>> Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. I'm Jeff Corcoran, Worldwide Go To Market Program Manager for the Compute Business Group. And I'm here today to talk to you about enabling and empowering your remote workforce with virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI. The pandemic has changed the way everyone works. And we're unlikely to go back to the way things were before 2020. The entire world has seen a dramatic fore shift to remote working. As you can see on the graphic here, 75% of CEOs say the pandemic has changed and accelerated this transformation. This brings with it a whole host of challenges. There are technical challenges like security and connectivity but there are also important challenges like culture and productivity to be concerned with. Gartner found that around half of employers now see remote work as a go forward motion for them which is opposed to less than a third before the pandemic. Of course there's work that you just can't do remotely. There the question is, how do you ensure maximum employee safety for work that needs to be physically co-located? 60% of CEOs say that their top concern is keeping employees safe and productive. It's becoming quite clear that the future is one of hybrid. It means that you have the flexibility to get work done regardless of your physical location. Because it's better for business continuity, better for employee productivity and better for long-term effectiveness. And employers are demanding it. Gartner reports that around 80% of employees want to work remotely, at least some of the time as opposed to those that want to work remotely all the time which is around 56%. This is because employees report the flexibility to work from home. It's a boost to retention, productivity and work-life balance. It's no coincidence that a JP Morgan CIO Survey found that the single biggest tech spending shift has been for technologies that enable remote working. This is seeing a 15% increase while other technologies in the rest of the market is flat to declining. When we talk about remote and hybrid work, one of the key enabling technologies is VDI. VDI is a client desktop virtualization workload. That's a subset of the more expansive spectrum of end user computing or EUC for short. These are technologies that allow users to access corporate applications and data regardless of where they are. Within this EUC spectrum, there are server-based computing which is sometimes known as application virtualization. These are for users with less complex computing needs. And then you've got the aforementioned VDI which is for task or productivity users. And then we have physical hosted desktops which is for the most demanding end-users. To understand why VDI has become so popular, we need to understand the benefits that it can provide. So you've got ease of access. And again we're talking about remote work, work from home. This is a way of life. So the VDI has the ability to provide that ease of access. Flexibility, so organizations have vastly different needs predicated on their users and their computing needs. So VDI enables organizations to provision right size solutions for their workforce. Less administrative overhead, you can now manage devices in the desktop to updates from a centralized location for VDI which is a tremendous boost. Resource consolidation, for those deployments where the users don't require full capacity all the time, you can see tremendous consolidation ratios. Data security and sovereignty, this is probably the number one reason why people go with VDI. You safely keep your data where it belongs in the data center where you have the ability to build a secure perimeter around it. So in this scenario with VDI, users are accessing the data. It's not on their laptop, it's in the data center. And now what happens is when they access it, the data itself doesn't come across the line. It's just the pixels of what that data represents so that it paints it on their screen. So if somebody were to intercept that stream they wouldn't get the data itself but just the pixels so security is greatly enhanced. And this is also closely predicated to performance. Applications reside close to the data, in the data center. So they're able to operate at data center speed, so think about 10 gigabyte or higher speeds. And so for those engineering workloads, for example that have maybe large models and they have lowered huge dataset with many different parts because this is operating at wire speed in the data center it happens very quickly. And this is a boon to productivity. It's a great way to realize the benefit of VDI. The process of developing your HPE VDI solution starts with identifying the types of users you have and understanding the applications that they use to perform their duties. That way we can size the VDI deployment correctly. If they provide or perform more simple office tasks or just a single function positions, these are what we might call task workers. So they use limited office, Microsoft Office, you know, they're maybe some word processing. But think about customer service, telesales, data entry, healthcare, telemedicine is a good one here. Perhaps they need more performance and they're oriented towards analysis or content creation. These are what we call knowledge workers. And this is probably most of you in the audience. Think about heavy office 365 usage teams and zoom for collaboration, web based SaaS apps. This is office workers, sales and operations, marketing, finance legal. And then lastly for those users that are really dependent on a heavy graphical usage, think about MRIs scans for healthcare, maybe complex graphs for investment bankers, maybe simulations or modeling and engineering, these are power users. So again, you know, CAD engineering design simulation, financial traders, geo-physical analysis for the energy industry, software developers and the media and entertain industry. These are great places for power users. Whatever the right mix is for your organization, we ensure that the solution provides each and every type of worker, the performance they need to perform the tasks they need to have success. Netherlands Cancer Institute is one of the foremost cancer research centers in the world. They were looking to improve IT agility and performance to support demanding research projects and dynamic clinical services. And to do this, we worked with them and deployed HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with VMware Horizon for their VDI infrastructure. And what this did was supported during the day up to 2000 VDI users. And at night, the usage went down to 400 to 600 users and the flexible design of the solution allowed them to take advantage of this infrastructure. And they could allocate capacity at night to some batch jobs that were running to improve image sharpness of imagery that's used to aid in the early research of cancer disease. And what used to take one hour to work on an image, took 10 minutes now in this new environment. So they are able to increase the agility to run diverse clinical and research workloads. They (indistinct) their IT infrastructure to handle consistently and constantly evolving business needs. And it also freed clinicians to focus more time on patient care which is really what they wanted to do. And the quote here says that by spending less time working with technology, the clinicians were able to spend more time focusing on the patients which is what they, you know, what's the most important part of this equation. With the introduction of HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus, we see a tremendous opportunity to help our customers drive better outcomes. For VDI that means we can leverage the innovation that the 3rd Generation AMD EPYC Processor provides. Improved clock speeds and increased instructions per clock will greatly benefit VDI workloads as well increased memory, so up to four terabytes per CPU. Storage and networking are no longer going to bottlenecks either as there's 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes to support this increased IO. This is twice the bandwidth that was available with Gen3. So with this increased performance envelopes for several sub-systems, we're able to build higher performing VDI solutions that'll help our customers drive the outcomes needed to move their business forward. When we leverage HPE GreenLake for VDI, it brings the simplicity of the cloud experience to VDI. The ability to scale capacity and costs up and down is a key benefit of cloud. But most VDI implementations need to meet certain standards of security, compliance and performance that cannot readily be met with pure public cloud solutions. HPE GreenLake for VDI brings that cloud-like economics and agility together with the performance compliance and control that you expect from your on premises IT. And because it is managed for you and build, use monthly, you can focus your IT teams on other critical aspects of delivering outcomes that help you drive your business forward. We just talked about GreenLake which is a great way for us to help you accelerate your transformation. You can deploy any workload as a service with GreenLake services. You can now bring that cloud speed agility and an as a service model to where your apps and data are today. You can transform the way you do business with one experience and one operating model across your distributed clouds for depths and data at the edge in co-locations and in your data center. With over 11,000 IT projects conducted and 1.4 million customer interactions each and every year, HPE Pointnext 15,000 experts in its vast ecosystem of solution partners and channel partners are uniquely able to help you at every stage of your digital transformation. Because we address some of the biggest areas that can slow you down. We bring together technology and expertise to help you deliver your most strategic outcomes. Flexible investment capacity is a key consideration for businesses to drive digital transformation initiatives. In order to forge a path forward, you need access to flexible payment terms that allow you to match your IT costs to usage. You need help releasing capital from existing infrastructures to deferring payments and providing pre-owned technology to relieve capacity strain. HPE Financial Services or HPE FS, unlocks the value of your entire IT estate from edge to cloud to end user with multi-vendor solutions consistently and sustainably around the world. HPE FS helps you create the financial capacity to transform your work business. There is a lot of other resources that are available to help you learn about the VDI solutions that we have available to help you. So there's a few links on the screen that talk about some of our VDI solutions, our product portfolio. And there's also some social media engagements that we can do on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. I'd like to thank you for taking some time out of your day to attend this session. Have a great rest of your day.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of a dips reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host of the Cube great segment here with Presidio. Two great guests Chris Keg, Nazi senior vice president, general manager of the Cloud and Managed Services Group of Presidio, and Sam Fattah Gado, VP of Cloud Solutions Group with Presidio both been here in the Cube talking with us many times before. Great to have you guys on. Thanks for coming on Chris and Sam. >>Great. Thank you, John. Thanks for having us. >>We've had many great cloud conversations with your company and engineers. Architects going back, I think 2016 2017, really as cloud hit, that inflection point. Certainly, scaling Public Cloud and on premise is cloud operations. Certainly that has happened as continue to accelerate. Chris, I would like you to explain your relationship with AWS and you're focused at this. Reinvent what's going on with Presidio? What's new in your world? What's changed for you and the customers, >>right? So thank you, John. So Presidio's focus really is, um you know, around developing the right strategies, helping companies realize the full potential of the AWS cloud. Think of it as ah vory strategic approach that aligns technology with business outcomes really on a global scale. Um, this past year, um, if I look back a year ago, it reinvent when Presidio was there. Um, code a global was also there, which was an acquisition that we did. And we closed out, uh, in August and Sam Farr Gado was the CEO of Code Global. So what's really changed for us is taking our legacy business around infrastructure around security around Matic services on bond, combining that with really combining that with what Coda had around the professional services side of cloud engagement and really building out a company that I believe can deliver a very unique offering to clients because we can cover the full spectrum. So for us Ah, lots happened in a year since we were at reinvent attend day. It's really about, you know, business and technical leaders that we have that are really dedicated thio, you know, focusing on customers, their client experience, and really delivering the best business outcome that weekend >>you know, one of the things that we chat in the past, you just mentioned manage services. This is a huge deal because one of the trends that we've been reporting on here in the Cube and on Silicon angle is, you know, a lot of the transformational goals or accelerated Cove it. We see that projects that are doubling down are mostly cloud related, large scale automation, machine learning. But from an executive standpoint, the mandate is everything is a service. So there's a big executive push. See XO, CSOs, whatever for everything as a service. And when you put that out there and put that ball in play, so to speak, it's not easy, right? So when you go when you say hey, make everything is a service, it's not trivial, and then you get okay, How does that work? That's where the hard part happens. I want to get your take on that. Is that something that you're seeing with your customers? They put that ball in play, let's get the manage services and then you got to put it together. Not that easy. What's your take on that? >>I think you know when you think about clients today and what CEOs are looking for, it's really it is a pay by the drink or a consumption based model, right? But at the end of the day, they don't they want to manage their business. They don't want a Mac manage huge I t groups on DSO software developers within within their own business. They wanna pass that responsibility onto experts like Presidio. So I think it za fact. What's what's simple for them? How does how do they move kind of accountability and how did they get to their business outcomes without owning? And I t business within their existing business? So those are some of the changes that we've certainly seen from a mindset perspective, but but we're fully prepared. Thio offer that city >>that's great for your business is certainly a tail when Sam, I want to get to you. Because when you get to that conversation, okay, put his a service a lot in their unpack. I mean, depending on who you're talking to, you know, certainly accelerating it with Presidio. I see that you're now part of Presidio. Take us through what's going on in your world because when you get to the customer. You gotta work backwards from what they're trying to dio not trying to retrofit of technology into their environment. You've got to kind of work with what they got. But actually get them to the cloud. Can you share what you're doing with customers? >>Yeah. Thanks, John. I appreciate that. And one thing I want to say about joining Presidio is that, uh, you know, we, uh, had worked together for a couple of years and really found that we had a great cultural fit and that we had the same goal. And that's to become a W s number one partner globally, providing these kinds of mission critical solutions for clients. We've been told often times that we are Amazonian in terms of our customer obsession are bias for action. And what you just said there is helping them get the benefits of cloud quickly, no matter where they're coming from. Because, you know, they wanna have the availability security scalability, But they also have to integrate in with their existing systems. So what we're finding with clients is they want to transform the way they do business. They want to transform their industry oftentimes, and that's what they're looking for, you know, when they partner with us and they look for leveraging the AWS platform. >>So let me ask you a question then, because certainly we've seen I've interviewed a ton of Amazon customers and executives, and it's some >>of the >>things that's going on with Cove. It has just been amazing what they've enabled people to move so fast and put riel game