hello welcome everyone to thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube the monaco crypto summit is happening we're here for the full day and tonight at the yacht club for special presentations crypto team is here digital bits and the industry's gathering and we get some great guests lined up throughout the day our first guest is michael gord co-founder and ceo of gda capital michael welcome to thecube cube great lunch on so we're kicking off the day here we got a lot of a lot of commentary around crypto and also we're in monaco so kind of a special inaugural event why this event why are people gathering here in monaco monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction but and there has been crypto events here before but never with participation from from prince albert so this being the first event first blockchain focus event in monaco that has participation from prince albert has brought a has brought a global audience and the fact that digital bets is intending to there's a a lot of excitement and and what uh what digital bits is going to be coming to market with yeah and i think i talked to alberto the founder and ceo of digitalbits um i've known him for many years he's a tech guy by heart but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto and one of the things i think digital bits has nailed this first the name's amazing but they got real deals i saw our announcement a couple days ago less than 48 hours roma soccer team has a new player they brought the big roll out digitalbits is on the uniform on the front of it huge crowd great visibility so this is a real trend where the the assets of physical and digital coming together there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market but this train is definition is happening training has left the station there's been a lot of over the past decade a lot of startups building in the on blockchains and some of those startups have become big companies but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets and uh digitalbits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those and bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain yeah i mean we met a couple days ago and we were talking in um at the hotel um you're you've been at this for a while you got some great successes talk about your firm what are you guys doing gda what are some of the things you're working on uh you're doing some investment what are some of the angles you're taking bets you've made things you're looking at yeah so i'm a serial entrepreneur and investor i've been focused on the mainstream adoption digital assets for the last decade went about that in in various different ways as i have as i've matured but the way our business looks now is uh is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain and helping institutional capital participate in the market um so we help digital assets with their with their public offering we've gotten into traditional public markets through uh the blockchain moon acquisition corp spac that one of my co-founders is director of we have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars about the transaction volume collateralized lending business we just started some some funds principal investments and then we incubate our own companies internally in category new categories like the metaverse nfts and um other things like that so pretty diversified across the boxing cabinet market at this point and in general looking to create solutions to um help the traditional capital market and the boxing cabinet market get get deeper exposure here you know it's interesting i hear you're speaking about the um how you guys are handling your your view of the landscape multiple moving parts on the investment thesis a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles it's a new creative structural change i mean if you look at just the money how crypto and the future of money this this cultural shift it's also some structural change on how to invest how to manage the investments how to bring on like incubation into most capital public private at the same time on the other side of the coin you have the entrepreneurial energy of um a lot of entrepreneurial ideas you see a lot of creative artists the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave but to me that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure if you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's industrial horowitz or other big vcs moving and shifting it's all the same game it's the infrastructure platform applications and it's but it's different it's not what we used to see because it decentralized how do you react to that what's your view on that concept you see it the same way yeah i think that there's everything with blockchains is novel but almost all of it we've seen before so um we've had games before now with the blockchain we have the ability to earn income by playing games we've had exchanges before but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or or whatever uh that you know there has been art for generations there's been uh now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable nft like every everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect but it's not it's not the first thing the first time that we've seen any of this stuff it's almost interesting you're seeing it recycling all the same concepts on the old web kind of come in the new web and there's also a gen z angle especially the metaverse metaverse the constant theme i'm seeing is hey you want to watch sports you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend so you know the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together and so i see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic i think still massive value in a real event like this us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is uh not replicatable in the metaverse but to be in monaco is not possible for everyone because uh visa reasons because they have something you know it's just you have to be here today is not possible for a hundred percent of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere movie premiere really anything that's happening in the real world is not the metaverse is not gonna replace the real world but it is gonna create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for uh for someone from zimbabwe someone from sydney and someone from brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in monaco and what prince albert is you know how how how how the monarchical crypto summit is looking to position monaco in the future of cryptocurrency the kind of theme of this event and they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse it doesn't replace well i mean i think i mean i think this is a great point this to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion i agree if you look at the notion of presence we're face to face we're here there's people here so we peace we see each other in the lobby maybe he's out sightseeing at dinners so when you have that face to face that's the scarce resource right that's going to be the intimacy sometimes it's not even just to learn about what the pro what's going on but if we're present here how do we create that same experience when you have presence not just some icon chatting but like just movement knowing that you're there connected to people first party is going to be no one's really done it well i think the metaverse is to me is showing the path to being a first-class citizen digitally with a real-time event it's new so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through through a microphone so if if you're beside someone then similar to the real world you can say you know hey how's it going what do you think about the presentation or or whatever you want and if you're speaking in a conversational way then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might might not um it's also that i've i've seen new features in certain like experiences that are coming to market that kind of take the google hangout or skype yeah like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on which is it's getting better but it of course doesn't replace real presence there's no doubt in my mind that in near future soon sooner or later there's gonna be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here okay there will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed will have capability to visualize that person they'll be in a metaverse they'll be queuing up for interviews this is a game this is a mind-blowing thing i mean if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time here with expressions with their with their digital expression their icon whatever whatever their nfts are so i think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather and i think ultimately how truth and and journalism and news is going to change so to me yeah we're super excited we're here obviously because we want to get the stories and you know we love what digital bits is doing prince albert certainly a relevant figure on the global stage um i think this is a signal for a lot of things to come indeed indeed all right so final question before we move on what's your hottest thing you got going on what are you looking at what are you most excited about um well just just this conference um we've got quite a lot of of companies we have exposure in that are that are presenting and a lot of them are coining new new new niches of the market so um we have uh um we've spoken about a lot about the metaverse we have you know i'm and i think the metaverse is probably the the thing that i'm overall most excited about i think it's the next multi-trillion dollar market that feels like bitcoins in but in addition to that we have the first regenerative finance platform that is that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first boxing all blocking protocols but eventually creating a leader board of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge their competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them earn some income outside of the potential value what's the name of that company that's kyoto protocol uh we have the first entertained to earn a company that is is presenting here it's playgood um the first uh e-commerce metaverse platform so integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to i think the future of the metaverse is is social links you have you know finest in the metaverse and you have all of the all the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in which is cool yeah that that's uh but then you're you're going out of the native website instead of having a um instead of you know native to the to the website having a metabolism experience so they're doing that um yeah really cool awesome final question one more final question i got for you because you made me think of it so metaverse obviously hot is there going to be an open metaverse you start to see walled gardens and you got facebook they got slam dunk by the u.s uh in terms of monopolistic move for buying a exercise act which you know i can i i don't think that was a good move by the u.s i think i let him do that but but there they're they're kind of the wall garden model the old facebook i mean decentralized about open yeah historically if we go back in time there's always open and closed infrastructure in the internet um there was there is companies building open infrastructure companies building closed infrastructure and we could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the the intranet is probably is even today still a multi-billion dollar per year business but it's not a multi-trillion dollar per year per year you know infrastructure like the public internet same with the blockchain in 2012 2013 um private blockchains were all the rage by banking raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private boxing infrastructure and private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars of revenue annually but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public watching has i think the same thing will be in the metaverse there will be open and closed infrastructure um but event and there already is close you know fortnight and and games are are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land um i always look at the i'm old school i look at aol they had they monopolized dial up internet like where the hell did that go you know history so again yeah we don't know it's going to be maybe a connection a connection point between these open metaverses we'll see maybe i'm investment update michael thanks for coming on thecube appreciate you kicking off the event here monaco crypto summit powered by digital bits presented by digital bits uh the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies i'm john furrier with more coverage after this short break thanks john [Music] you

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days. Cloud storage, immutability and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on, it has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is oftentimes data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats. This is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring but object storage historically was seen as this low cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard trade offs between cost and performance. That has changed. The ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parody with other storage formats. But cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues. First up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur, who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi. We'll then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi. And then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss, cool. Let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO, and co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Nice to be here. >> Great to have you. So look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years. Why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder, Jeff Flowers, and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disc drive was probably 500 gigabytes. And now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even hundred terabyte drives coming down the road. And, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disc drives is going to run out of steam, because even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures of sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth, was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it. And they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab designing and testing this new storage architecture. And when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we could sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite, you know? When you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zettabytes or something like that. And if you look at that as, you know, the potential market size during that data we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions. And so I said, look, this is a great opportunity. If you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on prem. If you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud. We're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like VEEAM, Commvault, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups they're never going to pay a ransom. So once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well so that you can't do a full restore from your backups, and that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know? Write once read many. And those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud. And it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff. But, you know, the net result is, if you store your backups in immutable buckets in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time. So you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that. Once that date is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty, it's obviously a big deal. I mean, especially for companies with a presence overseas but what's really is any digital business these days? How should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws. And if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in country you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore and I've probably forgotten one or two. But the reason we do that is twofold. One is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in country, so you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in may of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws. And we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and it continues to evolve. We see judgements in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the US and the elimination of third party cookies. What does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of, even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things to this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the US. Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues. So it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world. And this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world. And we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia, and so forth. You know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base. And that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah. It's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David. Thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations. What does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud. And I think, storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth. And it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local. And there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential. You know, the most analysts think that the full all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range. Whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month. And so I think people are learning how to, are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow. That's like a six X more expensive and the clouds more than six X. >> Yeah. >> All right, thank you, David. Go ahead, please. >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to VMO 2022. We're in the home stretch. Now, Dave ante for Dave Nicholson, and we're excited to have drew Schlissel on he's the director of product marketing at wasabi, and he is joined by Dustin Albertson, the manager of cloud and application alliances, product, product management at Veeam software. Dustin, did I get that right? You got it right. All right. You're gonna explain all those little titles in a moment. So wasabi is a company cool name, but you may not know much about them drew. What does wasabi do? >>We do cloud storage, plain and simple. It is the one thing we do extremely well. It's S3 compatible, and it covers a broad range of use cases, right? Primarily we work with Veeam on backup and recovery, and >>We're gonna get into that. But when we, what there's a lot of people do cloud storage, a lot of people do object store. What makes you wasabi unique >>Simplicity, predictability performance security, right? Predictability. Let's talk about price, right? That's the thing that gets people's attention, right? Oh, sure. Okay. You can look at it. One of two ways. It's either one fit the price of all the hyperscalers, significant difference there, or right. For fundamentally the same price. You get five times more storage, which makes a huge difference, especially in the backup space. When you want to have a lot of backups, right. Folks would prefer to have months of backups as opposed to days or weeks. Right? >>How do you, how do you do that? Because, because there's, you know, maybe >>It sounds like magic, doesn't >>It? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, look at us, we've all been around the block quite a few times and we know that the bits and the bites and the bolts are all basically the same. What are you doing to get that level of? >>I can't tell you >>Secret's secret. It's secret. >>Look, it, it doesn't have to be that expensive. Okay. Now granted, there's some things obviously we do that are proprietary and different from, >>Well, like stealing electricity from your neighbor or something. I mean, what, >>You just run a cord over a >>Absolutely that's one way to cut down on price. But because we are so focused on just the storage, right. And our founders, you know, the gentleman who founded Carbonite, no a thing or two about storage. Sure. Right. We have a very highly optimized stack, very efficient. You know, you guys know what raw to usable story is. Right? You've gone through that TCO analysis before, and we're highly efficient in how we use the raw storage. And we pass that price on to our customers. Right. We believe that a low price cloud storage, right? One tier always hot, always available. It gives our customers the ability to spend their money in other places. Right. >>Well, and, and there's a price umbrella that the public cloud guys have is kind of a gift that they've given you. Hey, look at Amazon's operating profits last quarter. It was 35%. Those are like Oracle operating margins. Not that I, we don't know what your operating margins are, but I I've followed David friend's career for a long, long time. He's got good nose for business. But so Dustin, when you, when you hear drew talk about the ability to retain that much data, what does that mean for Veeam customers? >>So the primary thing for Veeam customers is the ease of use. I would say, you know, the, the performance and things like that are all nice, right? They're, they're important. But primarily what I see is people say how easy it is to use and how easy it is to price. Now, the objective, you know, the alternative is you go to another cloud provider and you say, well, how much will this cost me per month? You really have to underst yes, you really have to understand object storage, how Veeam works, how we're moving data, all the API calls, all of that to really kind of correlate out a guesstimate of what your price would be per month. You know, with LASA it's, it's a flat fee it's per terabyte. You know what it is gonna be? That's it? There's no API charges. There's no egres. So the customers really love that. Ease of use this become one of the most popular endpoints for object storage for our customers. >>Imagine this, right? You go to best buy and you buy a refrigerator and you bring it home and you stock it with all your favorite drinks and snacks. Okay. You on game day, you go and you open the fridge and you hear a sound Bing. And it's your phone and it's your credit card company telling you that you've been charged a door opening fee. Okay. And then you grab a beer out of that fridge, Bing, Bing, and you hear another ring and now you're getting a beer extraction fee. Okay. Now I want to be fair to, you know, all the sponsors here, but okay. With wasabi, you can open that door. You could stand there. You can air condition, the whole house. You can take a beer out and put a beer back or whatever your favorite beverage is. And you're not gonna hear that noise. Okay. Very straightforward. Like in, in geometry class, right? The slope of a line Y equals MX plus B B equals zero. Okay. Well, >>Whoa. Well, you had me at free beer. You didn't, >>You don't, but you understand why? >>Why would you, you don't need to go see >>To open your fridge and take out a beverage, take out a snack. Okay. That's the predictable part of wasabi. That's what's resonating so strongly with folks where everything else is in this world. Unpredictable. >>So ease, simplicity. Maybe the answer to that is, well, there's all this other stuff in the cloud. I can just, it's convenient for me. It's right there. So how do you address that convenience factor? All these other services, you know, that I can get streaming and machine learning and all that other great stuff. How do you address that? >>Sometimes all you need is storage. Okay. That no, it that's yet put, okay. That's beauty of wasabi. We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We're trying to be one thing executed very well for a, a specific set of users and use cases. >>I may be a little objective here, but I, I, you know, I've grown up with you guys, right? You, you, you were one of the first partners that I started working with and, and, you know, I've seen you kind of grow, but one of the things I think that you've done a real good job at is, is like you say, sticking to your, your lanes, you know, just going after use cases that just need data. Right. I don't need to get into the AI or the analytics or all of this. We just do this and do it well. And, and people have resonated with that. Right? Yeah. >>So big topic here of course is ransomware. Yeah. 3, 2 11, 0. What is that? What are the threes? The twos, the ones >>That's you, you gotta explain that one. Okay. >>So forever we had the 3, 2, 1 rule, right? Like three copies of data, two different, two different copies, two different media types. Yeah. One offsite. And then one is, is testing. And then zero now is, is validation. BA basically reuse that data. Make sure that you're testing it because if you're not, if you're following through two one, and you're not actually testing your data, is it really good? You don't know. You're just, you may have bad copies spread out all over the place. So one of the things where wasabi shines is is that they don't have these E risk charges. They don't have these API charges. So you can test that data. You can, after you send a backup up there, restore it somewhere else and validate that it works and then get rid of it. And it's still sitting up there in BAA. >>So you're not trying to balance your activities and your operational requirements with your, with your bill. Correct. You're not getting yelled at, by the, the controller at the end of the month. >>You're unconstrained. Yeah. Right. And I think also imutability comes into play. Correct. As well. >>Talk about >>That. Right. So, you know, we heard this morning in the keynote, right? That backup data sets are, you know, one of the main attack vectors, right. For cyber criminals. And it makes sense, right. They take down your primary systems and they control your backup systems. They've got you. You have no choice, but to pay that ransom. Okay. So mutability, that means that your backups are untouchable, your root user, your admins, the folks at wasabi, the folks at Veeam, nobody can alter that data period. End of story. Okay. That saves you from yourself that saves you from the hackers, right? I mean the most disturbing story I've read about cyber warfare right now is that people are getting bribe offers from these cyber gangs. And they're just, you know, for a couple of Bitcoin handing over the keys to the kingdom with imutability, you're actually safe from that scenario. >>So that's a service, correct? >>No, it's a feature. >>Okay. So can I turn it off? >>Yeah. You don't have to use it. >>No. Can I, after I've, after I've turned it on, can I turn it off? >>Oh, it's up to you. I mean, why don't you talk about >>That? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's an API. So if let's say you send some backups up there today and you set it for two weeks and you decide today. Oh, I made a mistake. I wanna turn it off. You can't turn it off. Yeah. >>Okay. So as long as you set that policy, it's, it's a big warning, right? You can't undo this. Correct. Okay. So even if I come, come to jump to the admin with a bunch of Bitcoin yep. He or she can't undo, right? >>Nope. That's right. And you can set it for two weeks, two months, two years. Right. You can use it to secure your backups. Yep. Right. You can also use that same feature in compliance situations. Right. Regulatory environments, where you've gotta retain customer data for, you know, 5, 7, 10 years. Right. By using that imutability feature, you guarantee the integrity of that data for whatever period you set. >>And it's a feature it's not a paid for service. Is that right? >>It is included as part of the service. >>Okay. So I don't >>Free beer and free meat. >>I think I'm correct that some, some competitors you're paying for that service. So if you turn it off, there's a, if you don't stop paying, there's a, there's a theory. They could turn it off on you. They will warn you. >>Sure. But >>That says to me that somebody could be tempted by a few Bitcoin. >>That's not a mutable. Well's >>Notable. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >>Well, and, and there is a charge to use it in other places because it's an API request. Right. It's an action. It's opening the fridge. >>It's like texting. Yes. Maybe a charge. >>Yeah. I remember. I remember those days. Was it 10 cents? A 10 cents a message or something Telegraph. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. You still get those messages. Right? Text, text fees may apply. I'm like really? Okay. So tell me more about, so you got me. I'm sold. Okay. I've I've David friends got good job. Got cred, got credibility. Okay. But I have some other questions. Like where's my data. You guys running your own data centers. What's your global footprint. How do you deal with data sovereignty? All that stuff. >>So right now, oh boy. Now I'm on the spot. I wanna say 11 locations around the world. It's our gear. We're running it in concert with folks who are helping us host that system. Right. But we have complete control of course, over our systems. We're everywhere. Right? Just open, let's see. Toronto Frankfurt, Paris, London, Sydney just spun up in the last week. We've got Singapore coming online. I think in the next two weeks. Two >>In Japan. >>Yep. Two in Japan, multiple locations in the United States. So in terms of sovereignty, right, as long as folks are keeping it within, you know, their, their physical boundaries, not a problem. And if folks want to use, you know, other locations in other countries, great. We can support that as well. >>So you got momentum as a business. I mean, that's pretty clear. Yeah. Just from the discussions I've had with, with folks like David, and obviously you you're excited about this, where's it coming from? Is it really that, that price factor that's driving people to you? Is it Dustin said simplicity. I mean, where are you seeing the momentum geographies? Where is it? Where's the action. >>I I'll say, you know, from my point of view, it's, it's been a combination of all that, right? It, it's simple. It's easy to use a, like a user can, any user who's not cloud friendly, right. Can log in and create one. It's a simple portal to create a bucket and then start sending stuff off site. But also they've, they've kind of, they reminded me of a younger Veeam, like when they first started, because they went after the channel and they went and started these partner programs and, and MSP programs and things like that that have been really successful as far as one of the key markets is MSPs. Right? Because they, you know, want a cheap place to put this data. They don't wanna have to buy appliances. They don't wanna have to go to AWS and things like that. So this has been really appealing to >>Them. You know, it's interesting. So I have a, we have a partnership with a data company down in New York called enterprise technology research. We write a breaking analysis every week and we use a lot of their data. One of the things that popped up recently, maybe a year ago, OpenStack I'm like OpenStack. So we dug in like where's OpenStack and what it was was MSPs didn't want pay the VTax. Right. So they were rolling their own with, with open source and open stack. It was red hat services, blah, blah, blah. But it sounds like a similar dynamic, especially with the MSPs. >>I, so I think we've, I, I hate to use the, the metaphor, but I will. Right. There's a perfect storm happening, right. Especially in the last, what, two years. All right. The cloud has been gaining traction, but we've been around long enough to see the pendulum swinging. Right. Some folks went crazy for the cloud and then they got their bill and then they went crazy to get back out of the cloud. But now, you know, with distributed workforces, with the, you know, the, the constant attacks on their, their on-prem systems, right. The growth in cloud across the board has been phenomenal. I know you're a market watcher. Right. I know you guys are keeping close eyes. I saw your recent analysis on the cybersecurity firms. Right. It continues to grow. There's no question about it. We're we're on that wave. Right. And I think we've, you know, we're not, we're, we're, I don't know if it's the long board or the short little snappy board. Yes. We actually identify and, and, and went after the opportunity to partner with Veeam very early on, because it's the perfect work case work, work load. >>How long can you sustain that? And still resist the temptation to come out with some new shiny object to distract people? >>I >>Mean, what, what, what does that, what does that look like in terms of, as you look out in this laser focused yeah. Addressable market that you're going after now. >>So, you know, the best part about being here this week is having great conversations and, and talking to folks about what they're seeing in the marketplace and the different verticals. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of any of the verticals that we are working in today. Right. First and foremost, when it comes to backup and recovery, there's so much more opportunity with Veeam, right? Whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, analytics, backup of IML, you know, analysis, I think it's almost limitless, right. Data's growing what, 40, 80% year, over year, depending on who you ask. Right. Then the other things that we do, which maybe folks don't even know about, we have a burgeoning business in video surveillance, right. We're working with all the top partners in that sector. And the takeup is phenomenal because they are tweaking their technology to maintain a relatively small cash, right. OnPrem or in the central office. And then they're just kind of, you know, tearing that off to the cloud to have essentially a bottomless backup or archive of that footage. And they can do it at 4k. Here's the best part, right. When AK comes out, guess what, you know, that data set doubles in size. >>Right. But that's right in your zone. That's not stepping out that that's not stepping after that's that's classic leveraging. Good >>Answer. In other words. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. >>I mean, if >>You're, if you're, if you're hitting singles and doubles all day long, right. Do you have to switch to be a power hitter and go for the fences and drop your batting average down, but hope that your slugging percentage goes up. I think you keep hitting singles doubles, you know, in triples, >>A lot of people on Sandhill road or, you know, at the bar at the Rosewood would disagree with you. Wow. And so I, I appreciate the discipline. >>Yeah. And it's true. And, and as we know, the industry is littered with a lot of those names that just didn't didn't make it >>Let's stay positive, you know? >>Okay. No he's saying yeah, no, no. A lot of guys at sand hill road would say, no, you gotta go for it. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta forget these singles. We want, >>Yeah. We need home runs gotta be >>Shiny. Well, I mean, look at Vema as a, as a, as an example right. Of a disciplined approach. Right. Exactly. To, to a space that they have steadily grown. I mean, congratulations. Right. You guys have been identified by IDC, right. Is essentially, you know, co number ones. And I expect that to be the number one in the market. Right. I think, you know, David friend clearly has provided excellent guidance, right. To steer the company that way. And I'm just really happy >>To be about that. Oh. And the Tam is data. Right. And you're, you're just another node on the data universe. Right. Which is, that's what you want. You want, you don't necessarily wanna move it around. Yeah. If you don't have to. >>It is interesting though. I mean, we, we are seeing more and more analysts identifying with Sabi as like the fourth player. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Right. And I also heard it from some good sources this week that let's say one of the hyperscalers has, you know, started to yeah. Have conversations about us. Let's just >>Leave it. That's good. It means you're bothering people. Yeah. Said, all right, guys, we gotta go. Thanks so much for coming on the queue. Thank you. Great to have you. That was easy. Thank you. Appreciate it. Very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day one from VMO in 2022, right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm really excited because for the first time in my CUBE career of six years, I have a father daughter duo maybe the first time in CUBE's history. Frank and Emma Arrigo from AWS join me guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Great to be here thank you. >> So, Emma, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about how you got to AWS and a little bit about your background. >> Yes, thanks Lisa. So I've joined AWS as a recent graduate from university. So I did my masters of data science and I was going through the grad, the grad job hunt applying for all these different places. And AWS appeared on my radar for an intern program. And Frank was there at the time and so I was like, "Should I do it?" But I still applied cause it was a great program. And so I went did that internship for three months over the summer of 2019-2020, and then I went back and finished my degree. And another grad role came up for in AWS in Tech U to be an associate solutions architect. And so I was approached to apply for that. And I got through to that program and joined the team almost a year ago in March, 2021 through Tech U and yeah, that's how I ended up at AWS. >> Excellent and so Frank, this is a pretty unique situation, father daughter duo at AWS let alone Amazon, let alone probably a lot of companies. Talk to me about it the parental lens. >> Yeah, look it is unique, there's a few family connections within AWS, but you know, definitely here in Australia, it's really rare, but I think the family connection is, you know Emma and we've got four kids, I've got four kids in total. So Emma has three brothers, you know, I've lived in tech, my entire career and so they've been part of it. You know, we've lived in the States, lived in Seattle for a couple of years. And so they'd come to the office and see what dad did. And so it wasn't a big surprise for them to understand what the role was and what we did, so, you know, they kind of grew up with it. And you know, when the opportunity came up for Emma, did the internship, I was excited for it because it was in a different area. It was working in a startup team doing some interesting work that really lined up with some of the interest Emma had. And so she kind of learned what it was like to be Amazonian through that internship and that was... I call that a long audition for a job. And she was then able to join Tech U program, which is a early career bootcamp, I like to think of it, which is the six month program to help our grads learn some of the fundamental skills because the value of a solutions architect or some of these other tech roles is you need experience. You need to have been in the game a while to be a trusted advisor to a customer. And it's hard to do that when you're a grad. So the bootcamp gives them the practical experience and then they get another six months on the job experience where they develop those skills and hone it and get ready to, you know, be a trusted advisor to the customers. >> Right, and that's such a great... I'm sure that's a tremendous opportunity to learn how to become that trusted advisor, especially from peers, such as yourself and I want to go back to you. Talk to me about your interest in IT, in data science. Was this something that you were always interested in primary school or in high school? Or was this something that kind of came on later on? >> Yeah, so my interest in tech kind of emerged as I went along in my education. So when I was younger, I really wanted to be an orthodontist for some reason. I don't know why. And then you just sort of in year eight and like early school sort of didn't really know what I wanted to do. Just sort of going through just trying to survive as a teenage girl at high school at an all girls school, didn't really have many, didn't really have career aspirations, I guess, and then one year I attended a information day at a university about engineering and that just really sparked my interest, I don't know why, but I was like, I've always been obsessed with like factories and those types of things and how things are made. And so that really just sparked my interest and I never really thought of it before. And so then that put STEM engineering on my radar and then I guess spoke with it about with the parents. And then they mentioned that tech would be a like IT, Information Technology would be really useful. And so then we approached the school to ask if I could do IT in year 11. So that's sort of our second last year of high school. And they said, "No, we couldn't do IT." I couldn't go to the boys' school to do IT. That girls don't do it or that not good at it. And I wasn't allowed, and they wouldn't let me do physics either. So I moved school in for the final two of high school to be able to do IT and physics to help, you know, get to the course I wanted to do. And so that was my journey into STEM. So it wasn't really on my radar, but then events like this and at university isn't it? Organizations sparked my interest. And then still when I entered university, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to major in nor where I wanted to work would never have thought it would be where, with my father, like I was aware of the world of IT and everything, but I wouldn't, if you'd asked me in first year, it wouldn't have been that I would probably, we would've said, I don't know an academic or something. I don't know. And then, but again, as the university went on and you attend networking events or club things, you sort of learn a bit more about the ecosystem. And then that's where yeah. Tech company sort of became where I was looking for jobs and roles for when I finished up. So that was kind of my journey to... >> So what I love though, that you and Frank, this is going to be a question for you, how Emma was told. "No, you can't study IT. No, you can't study physics. You can't go to the boys school and do that either." Talk to me about that, Frank, from your perspective as a parent of a daughter, and you said, I think she's got three brothers lucky, Emma, but talk to me about that from your perspective, in terms of going, my daughter has really has an in a strong interest in this and they're telling her no we're going to pivot and actually change schools to be able give her the opportunities that she wants to pursue. >> Yeah. Look, as a parent, we were shocked. You know, it was just an unexpected response, you know, in a lot of ways, the school that she was at was more of a finishing school than anything else, you know, preparing young ladies for marriage and, you know, career as a, I don't know, I will leave it at that. So we were really disappointed. And so very quickly we looked at other alternatives and other options and we pulled Emma out of school and we knew it was like the last two years are critical in Australia. We don't have a middle school and a senior school, it's all one, you know, combined thing. But those last two years are all about getting ready for university. And so we made a really tough call and we picked her up, dropped her into a totally new school. It was co-ed school. And then when we told her previous, her girl's school. I actually spoke to the vice principal and he said, "Oh, I can't believe you're sending her to a co-ed school. She's going to struggle 'cause boys are so much better in tech." And I was totally, I was lost for words, right? Because I felt back in my career and I had some amazing female managers, leaders, role models in my time that I worked for and I followed and they were always struggling because, you know, they were in the minority, but they were incredible, you know, technologists and leaders. And I just couldn't believe it. So as parents we made the tough call. We picked Emma up. We put her into another high school and she flourished, you know, Emma started a club, she got convolved with a whole bunch of other things. When she graduated, the teachers felt that she'd been there six years, right? The whole time of it. So she really made a mark, made an impact at this school and so much so that her younger brother then followed and went to that school and completed his high school there as well. But it, we just can't believe it. And we tell it everyone, this story, you know, we name the school, we won't name. We choose not to name them here, but we name the school because we just think it's really terrible guidance and terrible advice. Like we want people to follow their passion. I tell my kids and I tell the folks when I speak to, you know, early career folks, follow your passion first, guess what the job will appear. Right? You know, there'll be the... The work will come if you do something that you love. And then the second piece that I always say is, "Every future job is going to be a tech job." Technology is embedded in everything that we do. So the fact that you say, "A girl can't do technology," you're limiting yourselves, right? You don't want to think that, you want to think about the possibilities rather than the things you can't do. It's the things you can do. And the things that you haven't even thought about doing. So that's why, you know, it was so exciting to see that experience with Emma, and just seeing her grow through that and she became a bit of a STEM advocate at a high school as well. So, she saw the value of her role model that helped her. And she wants to be a.... Continue being a role model for others as well, which again, I think is admirable, right? It's about- >> Absolutely. >> Shining a light and leading and as a parent, irrespective that we work at the same company as a parent, that's what you want to see. You want to see your kids aim high and inspire others. That's what she does. >> Well, she's already been a role model too, I mean, to your younger brother, but one of the things that we say often, and theCUBE does a lot for women in technology events. And I'm fortunate to get to host a lot of those, we say, "You can't be what you can't see." So needing to have those role models who are visible. Now, it doesn't have to be female necessarily. and Frank you mentioned that you had female mentors and role models and in your illustrious career. But the important point is being able to elevate women into positions where others can see and can identify, "Oh, there's a role model. There's somebody that might be a mentor for me, or a sponsor down the road, it's critically important." And as of course, we look at the numbers in tech, women in technical roles are still quite low, but Emma, tell me a little bit about, you've been through the program. You talked about that. What are some of the things that you feel in like the last six months that you've been able to learn that had you not had this opportunity, maybe you wouldn't have. >> You know, I think that's a great point. So as a solutions architect, I get to be both technical. So hands on building an AWS, helping customers solve their problems, whether it be a data leak or I don't know, an image recognition tool to look for garbage dumped on the street or, and also thinking from the business perspective for the customers, so that's a fun part as the, of the role, but things I get to do. So currently I'm working on a demo for the conference in Sydney. So I'm building a traffic detection model using some computer vision and IOT so I get to bring my data science background to this build and also learn about new areas like IOT, Internet Of Things; Technologies. So that's been a really fun project and yeah, just having the ability to play around on AWS, we have... >> Right. Well, the exposure in the experiences is priceless. You can't put a price on that, but being able to get into the environment, learn it from a technical perspective, learn it from a practical perspective. And then of course get all the great things about getting to interact with customers and learning how different industries work, you mentioned you were in public sector. That just must be a field of dreams, I would imagine. >> I know. >> In some senses for you, right? >> Really have lucked out. I know it's, I'm like, "Wow, this my job is to play around with some new service, just because need to know about that for the customer meeting. Like I'm building a chatbot or helping build a chatbot for a customer, at the university. So yeah, things like that make it very, yeah. It's a pretty amazing role. >> It sounds, it sure sounds like it. And sounds like you're are excelling at it tremendously. Let me ask you Emma. For young girls who might be in a similar situation to where you were not that long ago with the school telling you, "No, you can't do IT." "No, you can't do physics." So you actually switched schools. What would you tell those young girls who might be in that situation about hearing the