role of my role brand new in COVID interestingly enough, to create this bi-directional executive alignment with our customers and our internal teams and overall at CrowdStrike our goal, as I said is to stop breaches and it's really to bring, to minimize the frustration that comes sometimes with rolling out security tools. I've been at this a long time and tools like CrowdStrike are really game changers for security teams that are really about protecting organizations. And essentially what we do is we brought a single platform where when it, when the, when our software is deployed to an organization across their laptops, desktops, server and cloud infrastructure, we were born in the cloud kind of before it was cool and now we serve more than 11,000 customers. And that threat activity goes to a single AWS instance where we look across all of the threat activity. And then when we see activity in one area, we can protect all of our customers. That's the power of the cloud. >> Perfect and I'd love Jennifer's insights here too. What steps are you taking now to keep the public protected and the state cyber ready? >> And I like Tina's point about being born in the cloud. So State of Arizona is a cloud first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we're able to be more nimble. We're able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud first, even though it's, it wasn't embraced initially, I think that it's something that we've been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud first initiative that we have. >> And Tina what's top of mind? What are some of the key initiatives that your team and teams are going to be focused on in the years ahead? What's the next phase for cybersecurity? >> Great question and we've talked quite a bit about the end point but where we're headed and really where we've invested heavily the last couple of years and we'll continue moving forward is now that we have, we've brought this game-changing visibility to our security teams on the end point of each one of the systems in their environment where we've expanded the platform to now include cloud services like I mentioned. Now include indicators of misconfigurations which are so detrimental to teams working in a hybrid cloud environment. And then we've also moved into the identity protection space. And essentially what we're doing there is the same thing we've been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we're also in a zero trust principles way looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity. >> Terrific, well, in light of COVID-19, we saw a big spike in ransomware and I'd love to hear specifically from Tina why do we need trusted partners rather than software vendors in this fight? >> You know, it's so important to get out in front of all of the adversaries and most recently that we've seen huge growth in the e-crime actors that are taking advantage of the tools that are unfortunately in the market today, sometimes even free that allow them to hold organizations hostage. And the reason that's so important to partner with organizations and companies like CrowdStrike, is that we've been thinking ahead and we are designed in a way to stop an individual, a breach or adversary attack from occurring but we've been watching how their adversary works and now we can see their activity very early on before they have a chance to gain a foothold in an organization's server or laptop or even a phone or a tablet. And really what we're doing is we're providing protection so that it doesn't even need to move to an analyst to do further review. We just stop it right at the gate before it causes harm. And the reason that this is so important probably is obvious, but we're about making sure that the organizations like the State of Arizona can continue on their business and without these kinds of disruptions. So we haven't designed against one particular adversary but we really designed an approach that works across them all because we've been watching so closely how they move through environments for years. And we use the power of artificial intelligence delivered from the cloud to protect against all things including ransomware. >> Right it's really an evolving process. You constantly have to be vigilant for the next threat. Now I'd love to hear how you see things change with your tech partners and providers at the moment. >> So from a CrowdStrike perspective, we aim to be absolutely the best in class for the products and services that we provide whether that's your products that you can purchase like our endpoint solutions or whether that's services like our 24/7 threat hunting teams or Falcon Complete Teams that basically serve as an extension of an organization's team. But it's absolutely critical that we move this direction and not try to be the best at everything and instead partner. So we have extensive partnerships with Zscaler and Proofpoint and so many others, Okta. I mean the list goes on and on with now hundreds. And we also have a CrowdStrike store. So once you're a customer we've reduced the friction to taking on and trying out new modules, either from us or new options that maybe you haven't considered before from our trusted partners, much like the AWS marketplace we've got the CrowdStrike store and it's a growing set of partnerships where we build those integrations. So, my prior life I was the CISO for Arizona State University most recently. And we spend an awful lot of time integrating these solutions in a CrowdStrike. We're about building those integrations so that the teams within the organizations that can get on to doing innovative things within their space, rather than having to spend all their time tying these technologies together. >> Yeah now shifting to Jennifer late last year we learned that suspected Russian hackers broke into the US government agencies including a county in Arizona. So what measures has the State of Arizona put in place now to ensure that something like that won't happen again or that at least the state is very vigilant and ready to protect citizens and the government against these threats? >> We're definitely partnering with products like or vendors like CrowdStrike. That's what we, we're looking to extend those partnerships. And not only that we're developing our information sharing program across state, local and territorial governments. So we're looking to partner with the cities, the counties. Cybersecurity is a team sport. Cybersecurity is, it takes everyone. It takes the whole state working together. And that's one of the things that we've been trying to build. So working in conjunction with the state fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, we've been working to do more indicators of compromise sharing, any intelligence that we've been gathering from these counties that maybe did have an incident or a breach. We want to make sure that the information is disseminated to everyone so that we can be stronger and protect against it. Additionally, we we're always looking for grants that we can extend so that we're able to extend our products that we use to some of the smaller cities and towns and counties so that they can leverage some of the same technologies like CrowdStrike in their environments at a fraction of the cost or paid for by a grant. >> Terrific, well, Tina how does your experience as a CrowdStrike customer now come into play in your current role? >> Well, how's it come into play? Well, I think that it makes it really easy for me to be a liaison internally and help internal teams understand what it's like to sit as a CISO or as a CIO or deputy CIO. And to understand the kinds of challenges that these teams are (indistinct) these leaders of these teams are facing as they're moving forward with their innovation agenda while making sure to make sure that they're gaining those operational efficiencies that are so important today and wowing their customers all the while, right? So I think really what I bring to it is that level of experience to make sure that the voices of our customers are heard internally and that we continue to build products and services that make sense for the needs of our customers additional capabilities. Like we just released Falcon X Recon is an example of one of our newer capabilities where we're basically looking at their deep and dark web activity and bringing that together in the single platform, single event console that we've leveraged for years now. And in highlighting that activity many, in many cases, pre breach. So before you'd ever see it hit your, in your organization's operational environment, we would detect it through that service. So, I think it's those, all those things combined. >> Terrific well, CrowdStrike won a number of key accolades this year, and I was curious, Tina what you attribute to this huge success. >> Well, I have to tell you that I've been in the security space for far too long. And what I can say is that until CrowdStrike came along, there wasn't a solution, a security solution that we could get software running on an end point that wasn't just frustrating across the board. There were conflicts with other software running or the software would work great for one platform but it wouldn't work for the other. So we really have this new approach. And I think that that's what's made us, in fact I'm sure it's certainly what made me a wildly happy customer is that staff, faculty, employees, if we hadn't told them the software was being rolled out, they wouldn't have even noticed. You know it doesn't impact the machines and it's really provided this amazing experience and bringing all that with 150 different adversary groups that we track and we take that on for the customers and just bring visibility for the immediate things they need to take action on. I think those are all of the things that got us to this point in building out this platform is going to be really amazing to see in the years to come as we expand across other areas within the security space, either developing our own or really driving partnerships to make it easier for our customers. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, I pulled up the stat here for us to examine because I think it's really important for our viewers to understand just how important cybersecurity is and how it's going to be even more important for customers and for the private citizens and public citizens. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year reaching 10.5 trillion by 2025. That's just in about four years. And not only that, cyber crime will become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. So, I mean, it's really terrific that you're stepping up. You know just if you could both, perhaps Jennifer can go first and then Tina, what are the key lessons that you have for even the federal government to take a more proactive stance against these threats? >> Well, I think it's clear that this is a very lucrative venture, business venture. It's treated like a business venture by these criminal actors and they have a formula and it works. So I don't see that it's going to be changing anytime soon. And it's also not something that is highly sophisticated, highly technical. It's very easy. It's very much phishing, you know, users clicking on emails and vulnerabilities and environments. It's really a very easy formula that they continue to repeat. So I think until the federal government has more ways to recoup some of these ransomware payments, or we're able to stop some of these ransomware as a service products from being used, I think it's going to continue. So we're defenders so we need to make sure that we're ready for anything that comes and using products that keep us safe is really the best way and training our users. >> Terrific and Tina? >> Thank you. So we are so passionate about making sure that our customers can sleep better at night. When it comes down to tips it really comes back to the basics in many regards but the basics are sometimes really hard to do. So they sound simple, but they aren't so easy to do. And it's basics like making sure your systems are patched. Every organization has just a growing number of devices and pieces of software and infrastructure and all of those things need to be patched nearly immediately to stay out in front of today's adversaries. And Jen's right, Some are sophisticated, some are not but the reality is if we leave those windows open, we will have adversaries, oh, you know walk into our house if you will. So the basics like that also making sure that you have great backups, right? So if you do run into an instance of a ransomware where your systems are locked that you have the ability to recover quickly, being proactive and making sure that you have the partnership arrangement ahead of time is a third really important thing to do. Many organizations now have IRR retainers that they, incident response retainers that you can use proactively in years where you don't find yourself on your heels in a reactive situation but then it's there when you need it. Sometimes it's hard to find great services when there are the flood of ransomware attacks like we've seen in recent months. And then lastly, and I should have started with this 'cause it's the most important part, train your people. It's so important to make sure that security is just a culture, a part of the culture, just like you lock your car and you lock your house. Making sure that you're thinking about those things that will help keep you safe and your organization safe. >> Really excellent points. Thank you both so much for your insights. That was Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, as well as Jennifer Dvorak, information security architect for the State of Arizona. Again, really appreciate your insights. This was a fantastic conversation with you. And that's all for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards or in this session of that. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and see you very soon. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to the CUBE's digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Next Joining me is Leo LaBranche, director of Global Strategic Initiative at AWS. Leo, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. So talk to me about AWS and IBM, what's going on there with the relationship? What are some of the things that are significant for both partners? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, IBM's relationship really started with us around 2016, I would say it was a little bit more opportunistic at the time. We knew there was an opportunity to go to market together, we knew there were some great things we could do for our customers, but we hadn't quite cracked crack the code, so to speak, on, on when and where and why we are going to partner at that point. We fast forward into this sort of 2017 to 2019 timeframe. And we became, I'd say a lot more intentional about how we're going to go to market, where we are going to invest areas such as SAP, etc, we're an early one to be identified. And I'd say the ball really started rolling sort of in the 2018 timeframe, combination of a number of different things occurred, you know, the acquisition of Red Hat, obviously, you know, Red Hat is a very significant was a very significant partner with AWS prior to the acquisition. And so, post acquisition, you combine that with ramping up a workforce focused on AWS, combined with a number of different competencies that AWS or IBM really invested in, around migration as an example or SAP. And, you know, the ball really starting to roll quickly. After that, you know, I'd say the last 18 months or so, we both invested significant in the relationship, expansion around the world really, and joint resources and capability to make sure that we're going to market sort of partnered intentional way rather than sort of an opportunistic. >> Oh, go ahead. >> You know, as I was saying, so far, that's absolutely been paying off. In that we are seeing a number of wins all around the world across a broad set of industries, as well as a broad set of technologies. And so, you know, the strength of IBM consulting services in particular, but also their software, combined with the strength of our platform is really proven to be successful for our customers. >> So you said started in 2016, really started taking shape in the last couple of years, that Red Hat acquisition, talk to me about what's in this for customers, I imagine customers that are that are expanding or needing to move workloads into the cloud, or maybe more of a hybrid cloud approach. What are some of the big benefits that customers are going to gain from this partnership? >> Yeah, absolutely. In reality is, IBM has a long history and relationship with their customers, right? They run and manage many of the workloads. They really know the customer's business incredibly well. They have domain expertise and industry, and then the technology expertise from a professional services perspective to really help navigate the waters and determine what the right strategy is around moving to the cloud, right? You combine that with the the depth and breadth of the skills and capabilities and services that AWS provides. And the fact that IBM has invested significantly in making sure that their professional services are deeply steeped in our technology and capabilities. It's a great combination of really understanding the customer's needs plus the art of the possible, honestly, when it comes to technology that we provide, really can accelerate both and mitigate risk when it comes to moving to the cloud. >> That risk mitigation is key. So you guys recently AWS recently launched, I'm going to get this right Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS or ROSA, can you talk to me a little bit about ROSA? >> Yeah, so Red Hat, obviously, very well known and ultimately adopted within the enterprise. We have built a fully managed service around Red Hat on AWS. What that means is, you'll have access to essentially the capabilities that Red Hat would normally provide, but all containerized within a solution that allows you to have access to AWS services, right. The other benefit here is normally you would get sort of a multi vendor for invoicing and cost model, right. Where you get billed from Red Hat, get billed from Amazon, you get billed from IBM. In this case, it's essentially a holistic service in which there's a single sort of invoicing in vendor relationship, right. So the combination of capabilities that normally would be provided via Red Hat combined with access to cloud and all the interfaces and capabilities around OpenShift, etc, that you could do there. Plus a more interesting and beneficial commercial model. >> So streamline pricing models streamlined operating model for customers, talk to me about some of the customers that have adopted it. Give me a look into some of the industries where you've seen good adoption and some of the results that they're gaining so far. >> Yeah, absolutely. So no big surprise, right? The existing customer base that currently uses Red Hat Linux, and some of the options and OpenShift etc, that are out today are then the right customers to potentially look at this when it comes to moving forward. You know, industry wise, certainly their areas in financial services, banking, insurance, et cetera. We're also seeing some around manufacturing. A little so but some in media and Telco as well. So it's a broad swath, I mean, the applicability of Red Hat and OpenShift is somewhat universal, but the early customer basis has largely been sort of in those three areas. >> What I'm curious what the key target audiences are these Red Hat customers, are these AWS customers, IBM, all three? >> If there are existing customers that are currently using Linux or using Red Hat, if there are someone who a customer who currently has a relationship with either AWS or IBM, there's an opportunity to essentially look at it from any of the angles, if you're already on cloud, or you've already experienced AWS in some shape or form. There's an opportunity to potentially to leverage ROSA to further expand that capability and also have some more flexibility so to speak. If you're already using IBM as a professional services provider and advisory firm, then they absolutely have the expertise and understanding of this product set to help you understand how can you best leverage, right, so you can kind of look at it from either of the dimensions. If it's a customer, that's completely new to all of us, then we're happy to talk to you. But it's something that will definitely take a little bit more explanation to understand so why he should or shouldn't consider us with this multi cloud OpenShift type solution. >> Talk me from your opinion about why IBM for SAP on AWS, why should customers go that direction for their projects? >> Yeah, you know, SAP has or sorry SAP, IBM has over 40 years of experience and implementing SAP for their customers, right. And they've done I think it's over 6000 SAP migrations, 40,000 global SAP consultants around the world, right. So from a capability and depth of experience. There's a lot of nuance to doing an SAP implementation, particularly one that's then moving from on-prem to the cloud. You know, they got the experience, right. Beyond that they have industry specific solutions that are pre-configured. So I think there's 12, industry specific industry solutions pre-configured for SAP, it allows, you know, roughly 20 to 30% acceleration when it comes to implementation of platform. So combination of just depth of experience, depth of capability, combined with these solutions to accelerate, are all key reasons for sure. >> The acceleration you bring up, sorry, is interesting, because we saw in the last year, the acceleration of digital transformation projects and businesses needing to pivot again and again and again, to figure out how to survive and be successful in this very dynamic market in which we're still living. Anything industry wise specific that you saw that was really driving the acceleration and the use cases for ROSA in the last year? >> Yeah, so SAP, we saw an interesting trend as a result of what everyone's been experiencing in the last year with COVID and etc. You know, many organizations postponed large URP implementations and large SAP migrations, because of what you just said, right? They weren't entirely sure what would need to be done in order to survive either a competitive threats or more just the global threats that are occurring. So what we saw was, really none of none of the transformations went away. They were put on hold for a period of time, let's say six to nine months ago, maybe even a year ago almost. In lieu of, I would say more top line revenue generating or innovative type solutions that maybe were focused specifically at, you know, the changing dynamic with COVID. Since then we've seen a combination of those new ideas, right. Combination of the new innovation around healthcare, of course, but also public sector and, you know, a lot around employment and the engagement there. We said a combination of those new ideas and new innovations with the original goal of optimizing, transforming SAP, URP, etc. And then combining the two to allow access to the data, right, that sits inside the SAP implementation the SAP, combine the data then SAP with all these new innovations, and then ultimately use that to sort of capitalize on what the future business is going to be. That's been huge. It's been very interesting to see some organizations completely change their business model over the course of the last 12 months, in ways they probably had never intended to before, right. But it's absolutely become an opportunity and a time of a lot of challenges. >> Agree there are silver linings, and we've seen a lot of those interesting opportunities to your point that businesses probably would never have come up with. Had there not been a forcing function like we've been living with. Leo, thank you for joining me today talking to me about what's going on with IBM and AWS. We'll be excited to follow what happens with ROSA as it continues to roll out and we appreciate you joining us on the program. >> Absolutely. Thank you for your time for. >> Palo Alto branch, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. (gentle music) (bright music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual, I'm John Furry hosts of theCube, Cube Virtual. We're remote, we're not in person this year. Like last year, soon, we'll be back in person. We've got a great guest here, Mark Potts, managing director at Accenture for the Red Hat relationship. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Hey, thanks for having me John. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, we've been covering pretty extensively throughout this event, as well as you know the many, many years, the impact of cloud computing. Obviously, you guys have a really big strategic relation with IBM and now Red Hat, Red Hat's part of IBM. It's pretty clear that, you know, that Red Hats got this operating system mindset of open source and, you know, innovation. It's extending into cloud, cloud native, and edge, distributed computing. That's kind of in their DNA if you will, distributed computing and system software and open source, kind of the perfect storm. So, really interesting as this enables new services you guys are on the front lines working with the biggest companies in the world as the global businesses is changing. So, I want to get your take on Red Hat and what you guys are doing together, but first give a quick overview of the center role with Red Hat, your role there and what you do. >> Yeah, thanks. Perfect John. So Mark Potts, as you mentioned I'm the managing director responsible for our global business with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. As you probably saw in our announcements last Fall, around the September timeframe, Accenture made a very large, bold announcement about forming a new cloud first business unit within Accenture. And so we're going to invest $3 billion into that business unit. We're going to dedicate 70 over 70,000 people worldwide to that business unit and that cloud first initiative. And as part of that cloud fishing first initiative we've also developed our new hybrid cloud strategy. And we're looking for new partners and existing partners to help us grow in that hybrid cloud strategy, not hybrid cloud business. We see Red Hat as a very important partner in that business. And as you mentioned there, they've also been, you know, in the distributed computing for a long time. We also see them as a partner for clients that are lifting and shifting and migrating to the cloud on RHEL, like SAP and other workloads like that. And I'm excited to talk to you today about OpenShift, and Ansible, and all those great technologies that Red Hat brings to the table for our hybrid cloud approach and strategy. >> That's awesome. Great investment. And I love Paul coming in that you were saying on his keynote, you know, every CIO should be a cloud operator. I mean, running business at scale this is what hybrid cloud is all about. And so with your new hybrid cloud strategy and the formation of the new business group at Accenture what kind of challenges are you guys looking to solve? What are the opportunities that you're seeing for companies? How do you guys solve those challenges? What do you, what are you guys looking at right now? >> Yeah, that's a great question. As you mentioned, the keynote. So, Karthik Laredo actually runs our cloud first business was actually part of that keynote with Larry Slack as well, or Larry Stack, sorry, as well. And so he mentioned in his keynote something called the cloud continuum, right? And so historically Accenture has been working with our partner on cloud native development moving to about 20 to 25% of the existing workloads in the data center, the easy stuff to the cloud, right? But now we realize that there's a need for the hybrid cloud. There's a need to modernize, maybe on premise, there's a need to maybe modernize in the cloud one way or the other. And then we also look at the holistic view of cloud, on-prem, edge. And that's what Karthik is talking about when he's talking about the, the cloud continuum. And that's a very important part of our strategy within Accenture, and OpenShift really helps us meet those needs. So if a client is a little bit nervous about taking some of those complex workloads but they want a modernize and they want to use the latest and greatest cloud native technologies but they want to do it on-prem and move to the cloud a little bit later they can do that with OpenShift, right? And Red Hat. That's a great platform for that. Maybe it's a client that wants to lift and shift and get to the cloud as soon as possible, close their data centers save that cost of money and then modernize later, but they don't want to necessarily be locked and want to be locked into one cloud provider. Again, OpenShift is great for that. Take those legacy workloads that you move to the public cloud, modernize them on Red Hat OpenShift maybe it's Rosa on AWS, maybe it's aro on Azure. And then when you're ready to you can move those to any other public cloud, if you'd like to, when, when you're ready to, right. And that whole control plan as we call it, being able to see across public cloud, on-prem, the edge is really important for our story and our strategy, and Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Satellite. And those technologies bring a lot to the table for us to meet those needs of our clients and our customers. >> That's great insight there, Mark. I really appreciate that. And one of the things brought up when he was saying that I was thinking to myself, okay, the cloud conversation has many evolutions and, you know, go back five years. It was all moved to the cloud. Everyone was moving to the cloud. That was the big discussion point. Now it's, you know, enterprise ready the cloud get that next level of scale. And as you know, in the enterprise everything we do all everything complicated is a lot of legacy and is existing stuff. So this, you know, this, this is the next enterprise at scale is the conversation that includes hybrid multi-cloud or running on that, on the horizon. So with that, can you expand on what you mean by this cloud continuum that you refer to, that essentially refers to and what is needed to make it a reality for customers? >> Yeah, I mean, what's really needed is the latest greatest in hybrid cloud technology like OpenShift and what Red Hat brings to the table, right. It's also new skills and new capabilities, and, and policy management and those types of things that are important for our company to decide when they're ready to move those workloads to the cloud, right. They need the ability to see across their entire infrastructure. Like I mentioned earlier, whether that be a public cloud provider, whether that in their existing data center, in a colo, or on the, in the edge, like in a retail store or something like that, they need, we need the ability to see across those, that seeing all that infrastructure is a single control plane. So we can manage and know where things are to feel confident about security and everything with our clients. The other big thing that we need is skills. Skills to, you know, build the migration, the modernization, and more importantly, the interaction and integration into legacy workloads like the mainframe, for example, Accentures got a lot of use cases, leveraging Red Hat OpenShift for our cloud coupling solution, where we interact and build new applications that connect to the mainframe sitting right next to the mainframe but their new digital mobile applications, web applications that can be quickly modified and deployed in, into production at a rapid pace. Right, and so when we look at everything that's needed, it's skills, it's technology partners like Red Hat, and then it's, it's really building assets and offerings to help make that journey for our clients better, and, and secure. >> We just found out here at the event that you guys at Accenture had been recognized as Red Hats, global systems integrated partner of the year for North America, congratulations on that. What do you see as some of the key reasons for the recognition? Was there anything that they called out in particular? Obviously you guys have a great track record well-known brand you've known for, you know, creating a lot of value for companies as they do digital transformation. What's the, what's the recognition for this year? >> Yeah, we're super excited about this, right. I mean, this is, we've been partners with Red Hat for a long time. I think we were one of the first system integrators, if not the first system integrators to partner with Red Hat many years ago. Right, so, to get this award, and get it for the first time, is super exciting for us. Right, and so we're very grateful for that recognition and opportunity. You know, I think what really, what really, what got us the recognition for this award was really the effort we put into our partnership over the last 12 to 24 months, right. We had had a really big business in Europe with GDPR and, and the risk averse of going to the public cloud in Europe. OpenShift and Red Hat really had taken off. In North America our business was lagging behind Europe and we significantly invested with Red Hat and new offerings and new clients and new people, right. New talent to build a better business and partnership in North America. You know, I think a lot of the things that we got recognized with were what I mentioned earlier some of our cloud coupling solutions for an insurance client in North America where we're building cloud native applications on Red Hat OpenShift sitting next to the mainframe we're building new cloud, cloud native applications for our transportation company in, in the South region of the US right? So it's really that business transformation work that we're doing working with the legacy, but building new core applications for our customers that are truly portable, nimble and agile, and they can use to get speeds to the market and get to the cloud. >> Cloud first organization you guys are investing billions of dollars, 3 billion. That was referenced. I saw an article. I think we covered it as well on (mumbles). Congratulations, cloud first also implies that cloud native is going to be there. Mark, in all your years in the industry talk about from your personal perspective and even from Accentures, the, the shift that's happening because it's almost mind blowing what's going on in the sense of so fast this is accelerated, even the pandemic exactly accelerate even further. The opportunities that were, that are available now that weren't there before and what it's done to the project timelines and what it's done as a forcing function. Could you share your view on the reality of the current situation and opportunities for companies to take advantage of that wave? >> Yeah, and, and I think Accentures done a great job talking about this recently, even from our C-suite down, right. And Karthik we'll mention, has mentioned this as well in his keynote. I mean, we are seeing an acceleration to get to the cloud that was completely unplanned for us. I think the, the numbers I heard was we thought most clients are going to get to the cloud in eight to 10 years and be fully in the cloud in eight to 10 years. But that's accelerated with COVID and the pandemic, right. We're looking at four to five years we think most of our clients will be in a majority of their, their infrastructure and everything, a new, a new applications and legacy applications will be in the cloud. Right, so the, the, the change and the impact of the pandemic had, had a significant impact on our customers and their need to, to, to get to the cloud. We've even seen those that were leaders in the cloud journey accelerate even more, right. And, and they're being rewarded for that acceleration. Right, a lot of our customers that were first to cloud are seeing the benefits and seeing the, the, the ability to scale and for the pandemic, like, like a lot of our customers in the, in the US in particular. And I think OpenShift is going to help them, help us with that, right, And, and Red Hat in particular. And let's not be lost on the fact that Realms is a great product out there as well. We have many of our clients that are running SAP on Realm and that lift and shift and moving SAP to Azure or AWS or Google or something like that is, is a viable solution for our, to help accelerate our customers as they expand, right. We've seen internationally a lot of our customers that have been really focused just in their local region are now expanding their business outwards, and now they need to get to the clouds to be able to expand those businesses. >> You know it's interesting Mark, just as we're talking, just, you know thinking about my experience over the years in the computer industry everything had to display something else, disrupt something, you know, the mainframes were disrupted by client server. Now we're living in an era where with the containers and microservices and service meshes and cloud native technologies you can embrace existing legacy and abstract away some of the complexity on the integration side, right? So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And I think this phenomenon has opened up a new class of services and, you know the people I talk to and interview the leaders in the industry all have the same kind of view. And the ones that stand out are the ones that recognize that the