changing impact, whether it's societal impact or some other transformative thing. And if you look at Amazon traditionally they started as a transactional thing. You get some easy to you by by the drink. Everything's going on. But every reinvent is more announcement. Andy Jassy said one hour keynote turns into a two hour keynote three, our keynote. And now you're looking at more transform inal transformational solutions. You still got some transactions in there. But when you gotta put the holistic, cohesive plan together, that has to be transformative. How do you guys talk to customers when you say it's not just transactional? Transformative? >>Yeah, well, we look, you know, we're doing it, you know, internally ourselves as well. You know, with Presidio now we've gone from transactions. Transactions are important but we really want to transform the way our customers are able to do business. And with co vid, it's been even more important to be ableto get things done without having to be physically present in one location. And so whether it's telehealth or remote learning, remote sales activities making sure that systems are integrated with commerce engines are again are very secure. The cloud and A W S is really bringing a big difference to the marketplace, and we're very immersed in that we have clients. Uh, I'll give you an example. Wheel pros. One of the leading tire after market tire and wheel manufacturers and designers we've talked with with their CEO, Randy White. He said. What we're doing with Presidio and on AWS platform is building the wheel. Pros of the future. What does that look like? He says he wants his systems to be just like his products for his customers. They've got to be high performing. They gotta be high quality, and they've got to deliver a great customer experience. Uh, well, you know, we want to be able to leverage a lot of the services that AWS has to be able to deliver those kinds of things quickly and with high quality. So it's really exciting to be able to see the impact we're having wheel pros, business and other clients like that. >>So when you talk about your solution to take him in to explain what you guys offer a client because you have a Presidio cloud solution, you get a lot of services can just take a minute to explain what people are buying and what they're getting from Presidio. Because, um, that sounds like a great customer success story. What are they? >>What >>are they getting? >>Okay, so what? They're getting really again following kind of the Amazonian way, working backwards, right? So let's start with an idea. Let's let's let's look at something we really want to do that's going to change dramatically. Change and improve the way they delight their customers. So start with that idea. Will help them design it. Welcome. Build it. Welcome. Deploy it. We could help support it. Fully managed service support eso from from the idea through to production and then ongoing support enhancements. They can count on Presidio to deliver all of those capabilities on Dakota Couldn't do all of that on our own. We were really grated application development, data and analytics. Uh, dev Ops and Automation. But with Presidio, we bring everything to the table Onda geun fully supported. Help them from, you know, even managing. You know, they're they're resell, being able to manage the environment, making sure that they're getting the most value out of these critical investments. >>Chris, I want to get your thoughts on this. Um, Sam mentioned you wanna be the number one solution provider for on AWS? Um, great mission, by the way, I wanna unpack that now. Last year, I reported at reinvent one of the feedback items was Amazon's gonna think more about solutions. Certainly Microsoft does that. We've seen that, um, Amazon doesn't really flout a plant. Those solutions very much. I mean, even though they have them there there you guys are a nice fit there. So if you're gonna be the number one solution provider, what do you guys need to do to do that? What a customers expect from you guys? Can you take a minute? Explain your plan? >>Sure. Yeah, absolutely, John. So I think you know, when you think about clients that air transforming their business right. They need to be competitive in their own market. So when they think about business outcomes in what Presidio does, we look at it in really a full life bull approach. If you think about the applications that Sam spoke about creating things that Air Cloud native, perhaps it's a mobile ordering app that's going to make them more competitive, especially in this covert environment. Um, think about their their just their normal consumption of services on the AWS platform. How do we optimize it for them? How do we ensure that they have the right services in a very agile, secure environment? So managing and owning it the full life cycle is really kind of what we deliver from a solution set. But every client is a little bit different, depending on really what their their needs are and what what their business outcomes are. So we can take it everywhere, anywhere from, uh, full development toe Full deployment Onda managing it in a very secure way, um, to adding in their consumption side of it, adding in their licensing component where perhaps they're buying under marketplace or a or a c p p o offering. So what's really unique about Presidio is that we offer that full solution to clients from end to end, and we can manage the entire process, deliver performance, cost savings and very predictable models >>from I love the, you know, a big fan of the entire and people who watch the Cubano. All I do is talk about and to end is really a critical way to look at things holistically if you're looking at something cohesive as a solution with transactional transformative capabilities. But I want to get your thoughts on some of the market demand challenges. And if you guys could react to it, um, Sam and Chris, there's two spectrums we're seeing with this pandemic clients, customers who were, like, have a tailwind. Oh, my God. This is accelerating my value proposition. I need more help. I gotta get to the cloud I gotta transformed quickly. And then the other end of the spectrum is the worst screwed. So we're gonna reset and retool while we're kind of in this bunker down mode and they want to come out of the pandemic with a growth plan. So kind of to spectrums, right? Did you guys see that as well what's the range of psychology or buyer behavior for your customers? Because there seems to be like the airline. They're not really getting a lot of business, but they're redoing their systems. They're being classified. Or, you know, this is an app for zoom or school educational. It's needed. It's in more demand. So you kind of everything in between those Do you guys see that? And if so, or if not >>way, certainly see a component with our client base around saving costs, right? What are they going to do in this environment? Toe save costs. But at the same time, we are seeing a lot of creativity around. What does their future model look like? And how did and what do they need to build? And that's what they're spending money on. Eso. We've seen it across kind of all verticals within the business, but certainly it it's a it's a dual approach. I think customers that go about doing that properly really prepare themselves for when we all do come out of this. That the business was will be set to capitalize on the change in market. That's what I've seen. I'm sure Sam has some additional comments >>Your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. I would say necessity is the mother of invention. Invention. Right. So you know, we're seeing customers that we're thinking about cloud or, you know, considering maybe a new application cloud native application. But, you know, maybe you felt like they had time to do it where, you know, with covert ITT's bold are gonna be the ones that survive and thrive on DSO. Just like we saw when people came out of the 2000 and eight financial crisis. Those that invested in their systems, invested in their people, people skills is another big area right way at Presidio have I think we're upto like 600 AWS certifications across the board from sales through all different technologies. Because, you know, we wanna retain our people. We want to help them develop their skills and make sure that we're bringing the best talent to our clients. Eso yet z you know, it's a it's a difficult time, but it's a time for opportunity. >>Necessity could be business opportunity to capture opportunity, recognition, capture or survival. I mean, it is the mother of invention, you know it is it is a forcing function, guys. Thanks for the >>one of our clients. If I if I could, just mentioned Dunkin Brands, you know, they they couldn't have traffic in their stores. So, you know, mobile ordering became even more important. Um, you know, driving with Dr Drive up pick up and we helped them move from a multi tenant SAS application that was, you know, wasn't performing wasn't a reliable enough to an AWS Cloud native application, and they tripled the traffic while also improving performance and reliability. That's the kind of power that you can have with AWS and Presidio. >>That's a great eggs. And that's a great example looking relate to that. First of all, Dunkin Donuts makes great coffee and from the East Coast originally. So I love Dunkin Donuts. DND um, but great, great brand that mobile app. Good call, because people want to get in the curbside pickup or delivered. I mean, this is the new the new normal guys. Thanks so much for the insight. Final word. If you both can weigh in, um, share with the audience. The focus for this reinvent if you could share the Presidio message for reinvent virtual 2020. What do you think, >>Sam Why don't you go first? >>Well, from my perspective, it's all about, you know, taking it to another level. That's what we feel like we're doing was part of the video now again becoming the number one AWS partner. But it's also helping customers take their most important applications, uh, to the cloud so that they can improve the way they deliver for their customers. That's really what it's all about for me. >>Yeah, I would. I would have to concur with Sam. I mean, you know, our goal. Really like Sam said a few times to be be the number one aws partner. But with that comes, you know, a huge undertaking in a huge responsibility for us, you know, with our teams and and with our customers. At the end of the day, we want all of our clients to think of us first. Um, you know, when we're delivering these solutions and how impactful Presidio has been to their business for their growth onder for their future success. So for us, the customer obsession side of it all is really we want to continue that, and that's what we're gonna get out of this conference is how do we continue that? >>Well, congratulations. Like Chris and Sam. Thanks for coming on. I always say I enjoyed my conversations with your team. Uh, they get the technical chops, um, and having a service offering that accelerates mawr cloud goodness for customers on my, um, Amazon's got a great ecosystem clouds growing like crazy. So congratulations. Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. >>Thanks for coming on the Cuban John for your watching the Cube coverage of aws reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not impersonal, but the cube virtualization It's hit the market. More cube interviews remotely. And I'm John for Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The steepest drop in the stock market since June 11th flipped the narrative and sent investors scrambling. Tech got hammered after a two-month run, and people are asking questions. Is this a bubble popping, or is it a healthy correction? Are we now going to see a rotation into traditional stocks, like banks and maybe certain cyclicals that have lagged behind the technology winners? Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to give you our perspective on what's happening in the technology space and unpack what this sentiment flip means for the balance of 2020 and beyond. Let's look at what happened on September 3rd, 2020. The tech markets recoiled this week as the NASDAQ Composite dropped almost 5% in a single day. Apple's market cap alone lost $178 billion. The Big Four: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google lost a combined value that approached half a trillion dollars. For context, this number is larger than the gross domestic product for countries as large as Thailand, Iran, Austria, Norway, and even the UAE, and many more. The tech stocks that have been running due to COVID, well, they got crushed. These are the ones that we've highlighted as best positioned to thrive during the pandemic, you know, the work-from-home, SaaS, cloud, security stocks. We really have been talking about names like Zoom, ServiceNow, Salesforce, DocuSign, Splunk, and the security names like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. By the way, DocuSign and CrowdStrike and Okta all had nice earnings beats, but they still got killed underscoring the sentiment shift. Now the broader tech market was off as well on sympathy, and this trend appears to be continuing into the Labor Day holiday. Now why is this happening, and why now? Well, there are a lot of opinions on this. And first, many, like myself, are relatively happy because this market needed to take a little breather. As we've said before, the stock market, it's really not reflecting the realities of the broader economy. Now as we head into September in an election year, uncertainty kicks in, but it really looks like this pullback was fueled by a combination of an overheated market and technical factors. Specifically, take a look at volatility indices. They were high and rising, yet markets kept rising along with them. Robinhood millennial investors who couldn't bet on sports realized that investing in stocks was as much of a rush and potentially more lucrative. The other big wave, which was first reported by the Financial Times, is that SoftBank made a huge bet on tech and bought options tied to around $50 billion worth of high-flying tech stocks. So the option call volumes skyrocketed. The call versus put ratio was getting way too hot, and we saw an imbalance in the market. Now market makers will often buy an underlying stock to hedge call options to ensure liquidity in these cases. So to be more specific, delta in options is a measure of the change in the price of an option relative to the underlying stock, and gamma is a measure of the volatility of the delta. Now usually, volatility is relatively consistent on both sides of the trade, the calls and the puts, because investors often hedge their bets. But in the case of many of these hot stocks, like Tesla, for example, you've seen the call skew be much greater than the skew in the downside. So let's take an example. If people are buying cheap out of the money calls, a market maker might buy the underlying stock to hedge for liquidity. And then if Elon puts out some good news, which he always does, the stock goes up. Market makers have to then buy more of the underlying stock. And then algos kick in to buy even more. And then the price of the call goes up. And as it approaches it at the money price, this forces market makers to keep buying more of that underlying stock. And then the melt up until it stops. And then the market flips like it did this week. When stock prices begin to drop, then market makers were going to rebalance their portfolios and their risk and sell their underlying stocks, and then the rug gets pulled out from the markets. And that's really why some of the stocks that have run dropped so precipitously. Okay, why did I spend so much time on this, and why am I not freaking out? Because I think these market moves are largely technical versus fundamental. It's not like 1999. We had a double whammy of technical rug pulls combined with poor underlying fundamentals for high-flying companies like CMGI and Internet Capital Group, whose businesses, they were all about placing bets on dot-coms that had no business models other than non-monetizable eyeballs. All right, let's take a look at the NASDAQ and dig into the data a little bit. And I think you'll see what I mean and why I'm not too concerned. This is a year-to-date chart of the NASDAQ, and you can see it bottomed on March 23rd at 6,860. And then ran up until June 11th and had that big drop, but was still elevated at 9,492. And then it ran up to over 12,000 and hit an all-time high. And then you see the big drop. And that trend continued on Friday morning. The NASDAQ Composite traded below 11,000. It actually corrected to 10% of its high, 9.8% to be precise, and then it snapped back. But even at its low, that's still up over 20% for the year. In the year of COVID, would that have surprised you in March? It certainly would