word, "No." And would you advise them to embrace a career in technology? >> Yeah, I would say that it really..... What makes me so sad is if my family didn't know about tech and had my... Supported me through that like if I would've just gone, "Oh, okay. I won't do it." You know what I mean? Like that just makes me really sad. How many people have missed out on studying what they wanted to study. So by having those types of experiences, so what I would say as advice is, "Back yourself, find supporters, whether it be your family or a teacher that you really sort of connect with, to be able to support you and through these decisions." And yeah, I think having those sponsors in a way, your advocates to help you make those choices and help support you through those choices. >> Yeah. I agree. And I have a feeling you're going to be one of those sponsors and mentors, if you aren't already Emma, I have a feeling that's just around the corner from you. So Frank, last question to you. What's the overall lesson here, if we look at statistics, I mentioned some of the stats about, you know, women in technical roles as usually less than 25% globally. But also we see data that shows that companies are more profitable and more performant when there's at least 30% of the executive suite it's women. So from your parental perspective, and from an Amazonian perspective, Frank, what's the lesson here? >> Well, look from an Amazonian perspective, we need to make sure that we have a team that represents our customers, right? And our customers aren't all boys. You know, they're not all blokes, as we say down here. So you've got to have a team that is made up of what represents your customers. So I think that's the Amazonian view. And so diverse perspectives, diverse experience, diverse backgrounds is what does that. The other from a parent, you know, I said it earlier. I think every future job is a tech job. And I think it's really important that as kids come through, you know, primary school, high school, whatever, they're prepared for that, they're already consumers of technology. You know, they need to be creators or, or participate in that environment. And I can give you an example, a few years ago, I worked for, at a large telco here. And we actually invested in a thing called code club, which was aimed at primary school kids, kids in grade four, five and six. So elementary school for my friends in America, it's kids in grade four, five and six. And they were learning how to use scratch. Scratch is this interactive tool like building lego to write programming and believe it or not, there were more girls interested and were part of code club. It was probably 60-40 was the ratio of young girls doing it compared to boys because it was creative, it was a creative outlet, they were building stuff and assembling and making these things that they loved to make. Right. But then what we saw was there'd be a drop off at high school, whether it's curriculum related or interests or distractions, I don't know what it is, but there things get lost along the way along high school. But I see it at the primary school stage at elementary school that the interest is there. So I think part of it is, there needs to be a bit of a switch up in education or other opportunities outside of school to really foster and nurture and develop this interest because it really does take all kinds to be successful in the role. And Emma talked about a chatbot that she's building and that's a conversational thing. I can't see geek boys having being able to impact and create a interesting conversation, right. Then there's other areas that seems to be skewed and biased based on a predominantly male view of the world. So we need the tech, the industry needs these diverse perspectives and these diverse views, because, you know, to your point, it's going to impact the bottom line. It's going to also deliver a better product and it's going to reflect society. It's going to reflect the customers that are using it because we're made up of every, every race and color, creed, gender. And we need a team that represents that. >> Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Well, it sounds like the Arrigo family are quite the supporters of this, but also we need more of both of you. We need more of the sponsors and the parents who are encouraging the kids and making the right decisions to help them get along that path. And we need more folks like Emma and more women that we can see, "Wow, look what she's doing in such a short time period. We want to be just like that." So you guys are, have both been fantastic. I thank you so much for joining me at the International. Women's Showcase, more power to your family. We need more folks like you guys, so great work. Keep it up. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For Frank and Emma Arrigo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Showcase 2022. (soothing music)

>>Hey guys, welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage day, one of AWS and re-invent live that's right live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to be here. We are running actually one of the industry's most important hybrid tech events with AWS this year, and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We have two lives dots, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni and a new guest to the program. Savina Joyce Sabina, Joseph GM of technology partners at AWS joins me as well as Scott Owen, the VP of business development and global channels at air slate, guys. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. It's a great to be here. Live happy. Fantastic. Let's go ahead and give the audience an overview of your roles. Sabina. We'll start with you. And then Scott will go to you. >>Great to see you again, Lisa general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas, and we also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow their business in the Americas. >>Awesome. Scott goes, I'd give, give us an overview of air slate and then your role. You will. >>You bet. Uh, so, uh, air slate, we have two offerings on the AWS marketplace or e-signature offering, which is sign now and then our no-code workflow automation, which we're really excited to bring on the marketplace. I lead our business development, uh, in channels organization for the company global partnership with AWS. Uh, we're very excited about it. >>Talk to me about some of the challenges that the tools that you just mentioned, what challenges are those solving for customers in any industry? So, >>Oh, the biggest challenges right now, obviously we are in a COVID environment and, and companies are trying to drive automation optimization, especially for remote workers to today. And so part of our solutions is obviously solving that in a very, very big way on a global basis as well. >>What are some of the key trends that you're seeing? We've seen so much flux on change in the last 20 months, but what are some of the key trends, especially as it relates to workforce productivity with those work from anywhere environments still persisting, >>It's still persisting. And I'd say the challenge is we're in a hybrid mode where you have both, you know, coming to the office, not coming to the office, but still very remote, just a last week's announcement of a new variant, for example, forcing everybody back out of the office, back into a remote environment. So flexibility, uh, around supporting that hybrid workforce is key. >>And of course here we are at a hybrid event. There are people here at a lot of them in person, but there's also a lot of content that's going on virtually for those folks that weren't quite comfortable coming back to an in-person event. But let's talk about savings about how AWS has been helping joint customers with air slate through the pandemic over the last 20 months as we saw this scatter. And now this work from this hybrid kind of work environment. Yeah. So, >>So I, Scott mentioned, right, that customers are really looking for business solutions. I did have some rapidly increased the last 20 months. We are really, we've been really working together to help both workers and businesses adapt to this remote environment. And customers are looking for simple and cost effective solutions anywhere from, you know, improving and automating their business workflows with e-signature solutions, all the way to complex processes with no code capabilities and air slate does a great job of providing these solutions for our customers. >>Some of the things from a business automation perspective that are critical these days is anything contactless talking about. E-signatures for example, it's, that's really became table stakes in the last 20 months. It's not talk to me about how you would from a biz-dev lens. Describe the partnership that air slate has with AWS. >>Yeah. For our company, it is the most strategic partnership that we have and it's all the way from our board level to our executive leadership team all the way through, throughout our organization end to end it's our most strategic partnership. >>And the things that we know and love about AWS that we've talked about with Sabina is their customer first focus, their customer obsession from a cultural perspective, is there alignment there with air Slate's culture, >>A hundred percent. And one of the cool things about the AWS partner program, which we're in a high echelon period, is the focus on the customer. The customer can reduce their EDP commit by buying solutions like ourselves on the AWS marketplace, as well as the AWS account executives are also paid and incented to sell our solution as well. So it's a one plus one equals three scenario. >>That's a good scenario. One plus one plus three. So be it, talk to me about the evolution. How long have you guys been partnering with air slate? And talk to me about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah. We've been working together for a few years now, but I would say the last 15 months, we've really accelerated that partnership again because of customer need and really built out high velocity Cosell motions. We made available to our slate, our partnership resources, both from commercial and public sector to scale the sales motion. As Scott mentioned, they're available in marketplace and they're also part of our ISV accelerate program, which means that our sales teams are incented to work with air slate, to close opportunities. And the key is all of this has led to 250% increase in customer wins year to date as compared to 2020. So that really speaks volumes with the partnership and the need that we are solving for our customers. >>Amazing, amazing growth, 250% in, in a year's period during a pandemic, that's massive, but we saw the acceleration of cloud adoption of digital transformation and this dependence on SAS and cloud for our business lives, our daily lives, our consumer lives. That was really absolutely critical. So Scott, from your perspective, what are some of the key aspects of the AWS relationship that you think really contribute to that success and that big metric that we just met? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, the metric is driven by the partner programs. When you have a customer that can buy on the marketplace, reduce their EDP commit. You've got account executives that are incented to resell us, but for us, we have really great leadership support around the globe. We've created joint KPIs of which we all have stacked hands on and said, here's the KPIs we want to deliver as a joint partnership. And we're delivering those, which is creating these results as well. Can you share >>Some of those KPIs even at a high level? >>Yes. A lot of them are what, uh, opportunities in our renewal base can we bring into the ado, uh, UWS, uh, ecosystem, if you will. Um, as well as in nearly every deal that we're in, we're asking, is this an AWS customer? Is it a Greenfield opportunity for AWS and bring in the associated teams together to close that opportunity, >>Scott, about some of the business outcomes, the benefits that your joint customers are achieving, leveraging the power of this partnership? >>Absolutely well there's enormous cost savings in the solutions that we bring to the table creates the optimization that we talked about, that they need. It's also driving that digital transformation, any company, any size in order to survive has to move digitally into this new space. And we believe that the two offerings we bring to the marketplace can solve that for them. >>That's one of the things that we saw, there's definitely some silver linings that have come out of the last 20 I'm losing count 22 months, something like that. And nothing like that, right. A time to value is absolutely critical. Let's talk about now go to market Sydney and going back over to you, how does AWS support partners like air slate, um, and taking the solutions to market? You talked about the marketplace, but talk to me about that from a strategic perspective. Yes. >>So one of the things we are very focused on is creating business automation solutions, especially for industry verticals across automotive, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, and air slate really has solutions that help address all of the horizontal use cases and the vertical use cases, which means then we can focus our demand generation activities and actually help both our direct sales team and also our channel partners really, really scale. So again, it's kudos to Scott and the air slate team in order to be able to really scale this partnership, but most importantly help our customers through these really tough times in the past 20 months. >>And it's, uh, uh, you mentioned that with the Omicron Darion variant being announced just in the last week, of course, these challenging times persist in this uncertainty persists to it's important to have partnerships, but I also imagine Scott from your, from your perspective, being able to show transparency to the customers that you're really one team, you know, with AWS, with your channel partners. Talk to me a little bit about that. What does customers actually see and feel >>While we're excited, especially around the ecosystem piece is for example, in the last few months, we've been able to activate 35 of AWS's largest channel partners, uh, due to the fact that we are in this hand, stacked KPI go to market together. And so the ecosystem of AWS, it's the trusted partner of almost every customer. And we are trying to advantage ourselves with that trusted relationship, bringing a set of solutions that helps drive the customer's outcome. >>You mentioned an important word there, Scott, that trust that is critical for every company that is becoming a data company. If they haven't become a data company by now, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about from a trust perspective, what that means for your customers to be able to adopt these solutions, automate their businesses, allow their folks to work from anywhere and have that trust and this solid partnership and technology. >>Well, and that's the benefit of the AWS partnership. When you think of security, reliability, our entire offering basis completely on the AWS infrastructure. So we bring that trust of you can trust that the technology that it's sitting on, you can trust that it's secure, that's reliable, and we're bringing a set of solutions that drives those customer outcomes, which is cost savings, optimizations, et cetera. That combination is a win-win out there. >>And that outcome spaced focus is critical. What are some of the things Scott that folks can learn at air Slate's booth this week at reinvent for those folks that are here in person and those folks that are attending virtually >>Great question. I love that question first and foremost, both offerings are on the AWS marketplace, but we're the only e-signature offering on the marketplace. And we're the only end to end workflow automation offering on the marketplace as well. So again, uh, important to note we're on that AWS marketplace, AEs from AWS can take advantage of that end. Customers can take advantage of that. Uh, and we take advantage of it just to the, our great go to market partnership. >>We're going to mark great, good to market partnership, but also I'm hearing a pretty significant differentiator being the only ones in the marketplace with those. Talk to me about how that, I mean, one, one more question. How does that facilitate like customer conversations? I imagine that's a huge differential >>Here's is a significant different traitor to us obviously, but again, it's the power of one. Plus one equals three in the partnership, we brought a set of solutions that the customer needs. We do it on the AWS marketplace and AWS infrastructure that we sit on that creates that trust factor that you mentioned. >>I have to add, right? That air slate and team, when they saw that they were the first right, they embraced that and they broke ground and they listed on marketplace and that's paying off for them. >>Very smart. Well guys, congratulations on your joint success. Your go to market strategy seems brilliant, and we look forward to hearing many more successful years from airside and AWS together. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure. You were great for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from AWS. Reinvent the leader in global alive tech coverage.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>It's the Q we are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, we're covering UI path forward for this is our second day of coverage. We've had a lot of great conversations with customers at UI path partners, their senior leaders. And next up, we're going to be talking to, I'm going to say the queen of citizen developer nests. We're not just going to create that title for you. Sydney, Madison Prescott. She's the global head of intelligent automation at Spotify Sydney. Welcome to the program. I >>Am so excited >>To be here. We're excited to have you. So one of my, as we were talking before we went live, we both are big fans of Spotify. I don't know what we would do without it in our personal lives. But talk to me a little bit about Spotify automation, UI path. And I don't want to get into you your book, what you've done for citizen developers. >>Perfect. So Spotify is on a very interesting journey. Uh, we began the journey during the pandemic and we were speaking about this a little bit earlier. And so our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle, uh, still wanting to upskill our employees, despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis. And so through that endeavor, we decided to actually split out our different, uh, automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation. And we did all of this through a center of excellence. So a centralized, uh, COE, which would facilitate the growth of the automations, uh, whether on the citizen developer side or the unattended side. And through this programs, we set up, uh, several different trainings where we could facilitate the growth of the citizen developer community through five day, what we call bot boot camps and the bot boot camp is in essence, um, five day training, about four and a half, five hours a day, where we take anyone at Spotify who would like to upskill in this type of automation. And we teach them everything from the basics of robotic process automation, all the way to, you know, what are all of the Spotify specific things that you have to do in order to maintain a robust, uh, citizen developer footprint within your team. And so through that, uh, that entire journey, it's been quite amazing. We started with a very small footprint in our accounting team, and we have scaled now to over 100 citizen developers, uh, in a variety of functions within Spotify. >>And what was the role that you came to Spotify to do? Cause you came there, went there right before the everything happened. >>Yes. So I was actually, uh, brought into Spotify to stand up and scale out our intelligent automation center of excellence. >>So the center of excellence is, is sort of the main spring of knowledge, training innovation. And then the, the citizen developer piece, it sounds like you're pushing out distributing that knowledge. Right. And so I'm interested in that sort of architecture of automation is that you've got a combination of centralized expertise and decentralized innovation. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. So it's very interesting actually. So we facilitate the citizen developer program through the center of excellence. So you can think of the center of excellence as the foundation of that knowledge. And our goal is to democratize that knowledge throughout the enterprise. And the way we do that is through the training. Uh, we facilitate the governance of the program. So making sure that all of the infrastructure is properly set up, uh, enabling the citizens, if they need support, just talking about ideation, uh, even so far as up-skilling as well. So upskilling all the way to a power user, uh, whereby those users could become true innovators and facilitate a wide variety of automations within their teams. And was it >>The events of the last 18 months? It really catalyzed this and kind of led you to really become a big advocate for citizen led development. >>It did. So we initially were starting with just the center of excellence and an unintended footprint, and we quickly pivoted and realized that we needed to in order to scale, uh, significantly given the, the situation working virtually, uh, we are a distributed team around the world that it was critical for our success that we could, uh, really distribute to this workout. And we felt that the best way to do that was through standing up a citizen developer program. >>The things that I'm trying to understand is the relationship between automation and data. And I look at Spotify in many respects is a data company, at least a company who really understands data. And I see you building all these awesome data products. I'm a subscriber as well, but you know, you've added podcasts, you've got contributors to those podcasts. You've obviously got artists and you know, these people obviously have to be paid. You have this sort of interesting ecosystem and these are all data products, if you will, that you guys build. And it's very cool sort of business model. What's the relationship between data and automation? >>Well, it is a big relationship. I would actually say it is probably the pivotal relationship because in order to tell that compelling story of digital transformation, we have to understand the data behind all of the automations that we're generating. Um, and this is whether it says in developer or COE built. Um, and so for us, it's, it's a critical component of our success that we can pinpoint those key metrics that we are looking at and tracking, you know, what does success mean for our center of excellence? What does it mean for our citizen led program? And this is everything from, you know, increased data quality to risk mitigation of different internal regulatory risk. Uh, it could be something as simple as our saved on automation. So it's, uh, a wide variety of attributes that we're looking at to really pinpoint where the successes are coming from and where we can improve maybe where we need to improve our automation footprint in a given business. >>Why did you write this book? >>Great question. So I believe in citizen development, I think it is a very unique approach to spreading out the way that you can transform your business. And so I saw a lot of struggles as I've gone through I'm in the industry with understanding citizen development, uh, the premise of it, and also understanding the technology behind it. Um, I am a big fan of studio X. And so the book specifically focuses on studio X. Um, it really introducing users to what is studio X and how really teaching individuals, how to upskill themselves, um, just through the use of the book, very intuitive and hopefully taking away some of the fear that the users may have about walking through a platform like studio S >>So what do I have to know to actually, can I read your book and then start coding? Is it by >>That is the goal. Yes. So the goal for the book is very hands-on. So it is, it is a book for, um, the novice business user, uh, someone who is not familiar with RPA, someone who may not even be familiar with UI path, they would be able to pick up this book, go through the set of exercises. It's very robust out over 400 pages. So it really packed a lot of knowledge in there, but the goal would be by the time you walk through every single exercise and complete the book, you would not only understand RPA. You would also understand UI path as a, as a service provider platform. You'd also understand the nuances of studio X. >>So in theory, someone like myself could get your book, download the community edition, start building automations, right? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. >>You have to Google a few things, but yeah. >>Yes. And it comes with a very robust code code set up. They're able to actually look at the code and review, uh, examples of the code, uh, in a source code repository. So again, it's very novice users it's meant for, to help facilitate just the learning of someone who is maybe curious about RPA, curious about UI path, or just curious about studio app. >>I already have the use case. >>You do have these guys I'm interested in doing it too. I mean, I can tell that it's a passion project of yours that you fundamentally believe in. You know, we saw this morning data from IDC and we've seen lots of different data sources that talk about, oh, automation taking jobs, people being fearful, organizations, not being ready at the same time. We've had such a tumultuous last 18 months that organizations that weren't digital are probably gone and organizations that aren't, how did there was this massive uptake in automation because suddenly you couldn't get bodies into buildings. So tell me about how this book is a facility, first of all, tell us the name of it. And then as a facilitator of those employees who might be worried about their jobs being taken by bots, >>That is a great question. So the, the name of the book is robotic process automation, a citizen developers guide to hyper automation using UI path studio X. And I would say I've heard a lot of the conversation surrounding the loss of jobs, the potential fear, uh, we all we know as humans, we are generally unfortunately, a little resistant to change and, you know, the, I'll say the digital revolution that we're going through, uh, within the workforce, whether it is hybrid work, whether it is completely virtual work, it is a bit daunting. And I understand that fear, I think in alignment with the conversation that we had heard about earlier at forward there, RPA has the ability to generate a massive amount of not only improvements within different industries, but jobs as well. Right? And for someone who is looking at this kind of ever changing landscape, and they're wondering, where do I fit in? >>Am I going to get pushed out of a, of a general, you know, uh, industry? I would say that that fear turned that into power, turned that into ambition. Um, the level of upskilling that you can do on your own, whether it's using UiPath academy, whether it's reaching out to your center of excellence, it's incredible. Um, there's a wide variety of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And in essence, you become, um, a powerful player in your environment because not only do you have the business acumen, you now have the technical acumen, and that is everything. I mean, when we talk about transformation, we talk about where our industry's going. Um, there's a saying that, you know, every company now must be a technology company, right? And so this is the key, even as workers, even as employees, we all must be technologists. And so the real question is, think of yourself and think of this concept. I like to call human augmentation. How can you augment yourself through UI path, through the use of RPA to become that up-skilled worker, that next level worker who will be integral to the success of any company moving from, >>We talk a lot about upscaling. Now, of course, part of that upskilling I presume is learning how to use robotic process automation and the tooling, but it seems that there's more to it than that. And, and you just strike me as a person that's creative, you have a power persona. So what are these sort of intangible skills that, that I need to succeed in this new world? And can I learn them? >>That's a great question. I think one of the biggest skills, being able to think outside of the box, that is huge. Uh, and again, this goes back to at least question about what does it take and what should you, you should really think outside of the box about your own career, about your team, about your company, um, how you can improve upon what is already there, um, or how can you build something completely new that has never been thought of before. And so I think that's the biggest skill. The ability to, um, innovate, think, think innovatively and think outside of the box. Um, I believe it's, it's something that is maybe a little intuitive to some individuals, but you can also learn, you can learn to, um, get out of your own way, so to speak, uh, so that you can actually start to come up with these really creative ways to address, uh, whether it's complex business problems, uh, whether it's at an industry level or even just within your internal enterprise. >>And creativity is actually one of the attributes. And I guess it might not be in your DNA, but if you, you know, it's like humor, humor, right? If you hang out with funny people, you know, if you hang out with creative people, you can, you can learn about apply. >>That's right. That's right. But in the beginning of the pandemic, you know, one of the things that I think we all want, you seem to have a ton of motivation and ambition as Dave was saying. And, and I'm someone that normally has that too, but in the first year of pandemic, that was hard. It's hard to get motivated. It was hard to know where do I fit in? How do you advise? And now of course, when you publish the book six months ago, we're about a year into the pandemic. Things are looking better because here we are in Las Vegas at an in-person event with humans. But how do you, how do you see, how do you recommend to folks that are, that don't have technology backgrounds like you don't, I don't to motivate themselves to go, you can take the control, take it. And everybody don't, we all want control as people and take control of your career path. There are a lot of opportunities out there. How do you advise people navigating this challenging sort of mental state with there's so many opportunities sitting right here? Yes >>That's so I think it, it goes back to the getting out of your own way. It also goes back to really taking a look at assess assessing your own skillset, um, assessing your own personal drivers. What motivates you, uh, whether that is in your personal life, whether that is in your professional life, and then taking a look also at those motivators, how can I look at those and what use can I get out of those to help me to transform my own personal skill set and really grow out, uh, my, my capabilities, right, as a professional it's, it's all about really thinking through, uh, your, I'll say your professional background or role as ever-changing ever-growing. And as long as you approach it with a mindset of constantly growing constantly upskilling, I mean, honestly, the sky is truly the limit. >>I a weird question. If, if, if, if mastering word is a one and let's say learning, um, learning how to use Excel, macros is let's call it a three. Uh, all in the spectrum goes out to a, be a building, a complex, uh, you know, uh, AI model, data science kind of ML model. If that's a 10, where does learning how to code RPA as a citizen developer fit on that spectrum? Good question. >>Oh, that's a great question. I would say somewhere between, Hmm. I would say somewhere between maybe three and four around there, because you there. So again, we, we have so many tools that we can use to help upscale the set of sense at this point that we can really walk them through the nuances, uh, at a pace that is conducive to really retaining the knowledge. So I don't think it's, it's definitely not the level of, let's say, building out a complex, like machine learning model or something of that nature. It may be a little bit more in alignment with, um, if someone is up-skilled and macros, or you may be up-skilled in some other type of scripting, uh, language similar to that, I might even say sometimes a little bit, maybe a little bit less difficult than that, uh, depending on what you're trying to automate, right. The process you're trying to automate the company, >>But inside of a day, I can do something fairly simple, right? Yeah. >>Yes. So we actually, the, the