operating system of business will be software. And that software hasn't yet been built in clouds. The beginning, it's not just one cloud. So I think what's interesting about Red Hat is that their operating system people you almost to see, you know, Arvin kind of snapping the lines and kind of cornering the market on the operating system for business and applications then are a thousand flowers that bloom from that. So, very interesting take here again. That's my opinion. I don't think they've said that formally but if you look at it, that's kind of what's going on. What's your reaction to that? >> I think you're a hundred percent, right. I mean, it, you know, I, I also carry a little bit of the responsibility on the IBM side. And you mentioned mainframe and I've mentioned mainframe a handful of times, right? There's a lot of customers that have this legacy estate like the mainframe in particular but they need to be nimble. Right, they need to be agile and mainframe is a challenge sometimes around that. Right, and so to your point creating those applications that participate with the mainframe allowed the mainframe to participate better with these cloud native applications and these new digital transformation applications is a very key component to it. And so I, a hundred percent agree with with everything you said. And I think, I think we're going to see more around this operating system type software. And I, you almost, to an extent, you you kind of view Red Hat OpenShift as kind of that new operating system, right? And you look at some of the announcements that Red Hat has made around Palentier, right, and adding Palentier and ISV to their marketplace to allow customers that are bought OpenShift or make it easy for clients to buy Red Hat OpenShift, and then bring in these ISVs that have been certified, they're secure, they're easy to consume and buy it through Red Hats marketplaces is very exciting and very interesting, and very easy to do, right. Once you get that Red Hat OpenShift layer in there, that operating system and now you're bringing in products all over the place, right. And, and all the new stuff. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those announcements during summit as well. >> Yeah, I think it was a 20 year run here. It's trillions of dollars as it's been forecasted. Mark, great to have you on. Super valuable resource. Great insight! While we got you here let's get a quick free consulting a minute here for the customers watching. What's your advice. I need some help here. I'm going to go to the cloud. I want a good, I want enough headroom so I can grow into I want to foreclose any opportunities. I want to move to the cloud. I want to have a hybrid distributed computing architecture. I want to program my business. I want infrastructure as code. I want dev sec ops. What's my playbook? What should I do? >> So Accenture's got a real smart approach and strategy around us. We leveraged an, an assessment approach really to look at what's in your what's in your data center today and what, what you have from an infrastructure and application standpoint, there should be-- We have a seminar where it's can completely rewrite an application, and we would apply those six hours or seven hours to that assessment to help you figure out the disposition of your applications and your infrastructure to figure out what is the right cloud. What's the right journey. I mean, we talked about, you know the mainframe and mainframe being an anchor in a lot of our client's data centers, right. How do we move those applications that have data gravity challenges to those legacy applications, to the cloud. How do we consider that? So the right way to do it is take a holistic approach. Do the assessment, do the disposition of your applications. And then let's let Accenture put together a full plan of how we would migrate you incidents into the public cloud. >> Mark FOS, managing director of Accenture. Congratulations on your North America award, partner of the year. And also awesome to hear. And we've been covering again cloud first. Totally believe it, great investment. That's going to pay back huge dividends for you guys and you know, having the hybrid, which is pretty much determined as a fact now in the industry. Congratulations, thanks for coming on. >> Perfect, thanks, and thanks for having me, and thank you Red Hat for the award. Really appreciate it. And look forward to talking to you soon. >> All right, this is theCubes coverage of Red Hat summit, 2021, virtual. This is the Cube virtual, I'm John Furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>mhm Yes. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual. I'm john for a host of the cube we're here in Palo alto. Were remote with our great guest here cube alumni. I've been on many times chris wright, Senior vice president and CTO of red hat chris great to see you. Always a pleasure to have you on the screen here too. But we're not in person but thanks for coming in remote. >>Yeah, you bet. Glad to be here. >>Not only were talking about speeds and feeds, digital transformation going under the hood here we're gonna talk about red hats, expanded collaboration with boston University to help fund education and research for open source projects. So you guys have a huge relationship with boston University. Talk about this continued commitment. What's the news, what's the, what's the story? >>Well, we have a couple different things going on uh and and the relationship we have with the EU is many years in. So this itself isn't brand new. Um one of the things that's important to highlight here is we are giving something north of $550 million dollars worth of software to be you really in pursuit of running uh powering and running scaled infrastructure. That's part of the open hybrid class. Um and that's that's an important piece which we can touch on a little bit as we talk to this conversation. The other one is like I said, this isn't a new relationship with the U. And what we're doing now is really expanding the relationship. So we've we've built a great connection directly with the You were substantially expanding that. Um The original relationship we had was a $5 million relationship spread over five years now. We're talking about a $20 million Relationship spread over five years. So really a significant expansion. And of course that expansion is connected to some of the work that we plan to do together in this open hybrid cloud infrastructure and research space. So a lot of things coming together at once to really really advance the red hat ca laboratory at the U. That combined effort in bringing you know, cloud research and open source and all these things together >>and a lot of actually going on. So basically the boston area lot of universities, but I love the shirt you're wearing with his red hat innovation in the open. This is kind of one of those things you also mentioned out of this huge subscription of software grant that's going to be you just a huge number give value for for the boston University. But you also have another project that's been going on the collaborative research and education agreement called red hat collaborative orI Okay, this was in place. You mentioned that. How's that tying in because that was pre existing. Now. You've got the grant, you got your funding more and more research. Talk about how this connects into the open cloud initiative because this is kind of interesting. You're not bringing hybrid cloud kind of research and practical value in A i ops is hot. You can't you can't go anywhere these days without having great observe ability. Cloud native more and more is more complex and you've got these young students and researchers dying and get their hands on it. Take us through the connection between the CA laboratory and open open cloud. >>So the CA laboratory is a clever name that just talks about collaboration and research laboratory type research. And initially the CA laboratory focus was on the infrastructure running the cloud and some of the application workloads that can run on top of an open cloud infrastructure uh that are that's very data centric. And so this is uh an opportunity for multidisciplinary work looking at modeling for um for health care, for example for how you can improve imaging and we've had a great results in this collaboration. Um We've talked at times about the relationship with the boston Children's Hospital and the chris project not related to me, but just similar acronym that spells chris. Um and these things come together in part through connecting relationships to academia, where academia as research is increasingly built in on and around open source software. So if you think of two parallel worlds, open source software development, just the activity of building open source software, it brings so many people together and it moves so quickly that if you're not directly connected to that as an academic researcher, you risk producing academic research results that aren't relevant because it's hard for them to connect back to these large, fast moving projects, which may have invented a solution to the problem you've been focused on as an academic if you're not directly connected. So we see academia and open source coming together to build really a next generation of understanding of the scientific in depth and he's joining the >>train operations you're talking about here though, this is significant because there's dollars behind it, right? There's real money, it's not >>just the right software, >>it's it's a center, it's a joint operation. >>That's right. And so when you think about just the academic research of producing um ideas that manifest themselves as code and software projects, we want to make sure we're first connecting the software projects to open source communities in with our own engineering experience, bringing code into these open, open source projects to just advance the the feeds and speeds and speeds, the kind of functionality the state of the art of the actual project. We're also taking this to a new level with this expanded relationship and that is software today. When you, when you operate software as a cloud, a critical part of the software is the operationalization of that software. So software just sitting there on the shelf doesn't do anybody any good. Even if the shelf is an open source project, it's a tar ball waiting for you to download. If you don't ever grab it and run it, it's not doing anybody any good. And if the challenge of running it is substantial enough that it stops you from using that software, you've created a barrier to the value that's locked inside that project. The focus here is how can we take that the operations experience of running a cloud, which itself is a big complex distributed system, tie some of those experiences back into the projects that are used to build that infrastructure. So you're taking not just the output of the project, but also the understanding of what it takes to run a project and bringing that understanding and even the automation and code associated with that back into the project. So, your operational izing this open source software and you're building deeper understanding of what it means to operate things that scale, including data and data sets that you can use to build models that show how you can create the remediation and closed loop systems with AI and machine learning, you know, sort of synthesizing all the data that you generate out of a big distributed infrastructure and feed that back into the operations of that same infrastructure. So a lot going on there at the same time operationalization as as an open source initiative but also um really the understanding advancement of A I and data centric operations, so ai ops and closed the remediation. >>Yeah, I mean, devops developer and operations to operationalize it and certainly cloud Native put an emphasis on Day two operations, which leads a lot more research, a lot more uh student work on understanding the coding environment. Um so with that I got to ask um I asked you about this uh massachusetts focused or this open cloud initiative because you guys are talking about this open cloud initiative including this massachusetts. Open Cloud, what is that? What is the massachusetts? Open Cloud sounds like you're offering a kind of open person, not just bu but other um Yeah, institutions. >>That's right. So the the M o C massachusetts open cloud is itself a cross um organizational collaboration bringing together five different academic institutions in New England In massachusetts. It's