have surprised me. So to me, this pullback is sort of a relief. It's good and actually very normal and quite predictable. Now the exact timing of these pullbacks, of course, on the other hand is not entirely predictable. Not at all, frankly, at least for this observer. So the big question is where do we go from here? So let's talk about that a little bit. Now the economy continues to get better. Take a look at the August job report; it was good. 1.4 million new jobs, 340,000 came from the government. That was positive numbers. And the other good news is it translates into a drop in unemployment under 10%. It's now at 8.4%. And this is really good relative to expectations. Now the sell-off continued, which suggested that the market wanted to keep correcting, so that's good. Maybe some buying opportunities would emerge in over the next several months, the market snapped back, but for those who have been waiting, I think that's going to happen. And so that snapback, maybe that's an indicator that the market wants to keep going up, we'll see. But I think there are more opportunities ahead because there's really so much uncertainty. What's going to happen with the next round of the stimulus? The jobs report, maybe that's a catalyst for compromise between the Democrats and the Republicans, maybe. The US debt is projected to exceed 100% of GDP this calendar year. That's the highest it's been since World War II. Does that give you a good feeling? That doesn't give me a good feeling. And when we talk about the election, that brings additional uncertainty. So there's a lot to think about for the markets. Now let's talk about what this means for tech. Well, as we've been projecting for months with our colleagues at ETR, despite what's going on in the stock market and its rise, there's those real tech winners, we still see a contraction in 2020 for IT spend of minus 5 to 8%. And we talk a lot about the bifurcation in the market due to COVID accelerating some of these trends that were already in place, like digital transformation and SaaS and cloud. And then the work-from-home kicks in with other trends like video conferencing and the shift to security spend. And we think this is going to continue for years. However, because these stocks have run up so much, they're going to have very tough compares in 2021. So maybe time for a pause. Now let's take a look at the IT spending macroeconomics. This data is from a series of surveys that ETR conducted to try to better understand spending patterns due to COVID. Those yellow slices of the pies show the percent of customers that indicate that their budgets will be impacted by coronavirus. And you can see there's a steady increase from mid-March, which blend into April, and then you can see the June data. It goes from 63% saying yes, which is very high, to 78%, which is very, very high. And the bottom part of the chart shows the degree of that change. So 22% say no change in the latest survey, but you can see much more of a skew to the red declines on the left versus the green upticks on the right-hand side of the chart. Now take a look at how IT buyers are seeing the response to the pandemic. This chart shows what companies are doing as a result of COVID in another recent ETR survey. Now of course, it's no surprise, everybody's working from home. Nobody's traveling for business, not nobody, but most people aren't, we know that. But look at the increase in hiring freezes and freezing new IT deployments, and the sharp rise in layoffs. So IT is yet again being asked to do more with less. They're used to it. Well, we see this driving an acceleration to automation, and that's going to benefit, for instance, the RPA players, cloud providers, and modern software vendors. And it will also precipitate a tailwind for more aggressive AI implementations. And many other selected names are going to continue to do well, which we'll talk about in a second, but they're in the work-from-home, the cloud, the SaaS, and the modern data sectors. But the problem is those sectors are not large enough to offset the declines in the core businesses of the legacy players who have a much higher market share, so the overall IT spend declines. Now where it gets kind of interesting is the legacy companies, look, they all have growth businesses. They're making acquisitions, they're making other bets. IBM, for example, has its hybrid cloud business in Red Hat, Dell has VMware and it's got work-from-home solutions, Oracle has SaaS and cloud, Cisco has its security business, HPE, it's as a service initiative, and so forth. And again, these businesses are growing faster, but they are not large enough to offset the decline in core on-prem legacy and drive anything more than flat growth, overall, for these companies at best. And by the time they're large enough, we'll be into the next big thing, so the cycle continues. But these legacy companies are going to compete with the upstarts, and that's where it gets interesting. So let's get into some of the specific names that we've been talking about for over a year now and make some comments around their prospects. So what we want to do is let's start with one of our favorites: Snowflake. Now Snowflake, along with Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic, and Unity, has a highly anticipated upcoming IPO. And this chart shows new adoptions in the database sector. And you can see that Snowflake, while down from the October 19th survey, is far outpacing its competitors, with the exception of Google, where BigQuery is doing very well. But you see Mongo and AWS remain strong, and I'm actually quite encouraged that it looks like Cloudera has righted the ship and you kind of saw that in their earnings recently. But my point is that Snowflake is a share gainer, and we think will likely continue to be one for a number of quarters and years if they can execute and compete with the big cloud players, and that's a topic that we've covered extensively in previous Breaking Analysis segments, and, as you know, we think Snowflake can compete. Now let's look at automation. This is another space that we've been talking about quite a bit, and we've largely focused on two leaders: UiPath and Automation Anywhere. But I have to say, I still like Blue Prism. I think they're well-positioned. And I especially like Pegasystems, which has, for years, been embarking on a broader automation agenda. What this chart shows is net score or spending velocity data for those customers who said they were decreasing spend in 2020. Those red bars that we showed earlier are the ones who are decreasing. And you can see both Automation Anywhere and UiPath show elevated levels within that base where spending is declining, so that's a real positive. Now Microsoft, as we've reported, is elbowing its way into the market with what is currently an inferior point product, but, you know, it's Microsoft, so we can't ignore that. And finally, let's have a look at the all-important security sector, which we've covered extensively and put out a report recently. So what this next chart does is cherry-picks of a few of our favorite names, and it shows the net score or spending momentum and the granularity for some of the leaders and emerging players. All of these players are in the green, as you can see in the upper right, and they all have decent presence in the dataset as indicated by the shared NS. Okta is at the top of the list with 58% net score. Palo Alto, they're a more mature player, but still, they have an elevated net score. CrowdStrike's net score dropped this quarter, which was a bit of a concern, but it's still high. And it followed by SailPoint and Zscaler, who are right there. The big three trends in this space right now are cloud security, identity access management, and endpoint security. Those are the tailwinds, and we think these trends have legs. Remember, net score in this survey is a forward-looking metric, so we'll come back and look at the next survey, which is running this month in the field from ETR. Now everyone on this chart has reported earnings, except Zscaler, which reports on September 9th, and all of these companies are doing well and exceeding expectations, but as I said earlier, next year's compares won't be so easy. Oh, and by the way, their stock prices, they all got killed this week as a result of the rug pull that we explained earlier. So we really feel this isn't a fundamental problem for these firms that we're talking about. It's more of a technical in the market. Now Automation Anywhere and UiPath, you really don't know because they're not public and I think they need to get their house in order so they can IPO, so we'll see when they make it to public markets. I don't think that's an if, that I think they will IPO, but the fact that they haven't filed yet says they're not ready. Now why wouldn't you IPO if you are ready in this market despite the recent pullbacks? Okay, let's summarize. So listen, all you new investors out there that think stock picking is easy, look, any fool can make money in a market that goes up every day, but trees don't grow to the moon and there are bulls and bears and pigs, and pigs get slaughtered. And I can throw a dozen other cliches at you, but I am excited that you're learning. You maybe have made a few bucks playing the options game. It's not as easy as you might think. And I'm hoping that you're not trading on margin. But look, I think there are going to be some buying opportunities ahead, there always are, be patient. It's very hard, actually impossible, to time markets, and I'm a big fan of dollar-cost averaging. And young people, if you make less than $137,000 a year, load up on your Roth, it's a government gift that I wish I could have tapped when I was a newbie. And as always, please do your homework. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, so check that out, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. Don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey action. Get in touch on Twitter, I'm @dvellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. Everybody. This is the Cube. The leader in live coverage. My name is David wanted. I'm here with my co host, Paul Gill, in this day to coverage of the M I t cdo I Q conference. A lot of acronym stands for M I. T. Of course, the great institution. But Chief Data officer information quality event is his 13th annual event. Lars to Maria's here is the managing partner of Brass Rat Capital. Cool name Lars. Welcome to the Cube. Great. Very much. Glad I start with a name brass around Capitol was That's >> rat is reference to the M I t school. Okay, Beaver? Well, he is, but the students call it a brass rat, and I'm third generation M i t. So it's just seen absolutely appropriate. That is a brass rods and capital is not a reference to money, but is actually referenced to the intellectual capital. They if you have five or six brass rats in the same company, you know, we Sometimes engineers arrive and they could do some things. >> And it Boy, if you put in some data data capital in there, you really explosions. We cause a few problems. So we're gonna talk about some new regulations that are coming down. New legislation that's coming down that you exposed me to yesterday, which is gonna have downstream implications. You get ahead of this stuff and understand it. You can really first of all, prepare, make sure you're in compliance, but then potentially take advantage for your business. So explain to us this notion of open government act. >> Um, in the last five years, six years or so, there's been an effort going on to increase the transparency across all levels of government. Okay, State, local and federal government. The first of federal government laws was called the the Open Data Act of 2014 and that was an act. They was acted unanimously by Congress and signed by Obama. They was taking the departments of the various agencies of the United States government and trying to roll up all the expenses into one kind of expense. This is where we spent our money and who got the money and doing that. That's what they were trying to do. >> Big picture type of thing. >> Yeah, big picture type thing. But unfortunately, it didn't work, okay? Because they forgot to include this odd word called mentalities. So the same departments meant the same thing. Data problem. They have a really big data problem. They still have it. So they're to G et o reports out criticizing how was done, and the government's gonna try and correct it. Then in earlier this year, there was another open government date act which said in it was signed by Trump. Now, this time you had, like, maybe 25 negative votes, but essentially otherwise passed Congress completely. I was called the Open as all capital O >> P E >> n Government Data act. Okay, and that's not been implemented yet. But there's live talking around this conference today in various Chief date officers are talking about this requirement that every single non intelligence defense, you know, vital protection of the people type stuff all the like, um, interior, treasury, transportation, those type of systems. If you produce a report these days, which is machine, I mean human readable. You must now in two years or three years. I forget the exact invitation date. Have it also be machine readable. Now, some people think machine riddle mil means like pdf formats, but no, >> In fact, what the government did is it >> said it must be machine readable. So you must be able to get into the reports, and you have to be able to extract out the information and attach it to the tree of knowledge. Okay, so we're all of sudden having context like they're currently machine readable, Quote unquote, easy reports. But you can get into those SEC reports. You pull out the net net income information and says its net income, but you don't know what it attaches to on the tree of knowledge. So, um, we are helping the government in some sense able, machine readable type reporting that weaken, do machine to machine without people being involved. >> Would you say the tree of knowledge You're talking about the constant >> man tick semantic tree of knowledge so that, you know, we all come from one concept like the human is example of a living thing living beast, a living Beeston example Living thing. So it also goes back, and they're serving as you get farther and farther out the tree, there's more distance or semantic distance, but you can attach it back to concept so you can attach context to the various data. Is this essentially metadata? That's what people call it. But if I would go over see sale here at M I t, they would turn around. They call it the Tree of Knowledge or semantic data. Okay, it's referred to his semantic dated, So you are passing not only the data itself, but the context that >> goes along with the data. Okay, how does this relate to the financial transparency? >> Well, Financial Transparency Act was introduced by representative Issa, who's a Republican out of California. He's run the government Affairs Committee in the House. He retired from Congress this past November, but in 2017 he introduced what's got referred to his H R 15 30 Um, and the 15 30 is going to dramatically change the way, um, financial regulators work in the United States. Um, it is about it was about to be introduced two weeks ago when the labor of digital currency stuff came up. So it's been delayed a little bit because they're trying to add some of the digital currency legislation to that law. >> A front run that Well, >> I don't know exactly what the remember soul coming out of Maxine Waters Committee. So the staff is working on a bunch of different things at once. But, um, we own g was asked to consult with them on looking at the 15 30 act and saying, How would we improve quote unquote, given our technical, you know, not doing policy. We just don't have the technical aspects of the act. How would we want to see it improved? So one of the things we have advised is that for the first time in the United States codes history, they're gonna include interesting term called ontology. You know what intelligence? Well, everyone gets scared by the word. And when I read run into people, they say, Are you a doctor? I said, no, no, no. I'm just a date. A guy. Um, but an intolerant tea is like a taxonomy, but it had order has important, and an ontology allows you to do it is ah, kinda, you know, giving some context of linking something to something else. And so you're able Thio give Maur information with an intolerant that you're able to you with a tax on it. >> Okay, so it's a taxonomy on steroids? >> Yes, exactly what? More flexible, >> Yes, but it's critically important for artificial intelligence machine warning because if I can give them until ology of sort of how it goes up and down the semantics, I can turn around, do a I and machine learning problems on the >> order of 100 >> 1000 even 10,000 times