training that we have at Spotify, we train our users from novice. Absolutely no understanding, no knowledge of RPA to building able, being able to build a bot in five days. And those are five half days sessions that the citizen developers attend. And by the morning of the fifth day, they actually have built a bot. And so it's, and it's very powerful, uh, being able to, to upskill someone and show them, I can take you from, you know, absolutely no understanding of RPA to actually having something, a bot that you can showcase that you can run within as little as five half days. I mean, it's very compelling to any business user, right? >>The business impact. Soon as you guys are too young to remember, but there's this thing called Lotus 1, 2, 3, we used to have to go to Lotus class slash file retrieve for you folks who remember this was all keyboard based, but it was game changing in terms of your personal productivity. And it sounds like there's a similar but much, much larger impact with RPA >>Impact. Talk to me about the impact of the program, especially in the last, this year, here we are in October, you mentioned started small, and now there's about a hundred folks. Talk to me about the appetite of that as we've seen this massive acceleration and the need to automate for everyday things that we expect as consumers, whether we're ordering food or buying something online. >>Hmm. So it really is a different mindset in terms of thinking through the way that we work differently. And so we really approached it with, if you're an accountant, think of what is the future role and responsibility of an accountant in this new digital, uh, I'll say environment. And through that, we have been able to really push this idea or this concept of up-skilling as a key element of personal professional success and also team success. Um, and that has been a game changer. So there's a lot of value that comes out of the cohesiveness between the personal desire to upskill and continue to, uh, be a, you know, a consummate professional in whatever role you're in, but also to help your team right, to be, to be, you know, a standout, uh, team player in terms of the skills that you're bringing to the table as both an accountant and someone that has now the power of automation within your skillset. Okay. >>And ask you one more question. And that is something that Dave brought up yesterday as we were, he was sitting on a panel with, and he was the only male, which is not common in our industry. How have you seen the role of females in technology changing? And I'm imagine you do work in stem. Imagine you're a motivational speaker you should be if you're not. Um, but how have you seen the role of females in technology changing in since there's so much opportunity there? >>Yes. That is a great question. I believe that RPA specifically, uh, is an incredible driver of women and influencing more women to enter into stem fields, primarily because it is such an innovative technology. There are so many roles he said that are open, just opening up. Uh, probably I've heard different numbers in terms of acceleration of growth over the next five to 10 years. So we're looking at a plethora of opportunities and these are brand new roles that women who are curious about stem, curious about being a technologist can dive right into from wherever they are. So whether they are a tax professional today, whether they are working within, you know, uh, counting, whether they're working with an internal audit, they have the opportunity now to test the waters. Um, and quite often it is such a, it's such a fascinating field. And as I said, there's so much potential around it and for growth and just for changing, uh, different industries, that it's a great driver for women to actually enter into, uh, stem technology, uh, and really drive change, facilitate change, and have more women at the table, so to speak. Okay. >>And you didn't, you didn't start in tech, in stem, right? I did not. Do you have a law degree or no, you have a Ms. >>So yes, little studies and then I actually, I'm a philosopher. So I started by my degree is in philosophy. I love >>This logic. Yes. I love how you've applied that to >>Yeah. Yes. I was not initially in stem and it was actually through an internship at a technology firm, uh, while I was in college that I don't first open to technology. And it just immediately captivated me just in terms of working, you know, that the speed, the pace, uh, just being able to solve these complex business problems at scale around the world. It was absolutely fascinating to me, obviously still is, but I think testing the waters in that way, um, as I was just talking before, it helped me to understand, I had never envisioned a career in technology, but having an opportunity to test the waters really enabled me to see that, wow, this is something where I have a skillset and it brings out a passion within me that I didn't know that I had. So it was a, it was a win-win. >>That's awesome. No worries. Last question. Where can folks go to get your book? >>Yes. So anywhere books are sold, uh, definitely on Amazon. Uh, we, if you are here at forward, we also are, have a book signing, so you can come find me. I'll be on the patio signing books and, uh, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. And I would love to hear feedback. And we're thinking about a second one. So please let us know how you like the, uh, the activities that are in there. >>Thank you. Congratulations. And Dave's going to pick one up so he can start. >>Yeah. The use case. I'm dying to dig >>In, do a breathing analysis on it, and he was great to have you on the program. Your energy is fantastic. You really open up opportunities for people. I hope that more people will watch this and understand that while the really the sky is really the limit. And, uh, thank you for your time. Absolutely. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live in Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for you right back with our next guest.

>>Hi, this is Cindy Mikey, vice president of industry solutions at caldera. Joining me today is chef is Molly, our solution engineer for the public sector. Today. We're going to talk about speed to insight. Why using machine learning in the public sector, specifically around fraud, waste and abuse. So topic for today, we'll discuss machine learning, why the public sector uses it to target fraud, waste, and abuse, the challenges. How do we enhance your data and analytical approaches the data landscape analytical methods and shad we'll go over reference architecture and a case study. So by definition, fraud, waste and abuse per the government accountability office is fraud. Isn't an attempt to obtain something about value through unwelcome misrepresentation waste is about squandering money or resources and abuse is about behaving improperly or unreasonably to actually obtain something of value for your personal benefit. So as we look at fraud, um, and across all industries, it's a top of mind, um, area within the public sector. >>Um, the types of fraud that we see is specifically around cyber crime, uh, looking at accounting fraud, whether it be from an individual perspective to also, uh, within organizations, looking at financial statement fraud, to also looking at bribery and corruption, as we look at fraud, it really hits us from all angles, whether it be from external perpetrators or internal perpetrators, and specifically from the research by PWC, the key focus area is we also see over half of fraud is actually through some form of internal or external, uh, perpetrators again, key topics. So as we also look at a report recently by the association of certified fraud examiners, um, within the public sector, the us government, um, in 2017, it was identified roughly $148 billion was attributable to fraud, waste and abuse. Specifically about 57 billion was focused on reported monetary losses and another 91 billion on areas where that opportunity or the monetary basis had not yet been measured. >>As we look at breaking those areas down again, we look at several different topics from permit out payment perspective. So breaking it down within the health system, over $65 billion within social services, over $51 billion to procurement fraud to also, um, uh, fraud, waste and abuse that's happening in the grants and the loan process to payroll fraud, and then other aspects, again, quite a few different topical areas. So as we look at those areas, what are the areas that we see additional type of focus, there's a broad stroke areas. What are the actual use cases that our agencies are using the data landscape? What data, what analytical methods can we use to actually help curtail and prevent some of the, uh, the fraud waste and abuse. So, as we look at some of the analytical processes and analytical use crate, uh, use cases in the public sector, whether it's from, uh, you know, the taxation areas to looking at, you know, social services, uh, to public safety, to also the, um, our, um, uh, additional agency methods, we're gonna use focused specifically on some of the use cases around, um, you know, fraud within the tax area. >>Uh, we'll briefly look at some of the aspects of, um, unemployment insurance fraud, uh, benefit fraud, as well as payment and integrity. So fraud has it it's, um, uh, underpinnings inquiry, like you different on government agencies and difficult, different analytical methods, and I usage of different data. So I think one of the key elements is, you know, you can look at your, your data landscape on specific data sources that you need, but it's really about bringing together different data sources across a different variety, a different velocity. So, uh, data has different dimensions. So we'll look at structured types of data of semi-structured data, behavioral data, as well as when we look at, um, you know, predictive models. We're typically looking at historical type information, but if we're actually trying to look at preventing fraud before it actually happens, or when a case may be in flight, which is specifically a use case that shad is going to talk about later is how do I look at more of that? >>Real-time that streaming information? How do I take advantage of data, whether it be, uh, you know, uh, financial transactions we're looking at, um, asset verification, we're looking at tax records, we're looking at corporate filings. Um, and we can also look at more, uh, advanced data sources where as we're looking at, um, investigation type information. So we're maybe going out and we're looking at, uh, deep learning type models around, uh, you know, semi or that, uh, behavioral, uh, that's unstructured data, whether it be camera analysis and so forth. So for quite a different variety of data and the, the breadth and the opportunity really comes about when you can integrate and look at data across all different data sources. So in a looking at a more extensive, uh, data landscape. So specifically I want to focus on some of the methods, some of the data sources and some of the analytical techniques that we're seeing, uh, being used, um, in the government agencies, as well as opportunities, uh, to look at new methods. >>So as we're looking at, you know, from a, um, an audit planning or looking at, uh, the opportunity for the likelihood of non-compliance, um, specifically we'll see data sources where we're maybe looking at a constituents profile, we might actually be investigating the forms that they've provided. We might be comparing that data, um, or leveraging internal data sources, possibly looking at net worth, comparing it against other financial data, and also comparison across other constituents groups. Some of the techniques that we use are some of the basic natural language processing, maybe we're going to do some text mining. We might be doing some probabilistic modeling, uh, where we're actually looking at, um, information within the agency to also comparing that against possibly tax forms. A lot of times it's information historically has been done on a batch perspective, both structured and semi-structured type information. And typically the data volumes can be low, but we're also seeing those data volumes on increase exponentially based upon the types of events that we're dealing with, the number of transactions. >>Um, so getting the throughput, um, and chef's going to specifically talk about that in a moment. The other aspect is, as we look at other areas of opportunity is when we're building upon, how do I actually do compliance? How do I actually look at conducting audits, uh, or potential fraud to also looking at areas of under-reported tax information? So there you might be pulling in some of our other types of data sources, whether it's being property records, it could be data that's being supplied by the actual constituents or by vendors to also pulling in social media information to geographical information, to leveraging photos on techniques that we're seeing used is possibly some sentiment analysis, link analysis. Um, how do we actually blend those data sources together from a natural language processing? But I think what's important here is also the method and the looking at the data velocity, whether it be batch, whether it be near real time, again, looking at all types of data, whether it's structured semi-structured or unstructured and the key and the value behind this is, um, how do we actually look at increasing the potential revenue or the, um, under reported revenue? >>Uh, how do we actually look at stopping fraudulent payments before they actually occur? Um, also looking at increasing the amount of, uh, the level of compliance, um, and also looking at the potential of prosecution of fraud cases. And additionally, other areas of opportunity could be looking at, um, economic planning. How do we actually perform some link analysis? How do we bring some more of those things that we saw in the data landscape on customer, or, you know, constituent interaction, bringing in social media, bringing in, uh, potentially police records, property records, um, other tax department, database information. Um, and then also looking at comparing one individual to other individuals, looking at people like a specific, like a constituent, are there areas where we're seeing, uh, >>Um, other >>Aspects of, of fraud potentially being occurring. Um, and also as we move forward, some of the more advanced techniques that we're seeing around deep learning is looking at computer vision, um, leveraging geospatial information, looking at social network entity analysis, uh, also looking at, uh, agent-based modeling techniques, where we're looking at simulation Monte Carlo type techniques that we typically see in the financial services industry, actually applying that to fraud, waste, and abuse within the, uh, the public sector. Um, and again, that really, uh, lends itself to a new opportunities. And on that, I'm going to turn it over to chef to talk about, uh, the reference architecture for, uh, doing these buckets. >>Thanks, Cindy. Um, so I'm gonna walk you through an example, reference architecture for fraud detection using, uh, Cloudera's underlying technology. Um, and you know, before I get into the technical details, uh, I want to talk about how this would be implemented at a much higher level. So with fraud detection, what we're trying to do is identify anomalies or novelists behavior within our datasets. Um, now in order to understand what aspects of our incoming data represents anomalous behavior, we first need to understand what normal behavior is. So in essence, once we understand normal behavior, anything that deviates from it can be thought of as an anomaly, right? So in order to understand what normal behavior is, we're going to need to be able to collect store and process a very large amount of historical data. And so incomes, clutters platform, and this reference architecture that needs to be for you. >>So, uh, let's start on the left-hand side of this reference architecture with the collect phase. So fraud detection will always begin with data collection. We need to collect large amounts of information from systems that could be in the cloud. It could be in the data center or even on edge devices, and this data needs to be collected so we can create our normal behavior profiles. And these normal behavioral profiles would then in turn, be used to create our predictive models for fraudulent activity. Now, uh, thinking, uh, to the data collection side, one of the main challenges that many