bu it's Harvard mit, its Northeastern and its U. Mass. Coming together to support a common set of infrastructure which is cloud. It's a cloud that runs in a data center and then um it serves a couple of different purposes. One is research on clouds directly. So what does it mean to run a cloud? What does it look like from a research point of view to understand large scale distributed systems? And then the other is more on top. When you have a cloud you can run workloads and those workloads scaled out to do say data processing, looking at the implications of across different fields which could be natural sciences, could be medicine, could be, even political science or social science is really a multidisciplinary view of what it means to leverage a cloud and run data centric workloads on top. So two different areas that are of a focus for the M. O. C. And this becomes this sort of vehicle for collaboration between Red Hat View and the Red Hot Laboratory. >>So I have to ask only because I'm a big fan of the area and I went to one of those schools, is there like a bean pot for technical hackathons where you get all the schools matched up against each other on the mass open cloud and compete for who gets bragging rights and the text city there. >>It's a great question. Not yet. But I'll jot that down here in hell. Up on that. >>Happy to sponsor. We'll we'll do the play by play coverage, you know. Great. >>I love that. Yeah, kind of twitch tv style. The one thing that there is which is very practical is academic research grants themselves are competitive, right? People are vying for research dollars to put together proposals, Bring those proposals to um the agency that's that's that's giving out grants and winning those grants is certainly prestigious. It's important as part of her research institutes continue to fund the work that they're doing. Uh Now we've been associated uh through the work we've done to date with the U. With Yeah almost $15 million 20 papers. So there's there's a lot of work you can't quite call the play by play. It's a >>scoreboard. I mean their numbers you can put numbers on the board. I mean that's what's one of the things you can measure. But let me ask you on those grants. So you're saying this is just the bu you guys actually have data on um the impact of the relationship in terms of grants and papers and stuff like that academic work. >>That's right. That's right. And so those numbers that I'm giving you are examples of how we've worked together with the u to help their faculty generate grant dollars that then fund some of the research that's happening there together with redhead engineers and on and on the infrastructure like the massachusetts Open cloud. >>That's a good way to look at the scoreboard. It's a good point. We have to research that if you don't mind me asking on this data that you have um are all those projects contributing to open source or do they have to be? That's just generic. Is that all of you all papers around bu is part of the research. In other words, I'm trying to think if I'm in open source, has this contributed to me as an >>open source? Yeah, it's a big and complex question because there's so much research that can happen through a research institution. And those research grants tend to be governed with agreements and some of those agreements have intellectual property rights um front and center and might require things like open source software as a result, the stuff that we're working on clearly isn't that focus area of open source software and and research activities that help kind of propel our understanding forward of what does it mean to do large scale distributed systems creation and then operation. So how do you develop software that does it? How do you how do you run the software that builds these big large distributed systems? So we're focused in that area. Um some of the work that we facilitated through that focus includes integrating non open source software that might be part of um same medical imaging. So for example work we've done with the boston Children's Hospital That isn't 100 doesn't require us to be involved 100 of the open source pieces. All the infrastructure there to support it is. And so we're learning how we can build integrated pipelines for data analysis and image analysis and data sharing across different institutions uh at the open source project level. Well maybe we have a specific imaging program that is not generated from this project. And of course that's okay with >>us. You know chris you bring up a good point with all those conversations. I could see this really connecting the dots. Most computer science programs. Most engineering programs haven't really traditionally focused on it at the scale we're talking about because we look at cloud scale but now scaling with hybrid it's real engineering going on to think about the large scale. We know all the big hyper scale ear's right so it's not just I. T. Provisioning you know network connection and doing some I. T. Work. We're talking about large scale. So I have to ask you as you guys look at these relationships with academics uh academia like like bu and others um how are the students responding to this? Are you guys seeing any specific graduate level advancements? Because you're talking about operational roles that are becoming so important whether it's cyber security and as cloud needed because once more data driven you need to have all this new scale engineered up. That's >>what how >>do you look at that? >>There's two different pieces that I would highlight. One is just the data science itself. So schools still need to produce data scientists. And having data is a big part of being a data scientist and knowing what your what your goals are with that data and then experimenting with different techniques, whether it's algorithms or tools. It's a big part of being a data scientist sort of spelunking through the data. So we're helping produce data. We're looking at data science efforts around data that's used to operationalize infrastructure, which is an interesting data science endeavor by itself. The other piece is really what you highlighted, which is there's an emergence of a skill set in the industry, often referred to as SRE site reliability engineering. Um it is a engineering discipline. And if you back up a little bit and you start thinking about what are the underlying principles behind large scale distributed systems, you get to some information theory and computer science. So this isn't just something that you might think of as um some simple training of a few key tools and knowing how to interpret a dashboard. And you're good to go, this is a much more sophisticated view of what does it mean to really operate large scale infrastructure, which to date, there aren't a lot of these large scale infrastructures available to academics to research because their commercial endeavors >>and their new to me. I was talking to some young folks my son's age and daughters age and I was saying, you know, architect in a building, a skyscraper isn't trivial. You can't just do that overnight. There's a lot of engineering that goes on in that science, but you're bringing kind of operating systems theory, systems thinking to distributed computing. I mean that's combination of a interdisciplinary shift and you got, I won't say civil engineering, but like concept is there, you've got structure, you've got networks, they're changing and then you've got software so again completely new area. >>That's right and there's not a lot of even curriculum that explores this space. So one of the opportunity, there's a great program that really focuses on um that that space of site reliability engineering or operational izing software. Um And then the other piece that I'm I'm really excited about is connecting to open source communities so that as we build software, we have a way to run and operationalize that software that doesn't have to be directly tied to a commercial outlet. So products running in the cloud will have a commercial S. L. A. And commercial agreements between the user and the producer of that service. How do you do that in open source context? How do you leverage a community, bring that community software to a community run service, learn through the running of that service. How to best build architect the service itself and then operationalized with the tooling and automation that service? How do you, how do you bring that into the open source community? And that's something that we've been referring to as the operate first initiative. How do you get the operationalization of software? Really thought of as a primary focal point in the software project where you normally think about the internals of software, the features, the capabilities of functionality, less about the operationalization. So important shift at the open source project level, which is something that I think will really be interesting and we'll see a lot of reaping a lot of rewards. Just an open source communities directly. >>Yeah, speed and durability. Certainly having that reliability is great. You know, I love talking with you guys at red hat because, you know, software, you know, open source and you know, operating systems because as it comes together in this modern era, what a great, great fit, great work you're doing with Boston University's and the mass open cloud initiative. Congratulations on that. I got I got to ask you about this Red Hat Graduate Fellows program you have because this kind of speaks to what you guys are doing, you have this kind of this redhead graduate fellows network and the work that's being done. Does that translate into red hat at all? From an engineering standpoint? How does that, how does that work together? >>Basically, what we do is we support um PhD students, we support post docs. So there's a real direct support to the, you know, that is the Red Jack Graduate Fellow program on our focus there is connecting those um uh academics, the faculty members and the students to our engineers to work together on key research initiatives that we think will help drive open source software agendas forward really broad can be in all different areas from security to virtualization too, the operating systems to cloud distributed systems, uh and one of the things that we've discovered is it creates a great relationship with the university and we find students that will be excited to leave university and come into the the industry workforce and work at Red hat. So there is a direct talent relationship between the work that we do at bu and the talent that we can bring into red hat, which is awesome. Uh We know these people we've worked with well with them, but also we're kind of expanding understanding of open source across, you know, more and more of academia, which I think is really valuable and important for red hat. We just go out to the the industry at large, um, and helping bring a set of skills to the industry that whether they're coming, whether these are students that come into red hat or go elsewhere into the industry, these are important skills to have in the industry. So we look at the, how do you work in open source communities? How to operationalize software at scale? These are important things. They didn't >>expand, expand the territory if you will in terms of systems thinking. We just talked about great collaboration. You guys do a great job chris great to have you on a quick final word from you on this year at red hat summer. I know it's virtual again, which we could be in person, but we're starting to come out of the covid kind of post covid right around the corner. Um, what's the update? How would you describe the current state of red hat? Obviously you guys still got that, that vibe. You still pumping strong a lot going on. What's the current? What's the current, uh, bumper sticker? What's the vibe? >>Well, in many ways, because we're so large and distributed. Um, the last year has been, uh, can't say business as usual because it's been an impact on everybody, but it hasn't required us to fundamentally change. And as we work across open source communities, there's been a lot of continuity that's come through a workforce that's gone completely distributed. People are anxious to get to the next phase, whatever back to normal means. Uh, and people at Red Hat are no different. So we're looking forward to what it can mean to spend time with colleagues in offices, were looking forward to what it means to spend time together with our friends and families and travel and all those things. But from a, from a business point of view, Red Hat's focus on the open hybrid cloud and that distributed view of how we work with open source communities. That's something that's, it's only continued to grow and pick up over the course of the last year. So it's clearly an important area for the industry and we've been busier than ever the last year. So, uh, interesting, interesting times for everybody. >>Well, it's great to see and I love how the culture maintains its its relevance, its coolness intersection between software, Open Source and systems. Great, Great working congratulations chris. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>All right. I'm John for here with the Cube for Red Hat Summit 2021. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to The CUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard enterprise, making moves and storage. And with me are Omar Assad, vice president and general manager for Primary Storage, HCI and data management at HPE. And Sandeep Singh, who's the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to the CUBE Great to see you both. >> David, it's pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you David, thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course, Dave. In the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades upon at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure. And it's really coming at the nexus of data cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that, we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off, we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Then our second announcement is HPE Electra. HB Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AI ops platform which is HPE in foresight, and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers or data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool, I mean, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on prem, AI injected in, I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers. But I wonder if we get back up a little a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really, what are their pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the general manager for data management and storage here at HPE, I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And as time has progressed, as the amount of data under organizations management has continued to increase. What I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UI are present. But as the problem starts to get at scale, as customers acquire more, and more assets to store and manage their data on premise, the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster. Yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up, storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow, a single view of life cycle management of data customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multi-cloud management of data, the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these, a lot of modern enhancements in storage. >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys. Is I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures, people are frustrated, they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems. All it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its inherent simplicity, that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem, and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and do you agree? What data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer, and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management, that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, it's fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably a mixed picture, right? It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is. It's front and center. I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement, this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled, what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board. That's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation. And we call this vision unified data ops. Unified data ops integrates data centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud native control and operations, to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of talent to data and data infrastructure. Streamlined data management, and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of unified data ops real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services. And that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity is. I just don't want to see it anymore over. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement. Maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, David, it's a lot more than that. What did we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SAS console, which our customers get onto. And from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they're not only stop at that, but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that is available through a SAS platform, a SAS console. 'Cause as every customer onboard themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console, then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel, so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers. We at the same console, by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds? If the customer's digital transformation requires that. So again, from that single cloud console, from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console, customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-position the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SAS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody, they, what this is, is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers. And this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here. You're charting new territory. You've talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year. I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective. How does their experience actually change? >> Wonderful, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bites further for you. And I love that, right? So the way you look at it is, recently, the storage management from an, as we talked about earlier from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified. I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world, you can have hundreds of devices, but the ownership model is completely set. So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually lied, was inspired from consumerization of IT. And that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right? So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable, and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage administrator, they will be on their iPad, on their data services console or iPhone or whatever the device of their choices, and from that console, from that point on, the device will be registered, onboarded. Its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined states for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console, they don't even need to do that. We'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet. That's just one example. It's extremely simple. Plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their I-phones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that Sandeep and I often bounce ideas bond is is it is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload? Is the latency going to go South? Does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual. And it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE info site, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it. you just describe your workload. Hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS. And by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend, because we're managing your infrastructure, the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems. And because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is, describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices, you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective, a thing that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly then, global data management, distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right? So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SAS management and scale allows you to do. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit. What Omer described, especially with intent based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a long centric to app centric provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access, what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployment. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other skills because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about, but I wonder if you could address. I mean, you've got the definition of cloud is changing, the cloud is expanding to on prem expand. The cloud is going out to the edge, it's going across clouds. And so security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding. The operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So most of the organizations that we've talked to... In today's modern world, almost every customer that I've talked to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers for the hyperscalers or buy in for SAS based applications are pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE info site. That's one of the largest storage SAS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customers data secure, keeping customers telemetry information secure, we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SAS service would do so. Reverse tunneling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers chief information security officers. So all of those, what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's, we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a property engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave, the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not, sort of new. Aruba central, which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed, it's managing millions of access points in a SAS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SAS services and then built data and storage centric SAS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago . And it's same thing with, with info site, the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio. Those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know your branding team, you guys are serious about branding. That new product brand, maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right? And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performance to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that. It's completely wrapped around that. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000, which is available for mission critical workloads, for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra 6,000, which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads, generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model. It simplifies their management model and really, really allows them to focus on the context, the data and the app diversity, whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multi-cloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> [Sandeep And Dave-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in. HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> It really does. It really does. And I'm very comfortable in saying this, like HPE in foresight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI based elementary and support enabled metrics to work. And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it, we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless, non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SAS console, is again the first of its kind, when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you've got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important, because it's a performance it's got to be, a good price performance. So now can we bring this back again to the customers? What are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures, they don't have to think. It's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards, the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application, the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, the charge back models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications, customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model, or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that. The data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And David, just to almost response here. As I speak with customers, one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud. Yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model, IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for. At the same time they're been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back, be able to focus more on the strategic projects, at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with our families. That's incredibly important. >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift I'm seeing from HPE. We're not talking about how much the box weighs, we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new. Really to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to our operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited. >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a pleasure. >> Thanks, Dave. (upbeat music)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Okay, >>we're now going to explore the vision of the future of cloud computing From the perspective of one of the leaders in the field, J G >>Share >>a pure off is the vice president of As Your Data ai and Edge at Microsoft G. Welcome to the Cuban cloud. Thanks so much for participating. >>Well, thank you, Dave, and it's a real pleasure to be here with you. And I just wanna welcome the audience as well. >>Well, jg judging from your title, we have a lot of ground to cover, and our audience is definitely interested in all the topics that are implied there. So let's get right into it. You know, we've said many times in the Cube that the new innovation cocktail comprises machine intelligence or a I applied to troves of data. With the scale of the cloud. It's it's no longer, you know, we're driven by Moore's law. It's really those three factors, and those ingredients are gonna power the next wave of value creation and the economy. So, first, do you buy into that premise? >>Yes, absolutely. we do buy into it. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why we put Data Analytics and Ai together is because all of that really begins with the collection of data and managing it and governing it, unlocking analytics in it. And we tend to see things like AI, the value creation that comes from a I as being on that continues off, having started off with really things like analytics and proceeding toe. You know, machine learning and the use of data. Interesting breaks. Yes. >>I'd like to get some more thoughts around a data and how you see the future data and the role of cloud and maybe how >>Microsoft, you >>know, strategy fits in there. I mean, you, your portfolio, you got you got sequel server, Azure, Azure sequel. You got arc, which is kinda azure everywhere for people that aren't familiar with that. You've got synapse. Which course that's all the integration a data warehouse, and get things ready for B I and consumption by the business and and the whole data pipeline and a lot of other services as your data bricks you got You got cosmos in their, uh, Blockchain. You've got open source services like Post Dress and my sequel. So lots of choices there. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you think about the future of Of of Cloud data platforms? It looks like your strategies, right tool for the right job? Is that fair? >>It is fair, but it's also just to step back and look at it. It's fundamentally what we see in this market today is that customer was the Sikh really a comprehensive proposition? And when I say a comprehensive proposition, it is sometimes not just about saying that. Hey, listen way No, you're a sequel server company. We absolutely trust that you have the best Azure sequel database in the cloud, but tell us more. We've got data that's sitting in her group systems. We've got data that's sitting in Post Press in things like mongo DB, right? So that open source proposition today and data and data management and database management has become front and center, so are really sort of push. There is when it comes to migration management, modernization of data to present the broadest possible choice to our customers so we can meet them where they are. However, when it comes to analytics. One of the things they asked for is give us a lot more convergence use. You know it, really, it isn't about having 50 different services. It's really about having that one comprehensive service that is converged. That's where things like synapse Fitzer, where in just land any kind of data in the leg and then use any compute engine on top of it to drive insights from it. So, fundamentally, you know, it is that flexibility that we really sort of focus on to meet our customers where they are and really not pushing our dogma and our beliefs on it. But to meet our customers according to the way they have deployed stuff like this. >>So that's great. I want to stick on this for a minute because, you know, I know when when I have guests on like yourself, do you never want to talk about you know, the competition? But that's all we ever talk about. That's all your customers ever talk about, because because the counter to that right tool for the right job and that I would say, is really kind of Amazon's approach is is that you got the single unified data platform, the mega database that does it all. And that's kind of Oracle's approach. It sounds like you wanna have your cake and eat it, too, so you you got the right tool for the right job approach. But you've got an integration layer that allows you to have that converge database. I wonder if you could add color to that and you confirm or deny what I just said. >>No, that's a That's a very fair observation, but I I say there's a nuance in what I sort of describe when it comes to data management. When it comes to APS, we have them customers with the broadest choice. Even in that, even in that perspective, we also offer convergence. So, case in point, when you think about Cosmos TV under that one sort of service, you get multiple engines, but with the same properties, right global distribution, the five nines availability. It gives customers the ability to basically choose when they have to build that new cloud native AB toe, adopt cosmos Davey and adopted in a way that it's and choose an engine that is most flexible. Tow them, however you know when it comes to say, you know, writing a sequel server, for example from organizing it you know you want. Sometimes you just want to lift and shift it into things. Like I asked In other cases, you want to completely rewrite it, so you need to have the flexibility of choice there that is presented by a legacy off What's its on premises? When it moved into things like analytics, we absolutely believe in convergence, right? So we don't believe that look, you need to have a relation of data warehouse that is separate from a loop system that is separate from, say, a B I system. That is just, you know, it's a bolt on for us. We love the proposition off, really building things that are so integrated that once you land data, once you prep it inside the lake, you can use it for analytics. You can use it for being. You can use it for machine learning. So I think you know, are sort of differentiated. Approach speaks for itself there. Well, >>that's that's interesting, because essentially, again, you're not saying it's an either or, and you're seeing a lot of that in the marketplace. You got some companies say no, it's the Data Lake and others saying No, no put in the data warehouse and that causes confusion and complexity around the data pipeline and a lot of calls. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Ah, lot of customers struggled to get value out of data and and specifically data product builders of frustrated that it takes too long to go from. You know, this idea of Hey, I have an idea for a data service and it could drive monetization, but to get there, you gotta go through this complex data lifecycle on pipeline and beg people to add new data sources. And do you do you feel like we have to rethink the way that we approach data architectures? >>Look, I think we do in the cloud, and I think what's happening today and I think the place where I see the most amount of rethink the most amount of push from our customers to really rethink is the area of analytics in a I. It's almost as if what worked in the past will not work going forward. Right? So when you think about analytics on in the Enterprise today, you have relational systems, you have produced systems. You've got data marts. You've got data warehouses. You've got enterprise data warehouses. You know, those large honking databases that you use, uh, to close your books with right? But when you start to modernize it, what deep you are saying is that we don't want to simply take all of that complexity that we've built over say, you know, 34 decades and simply migrated on mass exactly as they are into the cloud. What they really want is a completely different way of looking at things. And I think this is where services like synapse completely provide a differentiated proposition to our customers. What we say there is land the data in any way you see shape or form inside the lake. Once you landed inside the lake, you can essentially use a synapse studio toe. Prep it in the way that you like, use any compute engine of your choice and and operate on this data in any way that you see fit. So, case in point, if you want to hydrate relation all data warehouse, you can do so if you want to do ad hoc analytics using something like spark. You can do so if you want to invoke power. Bi I on that data or b i on that data you can do so if you want to bring in a machine learning model on this breath data you can do so, so inherently. So when customers buy into this proposition, what it solves for them and what it gives them is complete simplicity, right? One way to land the data, multiple ways to use it. And it's all eso. >>Should we think of synapse as an abstraction layer that abstracts away the complexity of the underlying technology? Is that a fair way toe? Think about it. >>Yeah, you can think of it that way. It abstracts away, Dave a couple of things. It takes away the type of data, you know, sort of the complexities related to the type of data. It takes away the complexity related to the size of data. It takes away the complexity related to creating pipelines around all these different types of data and fundamentally puts it in a place where it can be now consumed by any sort of entity inside the actual proposition. And by that token, even data breaks. You know, you can, in fact, use data breaks in in sort off an integrated way with a synapse, Right, >>Well, so that leads me to this notion of and then wonder if you buy into it s Oh, my inference is that a data warehouse or a data lake >>could >>just be a node in inside of a global data >>mesh on. >>Then it's synapses sort of managing, uh, that technology on top. Do you buy into that that global data mesh concept >>we do. And we actually do see our customers using synapse and the value proposition that it brings together in that way. Now it's not where they start. Often times when a customer comes and says, Look, I've got an enterprise data warehouse, I want to migrate it or I have a group system. I want to migrate it. But from there, the evolution is absolutely interesting to see. I give you an example. You know, one of the customers that we're very proud off his FedEx And what FedEx is doing is it's completely reimagining its's logistics system that basically the system that delivers What is it? The three million packages a day on in doing so in this covert times, with the view of basically delivering our covert vaccines. One of the ways they're doing it is basically using synapse. Synapse is essentially that analytic hub where they can get complete view into their logistic processes. Way things are moving, understand things like delays and really put all that together in a way that they can essentially get our packages and these vaccines delivered as quickly as possible. Another example, you know, is one of my favorite, uh, we see once customers buy into it, they essentially can do other things with it. So an example of this is, uh is really my favorite story is Peace Parks Initiative. It is the premier Air White Rhino Conservancy in the world. They essentially are using data that has landed in azure images in