faster. And it has context. It has contacts in just having a little bit of context speeds up these problems so dramatically so and it is that what enables the machine to machine? New notion? No, the machine to machine is coming in with son called SP R M just standard business report model. It's a OMG sophistication of way of allowing the computers or machines, as we call them these days to get into a standard business report. Okay, so let's say you're ah drug company. You have thio certify you >> drugged you manufactured in India, get United States safely. Okay, you have various >> reporting requirements on the way. You've got to give extra easy the FDA et cetera that will always be a standard format. The SEC has a different format. FERC has a different format. Okay, so what s p r m does it allows it to describe in an intolerant he what's in the report? And then it also allows one to attach an ontology to the cells in the report. So if you like at a sec 10 Q 10 k report, you can attach a US gap taxonomy or ontology to it and say, OK, net income annual. That's part of the income statement. You should never see that in a balance sheet type item. You know his example? Okay. Or you can for the first time by having that context you can say are solid problem, which suggested that you can file these machine readable reports that air wrong. So they believe or not, There were about 50 cases in the last 10 years where SEC reports have been filed where the assets don't equal total liabilities, plus cheryl equity, you know, just they didn't add >> up. So this to, >> you know, to entry accounting doesn't work. >> Okay, so so you could have the machines go and check scale. Hey, we got a problem We've >> got a problem here, and you don't have to get humans evolved. So we're gonna, um uh, Holland in Australia or two leaders ahead of the United States. In this area, they seem dramatic pickups. I mean, Holland's reporting something on the order of 90%. Pick up Australia's reporting 60% pickup. >> We say pick up. You're talking about pickup of errors. No efficiency, productivity, productivity. Okay, >> you're taking people out of the whole cycle. It's dramatic. >> Okay, now what's the OMG is rolling on the hoof. Explain the OMG >> Object Management Group. I'm not speaking on behalf of them. It's a membership run organization. You remember? I am a >> member of cold. >> I'm a khalid of it. But I don't represent omg. It's the membership has to collectively vote that this is what we think. Okay, so I can't speak on them, right? I have a pretty significant role with them. I run on behalf of OMG something called the Federated Enterprise Risk Management Group. That's the group which is focusing on risk management for large entities like the federal government's Veterans Affairs or Department offense upstairs. I think talking right now is the Chief date Officer for transportation. OK, that's a large organization, which they, they're instructed by own be at the, um, chief financial officer level. The one number one thing to do for the government is to get an effective enterprise worst management model going in the government agencies. And so they come to own G let just like NIST or just like DARPA does from the defense or intelligence side, saying we need to have standards in this area. So not only can we talk thio you effectively, but we can talk with our industry partners effectively on space. Programs are on retail, on medical programs, on finance programs, and so they're at OMG. There are two significant financial programs, or Sanders, that exist once called figgy financial instrument global identifier, which is a way of identifying a swap. Its way of identifying a security does not have to be used for a que ce it, but a worldwide. You can identify that you know, IBM stock did trade in Tokyo, so it's a different identifier has different, you know, the liberals against the one trading New York. Okay, so those air called figgy identifiers them. There are attributes associated with that security or that beast the being identified, which is generally comes out of 50 which is the financial industry business ontology. So you know, it says for a corporate bond, it has coupon maturity, semi annual payment, bullets. You know, it is an example. So that gives you all the information that you would need to go through to the calculation, assuming you could have a calculation routine to do it, then you need thio. Then turn around and set up your well. Call your environment. You know where Ford Yield Curves are with mortgage backed securities or any portable call. Will bond sort of probabilistic lee run their numbers many times and come up with effective duration? Um, And then you do your Vader's analytics. No aggregating the portfolio and looking at Shortfalls versus your funding. Or however you're doing risk management and then finally do reporting, which is where the standardized business reporting model comes in. So that kind of the five parts of doing a full enterprise risk model and Alex So what >> does >> this mean for first? Well, who does his impact on? What does it mean for organizations? >> Well, it's gonna change the world for basically everyone because it's like doing a clue ends of a software upgrade. Conversion one's version two point. Oh, and you know how software upgrades Everyone hates and it hurts because everyone's gonna have to now start using the same standard ontology. And, of course, that Sarah Ontology No one completely agrees with the regulators have agreed to it. The and the ultimate controlling authority in this thing is going to be F sock, which is the Dodd frank mandated response to not ever having another chart. So the secretary of Treasury heads it. It's Ah, I forget it's the, uh, federal systemic oversight committee or something like that. All eight regulators report into it. And, oh, if our stands is being the adviser Teff sock for all the analytics, what these laws were doing, you're getting over farm or more power to turn around and look at how we're going to find data across the three so we can come up consistent analytics and we can therefore hopefully take one day. Like Goldman, Sachs is pre payment model on mortgages. Apply it to Citibank Portfolio so we can look at consistency of analytics as well. It is only apply to regulated businesses. It's gonna apply to regulated financial businesses. Okay, so it's gonna capture all your mutual funds, is gonna capture all your investment adviser is gonna catch her. Most of your insurance companies through the medical air side, it's gonna capture all your commercial banks is gonna capture most of you community banks. Okay, Not all of them, because some of they're so small, they're not regularly on a federal basis. The one regulator which is being skipped at this point, is the National Association Insurance Commissioners. But they're apparently coming along as well. Independent federal legislation. Remember, they're regulated on the state level, not regularly on the federal level. But they've kind of realized where the ball's going and, >> well, let's make life better or simply more complex. >> It's going to make life horrible at first, but we're gonna take out incredible efficiency gains, probably after the first time you get it done. Okay, is gonna be the problem of getting it done to everyone agreeing. We use the same definitions >> of the same data. Who gets the efficiency gains? The regulators, The companies are both >> all everyone. Can you imagine that? You know Ah, Goldman Sachs earnings report comes out. You're an analyst. Looking at How do I know what Goldman? Good or bad? You have your own equity model. You just give the model to the semantic worksheet and all turn around. Say, Oh, those numbers are all good. This is what expected. Did it? Did it? Didn't you? Haven't. You could do that. There are examples of companies here in the United States where they used to have, um, competitive analysis. Okay. They would be taking somewhere on the order of 600 to 7. How 100 man hours to do the competitive analysis by having an available electronically, they cut those 600 hours down to five to do a competitive analysis. Okay, that's an example of the type of productivity you're gonna see both on the investment side when you're doing analysis, but also on the regulatory site. Can you now imagine you get a regulatory reports say, Oh, there's they're out of their way out of whack. I can tell you this fraud going on here because their numbers are too much in X y z. You know, you had to fudge numbers today, >> and so the securities analyst can spend Mme. Or his or her time looking forward, doing forecasts exactly analysis than having a look back and reconcile all this >> right? And you know, you hear it through this conference, for instance, something like 80 to 85% of the time of analysts to spend getting the data ready. >> You hear the same thing with data scientists, >> right? And so it's extent that we can helped define the data. We're going thio speed things up dramatically. But then what's really instinct to me, being an M I t engineer is that we have great possibilities. An A I I mean, really great possibilities. Right now, most of the A miles or pattern matching like you know, this idea using face shield technology that's just really doing patterns. You can do wonderful predictive analytics of a I and but we just need to give ah lot of the a m a. I am a I models the contact so they can run more quickly. OK, so we're going to see a world which is gonna found funny, But we're going to see a world. We talk about semantic analytics. Okay. Semantic analytics means I'm getting all the inputs for the analysis with context to each one of the variables. And when I and what comes out of it will be a variable results. But you also have semantics with it. So one in the future not too distant future. Where are we? We're in some of the national labs. Where are you doing it? You're doing pipelines of one model goes to next model goes the next mile. On it goes Next model. So you're gonna software pipelines, Believe or not, you get them running out of an Excel spreadsheet. You know, our modern Enhanced Excel spreadsheet, and that's where the future is gonna be. So you really? If you're gonna be really good in this business, you're gonna have to be able to use your brain. You have to understand what data means You're going to figure out what your modeling really means. What happens if we were, You know, normally for a lot of the stuff we do bell curves. Okay, well, that doesn't have to be the only distribution you could do fat tail. So if you did fat tail descriptions that a bell curve gets you much different results. Now, which one's better? I don't know, but, you know, and just using example >> to another cut in the data. So our view now talk about more about the tech behind this. He's mentioned a I What about math? Machine learning? Deep learning. Yeah, that's a color to that. >> Well, the tech behind it is, believe or not, some relatively old tech. There is a technology called rd F, which is kind of turned around for a long time. It's a science kind of, ah, machine learning, not machine wearing. I'm sorry. Machine code type. Fairly simplistic definitions. Lots of angle brackets and all this stuff there is a higher level. That was your distracted, I think put into standard in, like, 2000 for 2005. Called out. Well, two point. Oh, and it does a lot at a higher level. The same stuff that already f does. Okay, you could also create, um, believer, not your own special ways of a communicating and ontology just using XML. Okay, So, uh, x b r l is an enhanced version of XML, okay? And so some of these older technologies, quote unquote old 20 years old, are essentially gonna be driving a lot of this stuff. So you know you know Corbett, right? Corba? Is that what a maid omg you know, on the communication and press thing, do you realize that basically every single device in the world has a corpus standard at okay? Yeah, omg Standard isn't all your smartphones and all your computers. And and that's how they communicate. It turns out that a lot of this old stuff quote unquote, is so rigidly well defined. Well done that you can build modern stuff that takes us to the Mars based on these old standards. >> All right, we got to go. But I gotta give you the award for the most acronyms >> HR 15 30 fi G o m g s b r >> m fsoc tarp. Oh, fr already halfway. We knew that Owl XML ex brl corba, Which of course >> I do. But that's well done. Like thanks so much for coming. Everyone tried to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody, We'll be back with our next guest from M i t cdo I Q right after this short, brief short message. Thank you

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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live from Orlando Florida it's the cube coverage conf 18 got to you by spunk welcome back to Splunk kampf 18 hashtag Splunk conf 18 you watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise I'm Dave Volante with my co-host Stu many men we love to talk to the customers too we've had seven out of ten of our interviews today have been with the customers Tony Alessandra was here as the chief architect at the co-operators group limited insurance company up in Canada leader in that field Tony thanks so much for coming on the yeah it's great to be here thanks for having me so we were talking off-camera about some of the innovation that's going on in Toronto and want to get to that innovation is actually in your long title yeah there's the time but tell us about your role as chief architect and then some of the other areas that you touch yes certainly so my primary role at the co-operators group is to serve as chief architect for the group of companies and so it's a fancy term to mean that I influence how we invest in technology and process for our strategy and for our operational imperatives I also have responsibility for information security within our organization so I have a great team led by a C so at the co-operators group and essentially our role is to to protect the data of our clients right we have a million unique clients across Canada that entrust us with a lot of personal and confidential data we have thousands of financial advisers throughout the company and so we have retail outlets throughout the entire geography of Canada and essentially we collect a lot of data and and with respect to policies for commercial businesses for private clients for subscribers etc and I also manage an innovation portfolio for the organization and so it's actually I'll work with our business stakeholders within the organization to figure out how we could accelerate new businesses accelerate new capabilities with the use of technology who's excited that's a big big big role that you have if I want to send the the regime you have for security say the seaso reports to you yes sir and there's a set CIO there right there is yeah so I report to the to the executive vice president and CIO of the co-operators group of companies and and my responsibility within the organization is to report back to our CIO on all the responsibilities that I talked to you about okay so this the C so technically reports up through the CIO and C so reports up through me into the CIO yeah which is that's a whole other interesting discussion maybe if we have time we could talk about that absolutely um so a lot of data I mean we think about insurance company regulated you got your claim systems which are critical you have your agent systems which are also critical different types of data both data on customers but when you talk about the data that you guys collect where's it come from what are you trying to do with with that data yes so so you know I'll start I'll start with the motive right the problem that we're trying to solve and so I'll say first and foremost we're an insurance company we offer assurance and protection to our clients right and so in the process of offering assurance and protection to our clients you know they entrust us with massive amounts of data like you know as we as we mentioned before but we'll also need to set a good example because a lot of the assurance some of the assurance that we offer to our clients is also cyber protection we offer cyber insurance to our clients we need to set a good example we need to demonstrate resilience right Splunk is a primary tool in our Arsenal where we're showing our clients that we have good resilience to be able to detect and respond to security threats when they happen that's part of our mandate right so our responsibility with respect to using Splunk is to collect data from all of our major systems within our organization we use Blonk to monitor we use Blanc to detect and we also use Splunk to respond when something is going on what is this is really interesting you're being proactive about from your you know from an actuarial