organizations face, uh, in this phase, uh, involves using a single technology that can handle, uh, data that's coming in all different types of formats and protocols and standards with different velocities and velocities. Um, let me give you an example. Uh, we could be collecting data from a database that gets updated daily, uh, and maybe that data is being collected in Agra format. >>At the same time, we can be collecting data from an edge device that's streaming in every second, and that data may be coming in Jason or a binary format, right? So this is a data collection challenge that can be solved with cluttered data flow, which is a suite of technologies built on a patch NIFA in mini five, allowing us to ingest all of this data, do a drag and drop interface. So now we're collecting all of this data, that's required to map out normal behavior. The next thing that we need to do is enrich it, transform it and distribute it to, uh, you know, downstream systems for further process. Uh, so let's, let's walk through how that would work first. Let's taking Richmond for, uh, for enrichment, think of adding additional information to your incoming data, right? Let's take, uh, financial transactions, for example, uh, because Cindy mentioned it earlier, right? >>You can store known locations of an individual in an operational database, uh, with Cloudera that would be HBase. And as an individual makes a new transaction, their geolocation that's in that transaction data can be enriched with previously known locations of that very same individual. And all of that enriched data can be later used downstream for predictive analysis, predictable. So the data has been enrich. Uh, now it needs to be transformed. We want the data that's coming in, uh, you know, Avro and Jason and binary and whatever other format to be transformed into a single common format. So it can be used downstream for stream processing. Uh, again, this is going to be done through clutter and data flow, which is backed by NIFA, right? So the transformed semantic data is then going to be stricted to Kafka and coffin. It's going to serve as that central repository of syndicated services or a buffer zone, right? >>So coffee is going to pretty much provide you with, uh, extremely fast resilient and fault tolerance storage. And it's also gonna give you the consumer APIs that you need that are going to enable a wide variety of applications to leverage that enriched and transformed data within your buffer zone, uh, allowed that, you know, 17. So you can store that data in a distributed file system, give you that historical context that you're going to need later on for machine learning, right? So the next step in the architecture is to leverage a cluttered SQL stream builder, which enables us to write, uh, streaming SQL jobs on top of Apache Flink. So we can, uh, filter, analyze and, uh, understand the data that's in the Kafka buffer in real time. Uh I'll you know, I'll also add like, you know, if you have time series data, or if you need a lab type of cubing, you can leverage kudu, uh, while EDA or, you know, exploratory data analysis and visualization, uh, can all be enabled through clever visualization technology. >>All right, so we've filtered, we've analyzed and we've explored our incoming data. We can now proceed to train our machine learning models, uh, which will detect anomalous behavior in our historically collected data set, uh, to do this, we can use a combination of supervised unsupervised, uh, even deep learning techniques with neural networks. And these models can be tested on new incoming streaming data. And once we've gone ahead and obtain the accuracy of the performance, the scores that we want, we can then take these models and deploy them into production. And once the models are productionalized or operationalized, they can be leveraged within our streaming pipeline. So as new data is ingested in real-time knife, I can query these models to detect if the activity is anomalous or fraudulent. And if it is, they can alert downstream users and systems, right? So this in essence is how fraudulent activity detection works. >>Uh, and this entire pipeline is powered by clutters technology, right? And so, uh, the IRS is one of, uh, clutter's customers. That's leveraging our platform today and implementing, uh, a very similar architecture, uh, to detect fraud, waste, and abuse across a very large set of historical facts, data. Um, and one of the neat things with the IRS is that they've actually recently leveraged the partnership between Cloudera and Nvidia to accelerate their spark based analytics and their machine learning, uh, and the results have been nothing short of amazing, right? And in fact, we have a quote here from Joe and salty who's, uh, you know, the technical branch chief for the research analytics and statistics division group within the IRS with zero changes to our fraud detection workflow, we're able to obtain eight times to performance simply by adding GPS to our mainstream big data servers. This improvement translates to half the cost of ownership for the same workloads, right? So embedding GPU's into the reference architecture I covered earlier has enabled the IRS to improve their time to insights by as much as eight X while simultaneously reducing their underlying infrastructure costs by half, uh, Cindy back to you >>Chef. Thank you. Um, and I hope that you found, uh, some of the, the analysis, the information that Sheva and I have provided, um, to give you some insights on how cloud era is actually helping, uh, with the fraud waste and abuse challenges within the, uh, the public sector, um, specifically looking at any and all types of data, how the clutter platform is bringing together and analyzing information, whether it be you're structured you're semi-structured to unstructured data, both in a fast or in a real-time perspective, looking at anomalies, being able to do some of those on detection, uh, looking at neural network analysis, time series information. So next steps we'd love to have additional conversation with you. You can also find on some additional information around, I have caught areas working in the, the federal government by going to cloudera.com solutions slash public sector. And we welcome scheduling a meeting with you again, thank you for joining us Sheva and I today. We greatly appreciate your time and look forward to future progress. >>Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining me. I'm Sydney. Mike joined by Rick Taylor of Cloudera. Uh, we're here to talk about predictive maintenance for the public sector and how to increase assets, service, reliability on today's agenda. We'll talk specifically around how to optimize your equipment maintenance, how to reduce costs, asset failure with data and analytics. We'll go into a little more depth on, um, what type of data, the analytical methods that we're typically seeing used, um, the associated, uh, Brooke, we'll go over a case study as well as a reference architecture. So by basic definition, uh, predictive maintenance is about determining when an asset should be maintained and what specific maintenance activities need to be performed either based upon an assets of actual condition or state. It's also about predicting and preventing failures and performing maintenance on your time on your schedule to avoid costly unplanned downtime. >>McKinsey has looked at analyzing predictive maintenance costs across multiple industries and has identified that there's the opportunity to reduce overall predictive maintenance costs by roughly 50% with different types of analytical methods. So let's look at those three types of models. First, we've got our traditional type of method for maintenance, and that's really about our corrective maintenance, and that's when we're performing maintenance on an asset, um, after the equipment fails. But the challenges with that is we end up with unplanned. We end up with disruptions in our schedules, um, as well as reduced quality, um, around the performance of the asset. And then we started looking at preventive maintenance and preventative maintenance is really when we're performing maintenance on a set schedule. Um, the challenges with that is we're typically doing it regardless of the actual condition of the asset, um, which has resulted in unnecessary downtime and expense. Um, and specifically we're really now focused on pre uh, condition-based maintenance, which is looking at leveraging predictive maintenance techniques based upon actual conditions and real time events and processes. Um, within that we've seen organizations, um, and again, source from McKenzie have a 50% reduction in downtime, as well as an overall 40% reduction in maintenance costs. Again, this is really looking at things across multiple industries, but let's look at it in the context of the public sector and based upon some activity by the department of energy, um, several years ago, >>Um, they've really >>Looked at what does predictive maintenance mean to the public sector? What is the benefit, uh, looking at increasing return on investment of assets, reducing, uh, you know, reduction in downtime, um, as well as overall maintenance costs. So corrective or reactive based maintenance is really about performing once there's been a failure. Um, and then the movement towards, uh, preventative, which is based upon a set schedule or looking at predictive where we're monitoring real-time conditions. Um, and most importantly is now actually leveraging IOT and data and analytics to further reduce those overall downtimes. And there's a research report by the, uh, department of energy that goes into more specifics, um, on the opportunity within the public sector. So, Rick, let's talk a little bit about what are some of the challenges, uh, regarding data, uh, regarding predictive maintenance. >>Some of the challenges include having data silos, historically our government organizations and organizations in the commercial space as well, have multiple data silos. They've spun up over time. There are multiple business units and note, there's no single view of assets. And oftentimes there's redundant information stored in, in these silos of information. Uh, couple that with huge increases in data volume data growing exponentially, along with new types of data that we can ingest there's social media, there's semi and unstructured data sources and the real time data that we can now collect from the internet of things. And so the challenge is to collect all these assets together and begin to extract intelligence from them and insights and, and that in turn then fuels, uh, machine learning and, um, and, and what we call artificial intelligence, which enables predictive maintenance. Next slide. So >>Let's look specifically at, you know, the, the types of use cases and I'm going to Rick and I are going to focus on those use cases, where do we see predictive maintenance coming into the procurement facility, supply chain, operations and logistics. Um, we've got various level of maturity. So, you know, we're talking about predictive maintenance. We're also talking about, uh, using, uh, information, whether it be on a, um, a connected asset or a vehicle doing monitoring, uh, to also leveraging predictive maintenance on how do we bring about, uh, looking at data from connected warehouses facilities and buildings all bring on an opportunity to both increase the quality and effectiveness of the missions within the agencies to also looking at re uh, looking at cost efficiency, as well as looking at risk and safety and the types of data, um, you know, that Rick mentioned around, you know, the new types of information, some of those data elements that we typically have seen is looking at failure history. >>So when has that an asset or a machine or a component within a machine failed in the past? Uh, we've also looking at bringing together a maintenance history, looking at a specific machine. Are we getting error codes off of a machine or assets, uh, looking at when we've replaced certain components to looking at, um, how are we actually leveraging the assets? What were the operating conditions, uh, um, pulling off data from a sensor on that asset? Um, also looking at the, um, the features of an asset, whether it's, you know, engine size it's make and model, um, where's the asset located on to also looking at who's operated the asset, uh, you know, whether it be their certifications, what's their experience, um, how are they leveraging the assets and then also bringing in together, um, some of the, the pattern analysis that we've seen. So what are the operating limits? Um, are we getting service reliability? Are we getting a product recall information from the actual manufacturer? So, Rick, I know the data landscape has really changed. Let's, let's go over looking at some of those components. Sure. >>So this slide depicts sort of the, some of the inputs that inform a predictive maintenance program. So, as we've talked a little bit about the silos of information, the ERP system of record, perhaps the spares and the service history. So we want, what we want to do is combine that information with sensor data, whether it's a facility and equipment sensors, um, uh, or temperature and humidity, for example, all this stuff is then combined together, uh, and then use to develop machine learning models that better inform, uh, predictive maintenance, because we'll do need to keep, uh, to take into account the environmental factors that may cause additional wear and tear on the asset that we're monitoring. So here's some examples of private sector, uh, maintenance use cases that also have broad applicability across the government. For example, one of the busiest airports in Europe is running cloud era on Azure to capture secure and correlate sensor data collected from equipment within the airport, the people moving equipment more specifically, the escalators, the elevators, and the baggage carousels. >>The objective here is to prevent breakdowns and improve airport efficiency and passenger safety. Another example is a container shipping port. In this case, we use IOT data and machine learning, help customers recognize how their cargo handling equipment is performing in different weather conditions to understand how usage relates to failure rates and to detect anomalies and transport systems. These all improve for another example is Navistar Navistar, leading manufacturer of commercial trucks, buses, and military vehicles. Typically vehicle maintenance, as Cindy mentioned, is based on miles traveled or based on a schedule or a time since the last service. But these are only two of the thousands of data points that can signal the need for maintenance. And as it turns out, unscheduled maintenance and vehicle breakdowns account for a large share of the total cost for vehicle owner. So to help fleet owners move from a reactive approach to a more predictive model, Navistar built an IOT enabled remote diagnostics platform called on command. >>The platform brings in over 70 sensor data feeds for more than 375,000 connected vehicles. These include engine performance, trucks, speed, acceleration, cooling temperature, and break where this data is then correlated with other Navistar and third-party data sources, including weather geo location, vehicle usage, traffic warranty, and parts inventory information. So the platform then uses machine learning and advanced analytics to automatically detect problems early and predict maintenance requirements. So how does the fleet operator use this information? They can monitor truck health and performance from smartphones or tablets and prioritize needed repairs. Also, they can identify that the nearest service location that has the relevant parts, the train technicians and the available service space. So sort of wrapping up the, the benefits Navistar's helped fleet owners reduce maintenance by more than 30%. The same platform is also used to help school buses run safely. And on time, for example, one school district with 110 buses that travel over a million miles annually reduce the number of PTOs needed year over year, thanks to predictive insights delivered by this platform. >>So I'd like to take a moment and walk through the data. Life cycle is depicted in this diagram. So data ingest from the edge may include feeds from the factory floor or things like connected vehicles, whether they're trucks, aircraft, heavy equipment, cargo vessels, et cetera. Next, the data lands on a secure and governed data platform. Whereas combined with data