particular. So, basically, you know, use drones over the vast area that they patrol and use machine learning on this data to really figure out where is an issue and where there isn't an issue so that this part with about 200 rangers can scramble surgically versus having to read range across the last area that they cover. So What do you see here is you know, the importance is really getting your data in order. Landed consistently. Whatever the kind of data ideas build the right pipelines and then the possibilities of transformation are just endless. >>Yeah, that's very nice how you worked in some of the customer examples. I appreciate that. I wanna ask you, though, that that some people might say that putting in that layer while it clearly adds simplification and e think a great thing that they're begins over time to be be a gap, if you will, between the ability of that layer to integrate all the primitives and all the peace parts on that, that you lose some of that fine grain control and it slows you down. What would you say to that? >>Look, I think that's what we excel at, and that's what we completely sort of buy into on. It's our job to basically provide that level off integration that granularity in the way that so it's an art, absolutely admit it's an art. There are areas where people create simplicity and not a lot of you know, sort of knobs and dials and things like that. But there are areas where customers want flexibility, right? So I think just to give you an example of both of them in landing the data inconsistency in building pipelines, they want simplicity. They don't want complexity. They don't want 50 different places to do this. Just 100 to do it. When it comes to computing and reducing this data analyzing this data, they want flexibility. This is one of the reasons why we say, Hey, listen, you want to use data breaks? If you're you're buying into that proposition and you're absolutely happy with them, you can plug plug it into it. You want to use B I and no, essentially do a small data mart. You can use B I If you say that. Look, I've landed in the lake. I really only want to use em melt, bringing your animal models and party on. So that's where the flexibility comes in. So that's sort of really sort of think about it. Well, >>I like the strategy because, you know, my one of our guest, Jim Octagon, e E. I think one of the foremost thinkers on this notion of off the data mesh and her premises that that that data builders, data product and service builders air frustrated because the the big data system is generic to context. There's no context in there. But by having context in the big data architecture and system, you could get products to market much, much, much faster. So but that seems to be your philosophy. But I'm gonna jump ahead to do my ecosystem question. You've mentioned data breaks a couple of times. There's another partner that you have, which is snowflake. They're kind of trying to build out their own, uh, data cloud, if you will, on global mesh in and the one hand, their partner. On the other hand, there are competitors. How do you sort of balance and square that circle? >>Look, when I see snowflake, I actually see a partner. You know that when we essentially you know, we are. When you think about as you know, this is where I sort of step back and look at Azure as a whole and in azure as a whole. Companies like snowflakes are vital in our ecosystem, right? I mean, there are places we compete, but you know, effectively by helping them build the best snowflake service on Asia. We essentially are able toe, you know, differentiate and offer a differentiated value proposition compared to, say, a Google or on AWS. In fact, that's being our approach with data breaks as well, where you know they are effectively on multiple club, and our opportunity with data breaks is toe essentially integrate them in a way where we offer the best experience. The best integrations on Azure Barna That's always been a focus. >>That's hard to argue with. Strategy. Our data with our data partner eat er, shows Microsoft is both pervasive and impressively having a lot of momentum spending velocity within the budget cycles. I wanna come back thio ai a little bit. It's obviously one of the fastest growing areas in our in our survey data. As I said, clearly, Microsoft is a leader in this space. What's your what's your vision of the future of machine intelligence and how Microsoft will will participate in that opportunity? >>Yeah, so fundamentally, you know, we've built on decades of research around, you know, around, you know, essentially, you know, vision, speech and language that's being the three core building blocks and for the for a really focused period of time we focused on essentially ensuring human parody. So if you ever wondered what the keys to the kingdom are it, czar, it's the most we built in ensuring that the research posture that we've taken there, what we then done is essentially a couple of things we focused on, essentially looking at the spectrum. That is a I both from saying that, Hollis and you know it's gotta work for data. Analysts were looking toe basically use machine learning techniques, toe developers who are essentially, you know, coding and building a machine learning models from scratch. So for that select proposition manifesto us, as you know, really a. I focused on all skill levels. The other court thing we've done is that we've also said, Look, it will only work as long as people trust their data and they can trust their AI models. So there's a tremendous body of work and research we do in things like responsibility. So if you ask me where we sort of push on is fundamentally to make sure that we never lose sight of the fact that the spectrum off a I, and you can sort of come together for any skill level, and we keep that responsibly. I proposition. Absolutely strong now against that canvas, Dave. I'll also tell you that you know, as edge devices get way more capable, right where they can input on the edge, see a camera or a mike or something like that, you will see us pushing a lot more of that capability onto the edge as well. But to me, that's sort of a modality. But the core really is all skill levels and that responsible denia. >>Yeah, So that that brings me to this notion of wanna bring an edge and and hybrid cloud Understand how you're thinking about hybrid cloud multi cloud. Obviously one of your competitors, Amazon won't even say the word multi cloud you guys have, Ah, you know, different approach there. But what's the strategy with regard? Toe, toe hybrid. You know, Do you see the cloud you bringing azure to the edge? Maybe you could talk about that and talk about how you're different from the competition. >>Yeah, I think in the edge from Annette, you know, I live in I'll be the first one to say that the word nge itself is conflated. Okay, It's, uh but I will tell you, just focusing on hybrid. This is one of the places where you know I would say the 2020 if I would have looked back from a corporate perspective. In particular, it has Bean the most informative because we absolutely saw customers digitizing moving to the cloud. And we really saw hybrid in action. 2020 was the year that hybrid sort of really became really from a cloud computing perspective and an example of this is we understood it's not all or nothing. So sometimes customers want azure consistency in their data centers. This is where things like Azure stack comes in. Sometimes they basically come to us and say, We want the flexibility of adopting flexible pattern, you know, platforms like, say, containers orchestra, Cuban Pettis, so that we can essentially deployed wherever you want. And so when we design things like art, it was built for that flexibility in mind. So here is the beauty of what's something like our can do for you. If you have a kubernetes endpoint anywhere we can deploy and as your service onto it, that is the promise, which means if for some reason, the customer says that. Hey, I've got this kubernetes endpoint in AWS and I love as your sequel. You will be able to run as your sequel inside AWS. There's nothing that stops you from doing it so inherently you remember. Our first principle is always to meet our customers where they are. So from that perspective, multi cloud is here to stay. You know, we're never going to be the people that says, I'm sorry, we will never see a But it is a reality for our customers. >>So I wonder if we could close. Thank you for that by looking, looking back and then and then ahead. And I wanna e wanna put forth. Maybe it's, Ah criticism, but maybe not. Maybe it's an art of Microsoft, but But first you know, you get Microsoft an incredible job of transitioning. It's business as your nominee president Azzawi said. Our data shows that so two part question First, Microsoft got there by investing in the cloud, really changing its mind set, I think, in leveraging its huge software state and customer base to put Azure at the center of its strategy, and many have said me included that you got there by creating products that air Good enough. You know, we do a 1.0, it's not that great. And the two Dato, and maybe not the best, but acceptable for your customers. And that's allowed you to grow very rapidly expanding market. >>How >>do you respond to that? Is that is that a fair comment? Ume or than good enough? I wonder if you could share your >>thoughts, gave you? You hurt my feelings with that question. I don't hate me, g getting >>it out there. >>So there was. First of all, thank you for asking me that. You know, I am absolutely the biggest cheerleader. You'll find a Microsoft. I absolutely believe you know that I represent the work off almost 9000 engineers and we wake up every day worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and toe. Absolutely. Make sure we deliver the best in the first time that we do. So when you take the platter off products we've delivered in nausea, be it as your sequel, be it as your cosmos TV synapse as your data breaks, which we did in partnership with data breaks, a za machine learning and recently when we prevail, we sort off, you know, sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data government solution in azure purview. I would humbly submit to you that we're leading the way and we're essentially showing how the future off data ai and the actual work in the cloud. >>I'd be disappointed if you if you had If you didn't, if you capitulated in any way J g So so thank you for that. And the kind of last question is, is looking forward and how you're thinking about the future of cloud last decade. A lot about your cloud migration simplifying infrastructure management, deployment SAS if eyeing my enterprise, lot of simplification and cost savings. And, of course, the redeployment of resource is toward digital transformation. Other other other valuable activities. How >>do >>you think this coming decade will will be defined? Will it be sort of more of the same? Or is there Is there something else out there? >>I think I think that the coming decade will be one where customers start one law outside value out of this. You know what happened in the last decade when people leave the foundation and people essentially looked at the world and said, Look, we've got to make the move, you know, the largely hybrid, but we're going to start making steps to basically digitize and modernize our platforms. I would tell you that with the amount of data that people are moving to the cloud just as an example, you're going to see use of analytics ai for business outcomes explode. You're also going to see a huge sort of focus on things like governance. You know, people need to know where the data is, what the data catalog continues, how to govern it, how to trust this data and given all other privacy and compliance regulations out there. Essentially, they're complying this posture. So I think the unlocking of outcomes versus simply Hey, I've saved money Second, really putting this comprehensive sort off, you know, governance, regime in place. And then, finally, security and trust. It's going to be more paramount than ever before. Yeah, >>nobody's gonna use the data if they don't trust it. I'm glad you brought up your security. It's It's a topic that hits number one on the CEO list. J G. Great conversation. Obviously the strategy is working, and thanks so much for participating in Cuba on cloud. >>Thank you. Thank you, David. I appreciate it and thank you to. Everybody was tuning in today. >>All right? And keep it right there. I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.