standpoint you rate your risk you're being very proactive when many if not most insurance companies would do is say ok what what's the history yeah and are there any high-profile breaches and yeah as opposed to what you're doing like sounds like you're really inspecting what the policies and the procedures and the technology of your clients is I think you hit on an important point right and so the important point is that you know the the the art of actuarial science is to rely on a lot of history in the past you know to predict the risks of the future but the reality is that model is falling apart very quickly because there is very little history for cyber threats and the other aspect of it is its inconsistent its evolving and it's changing on a regular basis right and so that's why you use platforms like Splunk use platforms like spunk to detect new threats and to end to in sort of to advance new correlations what should we be concerned about which threats are relevant to us which ones can we ignore and unless you have good platforms to do correlation unless you have good automation you're gonna need a large army of people to chase things that may not be relevant to either you or your clients so Tony your industry usually has quite a bit of M&A as to kind of fund the growth that's going on curious how does Splunk in your data strategy fit into M&A type a quiz yeah yeah and so I think that's one of the biggest potential uses of Splunk for us right and so the way that insurance is evolving right now is insurance companies are all trying to figure out how they get involved in the loss prevention game right in the past it's all been about assurance right it's all been about protection and so when you think about the Internet of Things is one of the biggest untapped opportunities for insurance companies it's all about data right so smart homes smart buildings cars outfitted with telematics so it's every history you wearing wearable devices so in terms of health and you know a health insurance and life insurance protection etc all of this data is meaningful to offer value to clients beyond what we've been able to do in the past one of the things we've looked at I know the industry is looking at is well how do you value that data is that something your company's gotten into yeah absolutely and so you know part of what we need to figure out is how to model that data to give the right level of engagement to the customer so to create that two-way engagement with the customer right how am i doing how am i driving is the weather a threat for me in in the in the foreseeable future in terms of things that I need to protect is there a hailstorm coming you know should I should I you know have alerts and and and you know provide you know ask clients to move some of their valuables indoors I mean all of these are things that will increase that engagement with our clients because face it with insurance your clients engage with you two times a year right two major time policy renewal and if they're unfortunate enough to have a claim right we need to have a but we need to have a better game much more proactive game with them so you're in other ways a risk consultant with your your clients right yeah so describe that so you client comes to you says they're interested or you go to them they're interested in in in in a security you know insurance where does it start do you ask them you have Splunk do you advise them as to what are you going to look at their policies and procedures well how does it work so so I think you know Splunk is one of those valuable assets that enables the capability right insurance you know the game is becoming all about data having massive amounts of data and being able to use that data to help assess the risks for a client properly right because without having good data everything is a great guest these days I mean with climate change with cyber risks evolving with customers preferences changing data is going to be the meaningful difference in terms of understanding what risks a client has what the probability is and how to write a meaningful policy for them where they're engaged and they understand it well enough as well understand it well enough to prevent some of their losses and that's really the issue that we're trying to figure out how do we help clients understand their risks and then prevent losses prevent or minimize losses for them and and what role does Splunk play in that you you know your your your client are you a an advisor or you encourage your customers to use belong counters at all so we're talking about our future roadmap right now and this is what we're trying to figure out what's blanc this is where we see the strategic opportunities with blah right and so when we look at the co-operators the way that co-operators has been using Splunk in the past is for their security sim we were one of the very first large companies in Canada to put our security sim on Splunk we were the very first large company in Canada to put our sim in Splunk clout right and so we we you know we're very proud with being able to work with Splunk for for charting that course right for setting the example our next course is how do we leverage a platform as powerful as Splunk now to give value to our customers we're protecting our customers data assets and now it's about returning valuable insights back to the customers in terms of loss prevention that's our forward-thinking approach in terms of how we stay ahead in terms of leveraging this as a unique asset as a unique capability so your leader you've got street cred you can now extend that to your client base I mean for an insurance company risk you know chaos is just cash as I like to say it's opportunity for you guys and to the extent that you can help clients mitigate that risk to win-win it's essentially for them the reduction in expected loss it can actually hate to say this but could actually pay for the insurance which is let's take attractive it's a massive win and I think you know the other part you know that people need to think differently about is the way that people consume insurance will change dramatically as well in the next tenure so and so where you think now that you know your typical home and auto insurance you will buy an annual policy well the reality is that Home Sharing car sharing ride-sharing insurance will change to what we call episodic oh right and so essentially you'll be consuming insurance for an activity right and the only way that you'll be able to sort of drive that activity in a meaningful way is to have a lot of data on that activity right where are you driving how did you drive you know what what are the risks associated to when you're driving in the geography that you're driving where are you renting out your home what are the rooms to which client and so understanding all of those elements give us the best opportunity at giving you just in time insurance for the right risks surance as a service I love it personalized for me I mean the model generally item as a consumer is broken it's very bespoke my insurance company doesn't know who I am it's just to check a bunch of boxes off and they sent me another form every year and advised some new things and I don't even know what half the time they are that's exactly right right then the and the only way you're able to personalize is to have all of that data on an individual on a company on an event right so we give you insurance for you based on your needs based on your risks Tony we know there's a lot of AI happening up in the Toronto area yeah maybe our audience might not know tell them a little bit about that and how you're thinking about AI and what interest you have and what's Blanc's talking about when they talk about AI yeah you're absolutely right I mean there's a loop there's a massive amount of artificial intelligence activity in the Toronto Kitchener corridor within southern Ontario I would say it's early days for insurance in terms of how we leverage AI I think you know some of the early wins for us have been what we refer to as chat BOTS or virtual assistants right helping clients so this is basically speed and convenience for clients right clients need to know something very quickly very predictive short-tailed answers we're there for customers who choose to do that where it's going next is helping clients assess risk and predict outcomes associated to risks right and so there's a lot of different use cases that we're working there partnerships with startups partnerships with mainstream organizations like Splunk is an important partner for us in this area and of course academic institutions that are investing right this is all part of it for the sales channel for the risk channel for claims processing so imagine being able to submit a claim on a mobile device gathering all that data being able to correlate that data to say we've seen this before right based on the correlation here's your damages we could processes as quickly here's the experts you need to go to here's the restoration facilities that you'll engage those are massive opportunities for client service and for an ability for an insurance company to settle things quickly right we're talking about weather before it's obviously a changing dynamic has a change variable and maybe it's it's model Abel I don't know but but clearly weather incidents are on the rise have caught companies and probably insurance companies you know a little bit off guard you know climate change etc the boiling seas this we've heard yeah what do you guys what's your position on that how do you accommodate that and pass it on to your customers and well I think this is what we're well known for right and so first of all we're not gonna be able to control the weather but what we'd be able to do is prevent it from getting worse right and so when you'll hear the leadership within our organization talk especially our CEO our CEO is very passionate about building resilient communities and that starts with making sure that we're building communities in the right spots not in flood plains not in areas of high risk of forest fires or or other things that you could you know potentially prevent you know within a certain geography and so that's first and foremost right and so we're a leader in this space in Canada how do you become a leader in this area you collect data understand the geography understand the trends associated to the understand the future risks associated to those geographies based on weather trends and then lobby governments builders entrepreneurs everybody land development consortiums to say we need to build communities in better places we need to build more resilient communities and then thereafter it's making sure that you're leveraging data to be able to predict and minimize losses for clients in those areas right and that's what you'll use weather data for right who do I need to alert we have threats on the way what can we prevent how do we minimize these losses for Canadians I think the big risk that we all need to understand if the weather continues to change at the same pace are our you know people will not be able to afford the risks right and so the insurance will rise exponentially and and you know will we we won't have a sustainable model for the future so it's clear for you guys it's really all about the data one of the challenges that a lot of companies in your industry have is the data it's about the data for them to insurance companies you could argue our you know IT companies in many respects they develop products that are put together by technologists but a lot of the data is in silos yeah as Splunk allowed you to break down those silos and and is that yet part while you're a leader well like I could talk about what's where Splunk has been able to to offer us that that that ability is with security right and so we have data we have information security log data associated to our systems and our application everywhere on Prem our partner sites in our agency offices on different endpoint devices in the cloud with our different service providers so what Splunk has been able to do is us to be able to aggregate that data consume that data build valid use cases and to correlate that and raise proper alerts right that's our main priority right now is to build resilience with information security that knowledge will take us to these other areas that we want to do in offering now the value back to our clients right embed that value into our product offerings is our next logical step awesome Tony thanks very much for coming on the cube really appreciate it you're welcome it's good to meet you in the pleasure have the leaves changed in Toronto its Toronto by the way stew no tea it's coming it's coming fast Dave a lot a force to Minutemen thanks for watching we'll be right back after this short break you're watching the cube from Splunk Kampf 18 [Music]

>> Announcer: From the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference Spring, San Francisco It's theCUBE. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Spring Event about a hundred CAO's as opposed to CDO's talking about big data, transformation and analytics and the role of analytics and a lot of practitioners are really excited to have our next guest. He's up from Mexico City, it's Jose Murillo. He's the chief analytics officer from Banorte. Jose, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with Banorte give us a quick overview. >> Banorte's the second largest financial group in Mexico. We, for the last, during the last three years were able to leapfrog city bank. >> Congratulations, and as we were talking before we turned the cameras on, you and your project had a big part of that. So before we get in it, you are a chief analytics officer. How did you come in, what's the reporting structure, how do you work within the broader spectrum of the bank? >> Well I moved to Banorte like about five years ago from, I was working at the central bank where I spent about 10 years in the MPC, the Monitor Policy Committee, and I was invited by initially by the president of the board and when the new chief operating officer was named he invited me to, to lead a new analytics business unit that he wanted to create. And that's the way that I arrived there. >> Okay so you report in to the COO. >> He's the COO/CFO, so he's not only a very smart guy but a very powerful guy running the organization. >> And does the CIO also report to him? >> The CIO, the CDO, the CMO report to him. >> Okay so you have a CDO as well Chief Data Officer. >> We have a CDO who I work very close with him. >> We could go for a long time I might not let you leave for lunch. So I'm just curious on the relationship between the CDO and the CAO, the data officer and the analytics officer. We often hear one or the other, it's very seldom that I've heard both. So how do you guys divide and conquer your responsibilities? How do you parse that out? >> I guess he provides the foundation that we need to find analytics projects that are going to transform the financial group and he has been a very good partner in providing the data that we need and basically what we do as the CAO we find those opportunities to improve the efficiency, to bring the customer to the center, and be able to deliver value to our stakeholders. >> Right, so he's really kind of giving you the infrastructure if you will, of making that data available, getting it to you from all various sources, et cetera, that then you can use for your analytics magic on top. >> Exactly >> Okay, so that's very good, so when we sat down you said an exciting report has come out from, I believe it was HBR, about the tremendous ROI that you guys have realized. So you tell the story better than I, what did they find in your recent article? >> Well in the recent article from the Harvard Business Review is how Banorte has made its analytics business unit pay off. And what we have found in the past two and a half years is we've been able to deliver massive value and by now we have surpassed a billion dollars in net income creation. From analytics projects made on cost saving strategies and revenue generating projects. >> So you paid for yourself just barely >> Yeah. >> No I mean that's such a great story, just barely 'cause it's so it's so important. So as you said, that billion dollars have been realized both in cost savings but more importantly on incremental revenue and that's really the most important thing. >> Exactly >> So how are you measuring that ROI? >> So basically the way we measure it is on cost saving strategies that are related to a risk operational and financial cost. It's the contemporary news effect. And that can be audited. And on the other side, on revenue generating projects, the way we do it is we estimate the customer lifetime value, which is nothing else than the net present value of the relationship with our customers, so we need to estimate survival rates plus the depth of the relationship with our customers. >> So I just love, so you're doing all kinds of projects, you're measuring the value of the projects. What are some of the projects that had a high ROI that you would've never guessed that you guys applied some analytics to and said wow, terrific value relative to what we expected. >> Let me tell you about two types of projects. The first project that we started on was on cost of risk cutting strategies. And we delivered massive value and very quickly. So that helped us gain credibility. And the way we do it, we did it, is like to analyze a dicing of the data where we had excessive cost of risk. And in the first year, actually, that was the first quarter of Operations, we yielded about a 25% incremental value to the credit card business. And after that, we start to work with them and started the discovery data process. And from there, we were able to optimize analytically the cross cell process. And that's a project that has already a three year maturity. And by this time, we are able to sell, without having any bricks or mortars, about 25% of the credit cards sold by the financial group. If we were a territory within the financial group, we would be the largest one with 400 basis points lower on cost of risk, 30% more on activation rates. And it's no surprise that the acquisition cost is 30% less, vis-a-vis our most efficient channel. >> Right, I just want to keep digging down into this, Jose, there's a lot of this stuff to go. I mean, you've been issuing cards forever. So was it just a better way to score customers, was it a better way to avoid the big fraud customers, was it a better way to steal customers maybe from a competitor with a competitive rate that you can afford, I mean, what are some of the factors that allowed you to grow this business in such a big way? >> I guess it's something that has been improving during the first three years. The first thing is that we made like, a very simple cascade on seeing why we were not that efficient cross cell process. And we kind of fixed every part of it. Like on the income estimation models that we had, and we partner with the risk department to improve them. Up to the information that we had on our customers to contact them, and we partner with data governance to improve those. And finally, on the delivery process and all the engaging process with the customers. And it seemed that we were going to find something that was going to be more costly, but it was something that we had at the center of the customers so that it was more likely for them to go and pick up the card and we deliver it to their homes. And finally, that process was much more efficient and the gains that we had, we shared them with our customers. And after three years, we've done things with artificial intelligence to have much better scripts so that we are better able to serve our customers. We do a lot of experimentation, experimentation that we didn't do before. And we use some concepts from behavioral economics to try to explain much better the value proposition to our customers. >> So I just, I love this point, is that it was a bunch of small, it was optimizing lots of little steps and little pieces of the pie that added up to such a significant thing, it wasn't like this magic AI pixie dust. >> Initially, it as a big bang, and then it has been something incremental that has since, it's a project that at the end of the day, we own, and it's something that we are tracking. We are willing to put all the effort to have all the incremental efficiency within the process. >> So people, process, and technology, we talk about, those are the three pieces always to drive organizational change. And usually, the technology is the easy part, the hard part is the people and the process. So as you and your team have started to work with the various lines of businesses for all these different pieces. Promotional piece, customary attention piece, risk and governance piece, cross sale pice, how has their attitude towards your group changed over time as you've started to deliver insight and all this incremental deltas into their business. >> I guess you are hitting just on the spot. Building the models is the easy part. The hard part is to build the consensus around, to change a process that has run for 20 years, there's a lot of inertia. >> Right, right. >> And there are a lot of silos within organizations. So initially, I guess, the credibility that we gained initially helped us move faster. And at the end of the day, I think what happens is the way that we are set up is that the incentives are very well aligned within the different units that need to interact in the sense that we are a unit that is sponsored by the, corporately sponsored, and we make it easier for our partners to attain their goals. So that's, and they don't share the cost of us, so that helps. >> And those are the goals they already had. So you're basically helping them achieve their objectives that they already had better and more efficiently. >> Yeah, and you are pointing out correctly, it's the people, and besides the math, it's a highly, you could say diplomatic or political position in the sense that you need to have all the different partners and stakeholders aligned to change something that has been running for 20 years. >> Right, right. And i just love it, it's a ton of little marginal improvements across a wide variety of tough points, it's so impactful. So as you look forward now, is there another big bang out there, or do you just see kind of this constant march of incremental improvement, and, or are you just going to start getting into more different businesses or kind of different areas in the bank to apply the same process, where do you go next? >> Well, we started with the credit card business, but we moved toward the verticals within the financial group. From mortgages, auto loans, payroll loans, to we are working with the insurance company, the long term savings company. So we've increased the scope of the group. And we moved not only from cost to revenue generating projects. And so far, it has been, we have been on an exponential increase of our impact, I guess that's the big question. The first, we were able to do 46 times our cost. The second year, we made 106 times our cost, the third year, we are close to 200 times our cost with an incremental base. And so far, we've been on this increasing slide. At some point, it's, I guess, we are going to decelerate, but so far, we haven't hit the point. >> Right, the law of big numbers, eventually, you got to, eventually, you'll slow down a little bit. All right, well Jose, I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. Kind of tips and tricks that you would share with a peer if we're sitting around on a Friday afternoon on a back porch. You know, as you've gone through this journey, three and a half years and really sold you and your vision into the company, what would you share with a peer that's kind of starting this journey or starting to run into some of the early hurdles to get past. >> I guess there are two things that I could share. And once you have built a group like this and you have already, the incentives aligned and you have support from the top in the sense that they know that there's no other way they want really to compete and be successful, and suppose that you have all these preconditions set up and suddenly, you have a bunch of really smart people that are coming to a company, so you need to focus on ROI, high ROI projects. I;s very easy to get distracted on non-impactful projects. And I guess, the most important thing is that you have to learn to say no to a lot of things. >> Speaking my language, I love it. Learn to say no, it's the most important thing you'll ever, all right, well Jose, thanks for spending a few minutes and congratulations on all your success, what a great story. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, he's Jose, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Summit in downtown San Francisco. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico It's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (latin music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound I'm John Furrier, your host, here covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marhall Taplits he's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co Founder of Nynja.biz, check out their site, Nynja.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So tell about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff, tell us about what you guys do, then it will jam into a conversation. >> Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? >> Yeah. >> Okay great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years, so we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet, which as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. >> A lot of mobile users. >> A lot of mobile users, 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. WeChat, basically, is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan the QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in Wuzhen China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept, and we're working on a global version of it, that's cryptocurrency based, and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. >> Are you guys in China? Cause it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? >> Yeah so because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system, and the financial system-- >> And you domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? >> Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. So we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. >> That's where all the action is. >> That's right >> That's where WeChat is >> That's right >> Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact we have a huge following on WeChat, Sou Kanai, Niki Bond, free content. But that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion, so their users are heavily mobile savy. >> Marshall: That's right. >> This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing, I mean there's a lot of gamification going on, some if it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the webstac, and the 20 year old e-commerce stacks, that are out there? >> Sure, I think the most important thing is reducing friction, all right. You don't want to be using platforms where you can not do it wherever you are whenever you are, you don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't want to have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the west over to there, but actually it's kind of the opposite now, right, so we basically want to take this concept of the frictionless digital life, and make it a global opportunity. And especially with BlockChain and cryptocurrency you have that really as an opportunity, because if you look at all the apps that are out there, and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is, and as big as LINE is, but ultimately it's locked into the Rem and B system or Reo in Korea, what have you, so the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. >> So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this, obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster, mobile on top, big data analytics using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that, that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view, so these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end, yeah there's some standardization on the lower end of the stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal, I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, I got sovereignty, all these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency BlockChain, de-centralized applications, are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out because, that's kind of what developers worry about, oh shit will this work on that chain? I got Neo I got this I got that, so the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. >> Marshall: That's right. >> But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on. What Dev opts did for Cloud, you got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that, do you agree? Or what's your take? >> Yeah well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly, you know, and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on TheCloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward Edge Cloud, where the way the clouds work, is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of, if your users are from this country, you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the BlockChain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of Fiat Currency, and how am I going to get back to dollars, and this and that, but I think what's going to wind up happening, is this is going to get pushed towards the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges and what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like, just other currencies, so for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe, I have some dollars, I have some Euros, I have some Rem and B, when I leave China, I don't immediately sell all of my Rem and B, I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is, especially on the larger BlockChains, like Ethereum and Neo and what have you, is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out, and this and that, and they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. >> Yeah as long as there's some level of stability. It's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no Euro, every country had their own currency. You had the French Franc, the Swiss Francs, the Deutsche Mark, Lira, etc, etc. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect, cause at the end of the day there's two things that we've identified in analysis, and I was talking about it last night, talked about it this morning on theCUBE, is the killer apps for BlockChain cryptocurrency, these sorts of apps is two things, money and marketplaces. >> Marshall: That's right. >> Everything else is just kind of circling around those two. >> Well there's more but certainly that's the main part of it >> Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with coin based, the Financial Conduct Authority, reading the news yesterday, has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is a nation. This is the beginning, to your point, that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will, so it's already happening. >> Yeah and I think what governments are starting to realize is hey guys this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into play, that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right. And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system, and I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrency have dropped almost 40%. Now if the stock markets and the global affects markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets. But the crypto market is asset based instead of debt based and because it's so structurally sound it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system, so in may ways, it's way more stable, and then as the market gaps and the buy in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. >> Well I mean its stable from a fail standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. >> But that's just because they're-- >> That's a lot of speculation, right? >> There's a lot of speculating and then if they're down they feel like they lost but, that's life. >> People that are into the game, like you, were long on this. So what would you explain to someone, cause I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought, that's a total scam, don't associate with that, to oh my god, that's the next biggest wave, lets get our surfboards out there and lets get on this, there's a multiple set coming in, it's the biggest thing we've seen, and everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? >> It's just your traditional curve, there's early adopters and what have you, and if you were one of the guys buying up domaine names in the early 90s, you know some people would say I can't believe you're spending $100,000 buying up domaine names, but some of them now are worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. But again, this is the speculatory piece of it. And there's no shortage of opportunities for speculation and I encourage everybody to speculate a little bit because what it does is it gets you a taste of the technology. And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention, so if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it, but people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. Nobody knows what's going to happen with any specific currency. But in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting, not only, communications like the internet, but financing governance and all as one. Programmable money, programmable contracts, that wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it whites out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this Open Unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be, as something that's under our control. >> Yeah and I think one of the things, first of all that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that, connect the dots, is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services was laughed at years ago. S3 came out, compute storage building, basic building blocks and a slew more services. What Cloud did for software developers, and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, dev ops, it's proven. What open source has done, even going back to the old red-hat days and linux, is that now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. And what made Cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. >> Marshall: Exactly. >> You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplace, society, >> Yeah you hit it on the head. >> We're there right? >> That's exactly right, so when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC, and getting their EIN Tax ID or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe, and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible, internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs or whatever and you've got access to money, program adding, you can take money, you can move money around, globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governancy, smart contracts-- >> They might not not need an SDK dashboard, its a console, click, click, click, smart contracts, governance, turn key. >> And one of the things we're working on with Nynja in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together a de-centralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion, is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days, now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cashflow is all over the place. With BlockChain technology, we can actually do real time payments. You could be paid minute by minute, hour by hour. Real time, program, contract. So we're going to create very flat even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cashflow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. >> I mean I lived through the dot com bubble, I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash. Part of the whole search paradigm, google right there. Key words, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw that, the scammers in there, or the bubble people, that's what we called them. But the reality is, everything happened. It was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, it's a little euphoric right now, but what's different is, is you have now, community data. See what I see happening is, it's not a major bubble crash, because self government, self governing, self governance, is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self healing, inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here, a lot of people, bad act is being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts? >> Well I mean you know, we've been through many evolutions of society, we've had surf-dom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things, and I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance. And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we can close our eyes and really think about it. I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally, and I think we have an opportunity here to build in organic program governance. And what's really special about BoxChain technology is if I program it to do X, it's going to do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you. I don't need to worry about where we're going to sue each other, or we're going to have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just going to make an agreement, and we're going to program it that way, and that's it. And now the next phase is, I could build on top of that trusting that that's just going to happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole nother-- >> Sounds like a bunch of web services. >> Well in many ways, in terms of the architecture, sure you could absolutely think of it like that. >> The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, so I want to just end the segment Marshall, take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on, Nynja coin, Nynja, N-Y-N-J-A .biz, you guys have a product, you got a BlockChain enabled platform, you got a coin, take a minute to explain what you're working on. >> Basically we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messengers, the web sites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together, and that's what we're doing with Nynja. We're staring with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment, and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a de-centralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with BlockChain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple years you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users, and we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. >> And have you got an IC already or not? >> We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much-- >> Is it a utility token or security? >> Utility Token, and I think it's really telling, interesting, coming here. It's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the d10e and we also spoke at d10e in Korea a week or two ago, and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because-- >> The Asian market gets it. >> Well they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in, so when I tell them that we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches which is ridiculous, it's like a chop shop, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short time frame, so, what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain-- >> Well platform is complex, a lot of pieces to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers, who are building products, for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. >> That's right and although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one, so that's very exciting and we're really really excited about that. >> And the coins will be utility of measures, what? >> Sorry? >> Well your utility coins going to be measuring what, what's the main token economics that drives the-- >> For the ICO economics? >> Your Nynja Coin. >> So basically we're releasing 5 billion tokens, 45% of them will be sold. There's five cents a token, so the hard cap, by definition is about 112 million, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale is going really well, but we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire eco-system, so anybody, not just within our Nynja App or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know XMPP federation, like back in the day-- >> Yeah you know about real messaging >> If you could think of us as the next version of XMPP federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things, and very cheap to do good things and globally. >> So it's like Twitter you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. >> That's right and also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Nynja boxes of their own, are either just internally, or you could specify specifically context or group of context-- >> We agree, that's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. And it's de-centralized, there's no single spot. >> That's right, if email came out today, when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam. Because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free and for everybody generally, and you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we can do that for messaging globally. >> Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, check out Nynja. Marshall Taplits is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Nynja.biz, check them out online. Check out the website, it's in Asia, bringing that culture of mobile and fast moving, real time apps, to the rest of the developers. This is theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for BlockChain Unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more, after this short break, thanks for watching.

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have on the program one of the users here at the event, Andrew Baxter, who's the Director of Systems Engineering with Commonwealth Financial Network. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role there. >> Certainly, Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer. We have a network of roughly 2,000 advisors throughout the country, just based in the U.S right now and we, that's what we do. We're a clearing house for them. We provide all their IT infrastructure for them. >> Okay, the good news is that financial, like most industries, isn't going through any change today, right, Andrew? >> Oh, yeah, absolutely no. We've got the Department of Labor is our big bugaboo right now. >> Yep. So what are some of the biggest challenging? Is it regulation? Is it uncertainty? Is it, you know, technology? What are some of the drivers of the business? >> It's a combination of both. We have a lot of issues with regulation because of such people as Enron and whatnot. >> Smartest people in the room, right? >> Exactly. And it's not, the regulation's not a bad thing. It's just, can be problematic to work with. So the most recent one is the Department of Labor where they have decided how your retirement funding can be managed and to make sure that there is no conflict of interest. >> Okay, so. (laughs) It, yeah, we're not going to get political here. >> No, nope, no, absolutely. >> And go into how much government and all everything like that. >> What does that mean to your all? Tell us a little bit about what you manage >> Sure >> and really from that standpoint. >> So my group is responsible for our virtualization, our server platform, all of our storage, our data protection be it back up, antivirus, things like that. So we've got several different systems from a performance standpoint, and then we've got also have things from a compliance standpoint, a lot of WORM drives in the form of Centera or Hitachi Content Platform, and then the storage that goes around it and the applications that go with them. >> Alright. Well, you've got one of the hot button topics, security. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about, you know, there's the compliance and the security, how is that impacting what you're doing these days? >> So they're sort of two different things. Compliance is one thing, >> Yeah. maintaining your compliance with the security level. You know, we have a whole group, two groups actually, independent of each other, that sort of check each other, and then check us to make sure that, one, we're keeping the patch levels up, but also that we're following best practices to try to keep the bad guys out. We, I think everybody knows that you can't keep them out if they really want in. It really comes down to how you're going to react and so we've got to make sure that we have the tools in place to be able to react appropriately. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at is, you know, security used to just be ah let the networking people take care of it. >> Right. >> We put up some firewalls. We do some things. Now, security, a lot of times, getting up to the board level type of discussion. What's the dynamic in your organization? >> Yeah, so, we do have the traditional on the network side. But we have a group within that that is specifically focused on that and it's more than just the network side of it. And then we have the information security group and that's more the board level where they're helping to define what types of data are critical, you know, personally identifiable information. We have HIPAA, other regulations like that, FINRA, the SEC, that we have to make sure we secure your information as well as possible. >> Okay, what brings you to this event? >> So, we've been a customer or partner with Winslow. I like to think of my vendors, for lack of a better word, as partners. I don't want to just use them as somebody I call when I need something. I want them to be somebody who is involved in the process, whatever that may be. And in this case, right now we're currently using them for all of our virtual desktop infrastructure, from the storage, the server standpoint. We're using some Dell products for wireless and things like that. And then, as time goes on, we start to do more refresh of equipment, then we're going to be looking at all of the vendors and not just the traditional ones. So, you know, you got the big three, sort of, HP, Dell and Lenovo in the server market or UCS as well. So we're going to make sure we look at all of them to see who has the best offering for us, for what we need. >> Okay. What about a cloud? How does that fit into your organization? Do you have, you know, cloud means many things to many people. >> Sure. >> But what does it mean to your organization? What's the strategy look like today? >> So we have two situations. One, we are actually a cloud for all of our advisors. We provide them with their exchange, their active directory, their antivirus, their patching, things like that. And then we're also looking at the Azure and the AWS offerings. We had to be very careful as we move to those offerings because we have to make sure that we retain this security level when that data leaves our hands, as it were. The financial markets tend to be a little slow moving to that kind of stuff because we've got very sensitive data that we've got to make sure that doesn't go away, doesn't get breached, and doesn't become generally available to the world. >> Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what data means to your organization >> Sure. >> Of course, securities piece. How are you, are there initiatives to leverage data more, you know, you look almost like a service provider. >> Sure. >> We've seen many organizations that leverage that kind of technology. >> So, one of the, there's a couple different ways we do that. One of them is the actual software we've written for our advisors to use. So we're providing them with all the information they could ever want about their clients, their performance of the portfolios, things like that. But then there's also, on the other side, we're starting to look more into the power of BI and that kind of information so that we can start leveraging, sort of, paying more attention to how our products are being used in a more proactive manner instead of reactive. >> Okay, Curious how things like Hyperledger and Blockchain, you know, play into, does it play into anything you're doing today? What does your organization look at? >> Not currently. It will be down the road, I'm sure. But at this point it's not something we, because we really just haven't moved anything out to that area yet. >> Okay, great. I want to give you, really, the last word. What do you, kind of, when you come into an event like this, what are you looking for? What do you hope to take away from this? >> I'm looking for what's new, what's coming. I want, I need to make sure that I'm trying to stay ahead of things because part of what we have to do is we have to set the tone for what's going to be coming in the coming years. And so, I don't want to just see the same old thing. And that's one thing I like about Winslow. They do keep on the cutting edge. They do keep on forward. They've got cloud, you know, for lack of a better term, as part of their portfolio. And I feel that they actually know what they're doing. I have worked with some vendors that, they could spell the word, but that was about it. >> Absolutely. The cloud washing if you will. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the updates on where all of this technology fits into your environment and you've been watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. This is the Cube, a flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the host of the Cube. Our next guess is Lima Rice, who's the chief data officer Global Enterprise Data Analytics for Allegis Group. Salema, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> So you won the Informatica Innovation Award Monday night. Congratulations. >> Salema: Thank you. >> You're also a chief data officer, so we love to have conversations with because really, what does that mean? (laughing) You're the chief of everything now. Data's at the center, you're like the heart surgeon of the organization. What was the award for? Tell us a little bit about Allegis Group. >> Sure. So the award was really about how we're innovating with data. So for us, it's really about using data as an asset and how we really want to transform our company the way that we transformed the industry almost 30 years ago. So we've really partnered with Informatica to build out our Master Data Management, data as a service, data quality, everything that would help us to find the right person for the right position at the right time. >> Talk about what you guys do at Allegis Group and how it fits into your parent company. A lot of folks, you guys are very large, but tell us a little bit about your firm. >> Sure. So Allegis Group is the largest talent solution company in the world, largest privately held one. We have almost 450,000 contract employees worldwide. We have over 500 offices in 53 countries that we service. Our two flagship companies are Tech Systems and Aerotech, which make up probably a little over 75% of our organization. >> So you guys match talent that's in your network with opportunities that they are fit for. >> That's correct, for most of the operating. For Tech Systems and Aerotech, which makes up that large portion, that's exactly what they do. Then we have service organizations and we have managed service programs and vendor management solutions and other operating companies that service other types of industries. >> You mentioned as we were getting started that you use data as a competitive strategy weapon, if you will, key asset. >> Absolutely. >> I kind of weaved in competitive strategy. If you're doing well, it's also competitive strategy. >> Right. >> If you're successful. That's the key conversation here at Informatica World this year and in the industry worldwide as they look at the assets differently. It's not just an accounting thing. Most CFOs know where the plant and equipment are, the depreciation schedule, itemization schedule, all that stuff is kind of like in Financial 101. Data now is coming in as an asset where sometimes they don't even know where the data is, that's one problem. How are you looking at that? Because take us through what that means to make data as the asset, and how do you wrangle it in, how do you get your hands on it so to speak, metaphorically speaking, and then, also, how do you deploy it as an asset? How does it get paid back to the company? >> So that's a lot of questions in there. I'll start with, we believe that being able to ingest any data from anywhere in any format and use that in order to enable our producers which are our recruiters and our account managers to make better, faster decisions and really reduce our risk is a way that we can help produce and make quality, fact-based decisioning. So it all starts with great quality data. When you think about the journey that somebody goes through of getting a job, there's probably not, maybe two other times in your life that are more traumatic, right? So, birth, death, and you know? >> John: I know. >> Getting married, maybe? >> John: That too. >> And changing careers, right? So we try to use data and we try to make the best out of each situation so that people feel like they're really becoming part of our Allegis family and not just taking a job. >> Or a piece, a resume that's on file so to speak. >> Salema: That's right. >> Take us through an example of a use case that someone could relate to with you guys or applying data and the benefit to you guys and your customer. >> So at any given time, we have roughly 55 million resumes that we're parsing through and trying to identify and make the perfect search and match for our customers. And that's really the core part of our business. >> 55 million. >> 55 million resumes. (chuckling) So within that search and match process, it's really important that my team help enable that search and match team with good quality data so that, when you think about, if you have bad data, you're going to make bad decision matching rules. And so the better quality the data, the better we can help that team. >> I mean, everyone's had an experience where they've gotten an email or something where you can see some sort of form was inserted Dear Placeholder, my name, they didn't insert my name. That's just a random example, but that's the kind of example where it's not personalized. It's not a fit for me. I'm like, hey, I'm a machine, you're talking to me, I'm a person, I instantly delete it if it's not already in my spam folder. >> Right. >> Similarly with your, it's a high touch and again, it's intimate-- >> Very much so. >> Very intimate to the user. How will you guys doing that personalization and what's the data angle on that? >> That's very important to us, actually. So when our founders created the company almost 30 years ago, they made three promises. They made a promise to the customer that they would work harder than any other vendor ever worked for them. They wouldn't stop until they filled that rack. To the consultants coming in, they made a promise that they'd never just sling their resumes. That they would get to know them intimately. They would find out their likes, their dislikes, what are things that they want to do to make a life? And then to the people working in-house, they promised that if you would work harder than you ever thought was possible, the company would pour into them and those three things are still the core value of what we do today. So while our competition looks very different today than it used to, I mean, for probably 20 years our competition looked exactly like us. The same model, the same comp model, everything. Until about four years ago, and we started seeing competition that had no brick and mortar, that has no recruiters. We have 25,000 recruiters, we have 500 offices. >> Where was the competition going? All online automated? >> They're going algorithm, so they're going bionic recruitment. The thing for us is that that relationship is what really sets us apart. The relationship means that much to us that we want to use data to enable our recruiters and enable our producers so that they can become more talented advisors and career coaches. >> You know, there's two things that jump in my head. One is, you don't want to be a slave to the algorithm. >> That's right. >> Or slave to process, you want the process to work for you. >> Absolutely. >> The second one is, we always talk about the start-up community and growing companies is that you always hear people, "Oh, he and she is a good fit." You know, being a good fit for a job really is key because you could be in a job and be unhappy and no one wins. >> That's right. >> So getting the fit is critical. So you guys are using humans with machines-- >> That's right. >> Together so you're making the data work for the human process which is a hybrid. >> That's right. We look at it as we use data to have a competitive advantage by empowering our producers and really using that combination of human touch and technology to deliver the best customer experience. >> Okay, talk about the marketplace. As you look back, and you notice your Informatica customer, we'll get to that in a second, but there's a lot of solutions out there. People are peddling software. You got to be kind of a skeptic, but you don't want to miss the wave. >> Salema: That's right. >> The data wave, that that's something you obviously as a Chief Data Officer. So you got to squint through the BS of the fog or the smokescreens that are out there. How do you tell, well first of all, what is the current landscape from your perspective? What's the right solutions that you see emerging out of this new modern era of data at the center? With software, with algorithms, and obviously mixed with humans. What's the big industry trend that you like, and what don't you like? >> Yeah, I love what Informatica's doing. I love that they're combining the best of artificial intelligence and machine learning into every application that they create. That's really critical to us, and I think to every company is we always say as we're teaching our children, if you learn from your own mistakes, you'll be smart. But if you can learn from the mistakes of others, you're going to be a genius. Well, when we make mistakes, if our applications can learn from them, but what if those applications can learn from all the customers and from the information that they're putting in? So Informatica embedding AI with Claire now, I think is genius. I think that it's going to set them apart and really set their customers apart. So that's why we like partnering with them. >> You mentioned data quality. It's one of my favorite topics, and I always talk about dirty data, it's bad for you. Clean data, good data, is really instrumental. >> Salema: That's right. >> How are you guys refreshing the data? Someone from Informatica was on, talking about heartbeat of data as the, but also that implies the heart is a critical organ so you need a surgeon for that, heart surgery. But sometimes, data hygiene. You need a data hygienist. So there's a spectrum of data interaction points. What's your thoughts on data quality? What are the key things you keep on top of to keep the data high quality? >> It's really important to us. We use, so if you think about one of the things that makes a great match for somebody, it's about the proximity to your position. So making sure that the addresses are clean. We use Informatica's data as a service. And we do all world geo lat long, and we do Address Doctor and address verification. Email verification is big in our business. Phone number cleansing, and then just overall making sure that we have a single golden record. If you think about somebody like me, I started with the company in 1998 as a consultant. So being out there as a consultant for 23 years and then coming in-house, all of my data from my maiden name still exists in our systems. So really, it's about not just cleansing good to bad, but making sure that you're creating that golden record of a person so somebody on LinkedIn might just put their first initial or on any third party system and knowing that those are all still the same person and making sure that we're connecting the right people is really important to us. >> You bring up such good points I don't even think about. Most people don't think about. But one of the most satisfying things about a job is the commute. I live in the Bay Area here. (laughing) If I'm in East Bay and I've got to go to Palo Alto, that's a nightmare. But that depends on the opportunity, right? So that's a blend. And the other one is the role of new data. So you mentioned LinkedIn. So LinkedIn seems to be a contextual resume, and in short term social network, which they're doing a decent job with. But that's more data. Reputation's super important in the world you're in. >> That's right, right. >> How are you guys looking at that? Because I can see how you guys got the blend of machines and humans, that's nice. Business philosophy's awesome. How do you guys get more reputation data points, too? Look for those blind spots. >> Sure. Well one of the things we do is by taking the person's information. One of the things that I think sets us apart from our competition is that we actually have the actuals. So if somebody, how they performed, how long they performed on a position for a lot of our consultants, that's information that we've had in our systems for 20, 30 years. So having the actual data to compare against what people are saying now makes a big difference. It's something our competition can't go out and buy. >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's just so interesting a world you're in. You're like in the cross hairs of a lot of moving waves. Look at the HR world is changing significantly from the world I live in in tech, for instance, has been a big thing and making sure people are being promoted. And the old way of doing HR is like, processes are kind of broken but the tools are available. So there's a whole dynamic going on in the future of work that's overlaying on top of your job. How are you dealing with that? >> It's very difficult. We use a lot of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to really look at people and almost in some ways predict their level of thought leadership. So it's not enough any more to say, "I have those skills." It's can they do more than the skill we're hiring for and are they really going to be able to come in here and be that curious person, that problem solver, right? We can teach people tools. How do you teach somebody to be a problem solver? >> I can almost imagine Claire and some of these automated intelligences, I call it AIs. To me, it's automated intelligence. AIs don't really exist, I mean Google's probably about. Neural networks that teach neural networks, c'mon. >> Salema: Right. >> That's 1980s. But the augmentation is the key, and you think about what you're doing is you almost want the system to be working for the user. So instead of HR, you flip it around. So the HR should be notified that, "Hey, Salema needs a promotion right now. "She's peaked, she's been growing." Now new openings are coming up. Rather than trying to have the review, have the end user fill out their performances, having an ongoing performance track is probably pretty key. >> Yeah, it's something that we look at in our applicant tracking systems and how we keep track of the people that are out there working for our clients and the feedback that we get. Survey information is really important to us, both from our customers and from our consultants. So we use that to help them grow, and I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we tried really hard is coming to work for Allegis is about coming to work for a family where you're not just making a living, but you're making a life. >> Alright, final question, well, two final questions. But I'll get your thoughts on the show, that's a little bit of an easier question. The pointed question here, relative to what you're doing is, the world now with Cloud and data is about scale. And one of the things that's interesting about what you guys are doing at your work is it's pretty large scale. You mentioned 55 million people and beyond that. A lot of folks have to operate now at a higher level of scale. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice to other practitioners out there that have to start thinking differently in terms of order of magnitude scale. Just mindset, what advice would you share with folks on the scale question? >> I would say collect the data. Collect all the data you create as an organization. Collect everything, and then over time, connect it. Connect the dot. I often say collect it and we'll connect it. And I think that start small, right? I mean, when you don't want to boil the ocean, but collecting the data with the tools that we have today with the big data appliances, we use Cloudera, Informatica, by bringing all of that data into our enterprise data hub, then as those business problems exist and we can slowly start to help the organization by being those problem solvers. >> Awesome, great success story. Final question, word for you is, what's the show like? For the folks watching? What's the experience like, what's the vibe? >> Salema: At Informatica World? >> Informatica World here in San Francisco? >> It's been amazing. It's full of energy like the opening yesterday had my heart racing. It's really been a great event. It's a lot smaller than some of the ones that I think people are accustomed to coming to. And because of that, you get more of that personal touch. The classrooms aren't so big that you can't do a question and answers. >> John: It's very intimate. You get to meet the executives, they're very transparent. >> Yeah, absolutely. And really just see where it's going. And this isn't the kind of thing where you're seeing something that's going to be here years from now. You're seeing what's going to be released weeks from now. >> You're happy with Informatica? They've done a good job with the product? >> Absolutely. I love Informatica. I love our partnership with them. I mentioned for me, it's about, they have a seat at our table, and they help us solve problems and things where we didn't think they were possible, and they really help us identify what those things are and how we can resolve them. >> What do you think about their transformation? >> I love it. I absolutely love it. I love all of the buzz words around here, and I even love the new logo. I think it's great, it's full of energy. >> John: Salema Rice, thanks so much for spending the time here. >> Absolutely. >> Inside the Cube, sharing her experiences as an industry practitioner also large scale. Really using data as an asset, that is the theme here. And of course, we believe at the Cube. We're very data-driven as well, software-defined. And that's the future. Salema, thank you so much, it's the Cube. More live coverage here in San Francisco with the Cube after this short break. I'm John Furrier, stay with us.