from existing systems of record to provide additional insights, and this platform supports multiple analytic functions working together on the same data while maintaining strict security governance and control measures once processed the data is used to train machine learning models, which are then deployed into production, monitored, and retrained as needed to maintain accuracy. The process data is also typically placed in a data warehouse and use to support business intelligence, analytics, and dashboards. And in fact, this data lifecycle is representative of one of our government customers doing condition-based maintenance across a variety of aircraft. >>And the benefits they've discovered include less unscheduled maintenance and a reduction in mean man hours to repair increased maintenance efficiencies, improved aircraft availability, and the ability to avoid cascading component failures, which typically cost more in repair cost and downtime. Also, they're able to better forecast the requirements for replacement parts and consumables and last, and certainly very importantly, this leads to enhanced safety. This chart overlays the secure open source Cloudera platform used in support of the data life cycle. We've been discussing Cloudera data flow, the data ingest data movement and real time streaming data query capabilities. So data flow gives us the capability to bring data in from the asset of interest from the internet of things. While the data platform provides a secure governed data lake and visibility across the full machine learning life cycle eliminates silos and streamlines workflows across teams. The platform includes an integrated suite of secure analytic applications. And two that we're specifically calling out here are Cloudera machine learning, which supports the collaborative data science and machine learning environment, which facilitates machine learning and AI and the cloud era data warehouse, which supports the analytics and business intelligence, including those dashboards for leadership Cindy, over to you, Rick, >>Thank you. And I hope that, uh, Rick and I provided you some insights on how predictive maintenance condition-based maintenance is being used and can be used within your respective agency, bringing together, um, data sources that maybe you're having challenges with today. Uh, bringing that, uh, more real-time information in from a streaming perspective, blending that industrial IOT, as well as historical information together to help actually, uh, optimize maintenance and reduce costs within the, uh, each of your agencies, uh, to learn a little bit more about Cloudera, um, and our, what we're doing from a predictive maintenance please, uh, business@cloudera.com solutions slash public sector. And we look forward to scheduling a meeting with you, and on that, we appreciate your time today and thank you very much.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cube virtual coverage of the executive summit at AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. This is the cube virtual. We can't be there in person like we are every year we have to be remote. This executive summit is with special programming supported by Accenture where the cube virtual I'm your host John for a year. We had a great panel here called on cloud first digital transformation from some experts, Stuart driver, the director of it and infrastructure and operates at lion Australia, Douglas Regan, managing director, client account lead at lion for Accenture as a deep Islam associate director application development lead for Accenture gentlemen. Thanks for coming on the cube virtual. >>That's a mouthful, >>All that digital, but the bottom line it's cloud transformation. This is a journey that you guys have been on together for over 10 years to be really a digital company. Now, some things have happened in the past year that kind of brings all this together. This is about the next generation organization. So I want to ask a Stuart, you first, if you can talk about this transformation at lion has undertaken some of the challenges and opportunities and how this year in particular has brought it together because you know, COVID has been the accelerant of digital transformation. Well, if you're 10 years in, I'm sure you're there. You're in the, uh, on that wave right now. Take a minute to explain this transformation journey. >>Yeah, sure. So number of years back, we, we looked at kind of our infrastructure and our landscape. I'm trying to figure out where we wanted to go next. And we were very analog based, um, and stuck in the old it Grove of Capitol reef rash, um, struggling to transform, struggling to get to a digital platform and we needed to change it up so that we could, uh, become very different business to the one that we were back then. Um, obviously cloud is an accelerant to that and we had a number of initiatives that needed a platform to build on. And a cloud infrastructure was the way that we started today. That side, we went through a number of transformation programs that we didn't want to do that in the old world. We wanted to do it in the new world. So, um, for us, it was palming up with, uh, you know, dried organizations that can take you on the journey and, uh, you know, start to deliver a bit by bit incremental progress, uh, to get to the, uh, I guess the promise land. >>Um, we're not, uh, not all the way there, but to where we were a long way along. And then when you get to some of the challenges like we've had this year, um, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile because you can actually change pretty quickly, um, provide capacity and, uh, and increase your environments and, you know, do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously where we might've been waiting for the hardware vendors, et cetera, to deliver, um, capacity for us this year. It's been a pretty strong year from an it perspective and delivering for the business needs before we hit the Douglas. I want to >>Just really quick redirect to you and say, you know, if all the people who said, Oh yeah, you got to jump on cloud, get in early, you know, a lot of naysayers like, well, wait till to mature a little bit. Really, if you got in early and you, you know, paying your dues, if you will taking that medicine with the cloud, you're really kind of peaking at the right time. Is that true? Is that one of the benefits that comes out of this getting in there? >>Well, I mean, John, this has been an unprecedented year, right? And, um, you know, Australia, we had to live through bushfires and then we had covert and, and then we actually had to deliver a, um, a project on very large transformational product project, completely remote. And then we also had had some, some cyber challenges, which is public as well. And I don't think if we weren't moved into and enabled through the cloud, we would have been able to achieve that this year. It would have been much different. It would have been very difficult to do the fact that we're able to work and partner with Amazon through this year, which has been unprecedented and actually come out the other end and we've delivered a brand new digital capability across the entire business. Um, it really wouldn't have been impossible if we could, I guess, stayed in the old world. The fact that we were moved into the new Naval by the Navy allowed us to work in this unprecedented year. >>Just quick. What's your personal view on this? Because I've been saying on the Cuban reporting, necessity's the mother of all invention and the word agility has been kicked around as kind of a cliche, Oh, be agile. You know, we're going to get to Sydney. You can a minute on specifically, but from your perspective, uh, Douglas, what does that mean to you? Because there is benefits there for being agile. And >>I mean, I think as Stuart mentioned, right, in a lot of these things we try to do and, you know, typically, you know, hardware capabilities, uh, the last to be told and, and, and always the only critical path to be done, you know, we really didn't have that in this case, what we were doing with our projects in our deployments, right. We were able to move quickly able to make decisions in line with the business and really get things going, right. So a lot of times in a traditional world, you have these inhibitors, you have these critical path, it takes weeks and months to get things done as opposed to hours and days, and, and truly allowed us to, we had to, you know, BJ things, move things. And, you know, we were able to do that in this environment with AWS to support and the fact that we can kind of turn things off and on as quickly as we needed. Yeah. >>Cloud-scale is great for speed. So DECA, Gardez get your thoughts on this cloud first mission, you know, it, you know, the dev ops world, they saw this early, that jumping in there, they saw the, the, the agility. Now the theme this year is modern applications with the COVID pandemic pressure, there's real business pressure to make that happen. How did you guys learn to get there fast? And what specifically did you guys do at Accenture and how did it all come together? Can you take us inside kind of how it played out? >>No ma'am. So we started off with us and we worked with lions experts and, uh, the lost knowledge that I had, um, we then applied >>Our journey to cloud strategy and basically revolves around the seminars and, and, uh, you know, the deep repeating steps from our perspective was, uh, assessing the current environment, setting up the new cloud environment. And as we go modernizing and migrating these applications to the cloud now, you know, one of the key things that, uh, you know, we did not along this journey was that, you know, you can have the best plans, but the environment that we were dealing with, we, we often than not have to make changes. Uh, what opened a lot of agility and also work with a lot of collaboration with the, uh, Lyon team, as well as, uh, uh, AWS. I think the key thing for me was being able to really bring it all together. It's not just, uh, you know, essentially mobilize all of us working together to make this happen. >>What were some of the learnings real quick here for your journey there? >>So I think so from our perspective, the key learnings that, you know, uh, you know, when, when we look back at, uh, the, the infrastructure that was that we were trying to migrate over to the cloud, a lot of the documentation, et cetera, was not, uh, available. We were having to, uh, figure out a lot of things on the fly. Now that really required us to have, uh, uh, people with deep expertise who could go into those environments and, and work out, uh, you know, the best ways to, to migrate the workloads to the cloud. Uh, I think, you know, the biggest thing for me was making Jovi had on that real SMEs across the board globally, that we could leverage across the various technologies, uh, uh, and, and, and, you know, that would really work in our collaborative and agile. A lot of it would lie. >>Let's do what I got to ask you. How did you address your approach to the cloud and what was your experience? >>Yeah, for me, it's around getting the foundations right. To start with and then building on them. Um, so, you know, you've gotta have your, your, your process and you've got to have your, your kind of your infrastructure there and your blueprints ready. Um, AWS do a great job of that, right. Getting the foundations right. And then building upon it, and then, you know, partnering with Accenture allows you to do that very successfully. Um, I think, um, you know, the one thing that was probably surprising to us when we started down this journey and kind of after we got a long way down the track and looking backwards is actually how much you can just turn off. Right? So a lot of stuff that you, uh, you get left with a legacy in your environment, and when you start to work through it with the types of people that civic just mentioned, you know, the technical expertise working with the business, um, you can really rationalize environment and, uh, um, you know, cloud is a good opportunity to do that, to drive that legacy out. >>Um, so you know, a few things there, the other thing is, um, you've got to try and figure out the benefits that you're going to get out of moving here. So there's no point just taking something that is not delivering a huge amount of value in the traditional world, moving it into the cloud, and guess what is going to deliver the same limited amount of value. So you've got to transform it, and you've got to make sure that you build it for the future and understand exactly what you're trying to gain out of it. So again, you need a strong collaboration, you need, uh, um, you know, good partners to work with, and you need good engagement from the business as well, because the kind of, uh, you know, digital transformation, cloud transformation, isn't really an it project, I guess, fundamentally it is at the core, but it's a business project that you've got to get the whole business aligned on. You've got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that's, uh, you're able to understand the benefits and the value that say, you're going to draw it back towards the business. >>Let's do it. If you don't mind me asking, what was some of the obstacles you encountered or learnings, um, that might've differed from the expectations we all been there, Hey, you know, we're going to change the world. Here's the sales pitch, here's the outcome. And then obviously things happen, you know, you learn legacy, okay. Let's put some containerization around that cloud native, um, all that rational. You're talking about what are you going to have obstacles? That's how you learn. That's how perfection is developed. How, what obstacles did you come up with and how are they different from your expectations going in? Yeah, >>They're probably no different from other people that have gone down the same journey. If I'm totally honest, the, you know, 70 or 80% of what you do is relatively easy because of the known quantity, it's relatively modern architectures and infrastructures, and you can, you know, upgrade, migrate, move them into the cloud, whatever it is, rehost, replatform, you know, rearchitect, whatever it is you want to do, it's the other stuff, right? It's the stuff that always gets left behind. And that's the challenge. It's, it's getting that last bit over the line and making sure that you haven't invested in the future while still carrying all of your legacy costs and complexity within your environment. So, um, to be quite honest, that's probably taken longer and has been more of a challenge than we thought it would be. Um, the other piece I touched on earlier on in terms of what was surprising was actually how much of, uh, your environment is actually not needed anymore. >>When you start to put a critical eye across it and understand, um, uh, ask the tough questions and start to understand exactly what, what it is you're trying to achieve. So if you ask a part of the business, do they still need this application or this service a hundred percent of the time, they'll say yes, until you start to lay out to them, okay. Now going to cost you this to migrate it or this, to run it in the future. And, you know, here's your ongoing costs and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then, uh, for a significant amount of those answers, you get a different response when you start to layer on the true value of it. So you start to flush out those hidden costs within the, and you start to make some critical decisions as a company based on that, based on that. So that was a little tougher than we first thought and probably broader than we thought there was more of that than we anticipated, uh, which actually resulted in a much cleaner environment, post post migration, >>You know, the old expression, if it moves automated, you know, it's kind of a joke on government, how they want to tax everything, you know, you want to automate, that's a key thing in cloud, and you've got to discover those opportunities to create value, uh, Stuart and Siddique. Mainly if you can weigh in on this love to know the percentage of total cloud that you have now, versus when you started, because as you start to uncover whether it's by design for purpose, or you discover opportunity to innovate like you guys have, I'm sure it kind of, you took on some territory inside Lyon, what percentage of cloud now versus stark? >>Yeah. I just thought it was minimal, right. You know, close to zero rise, single and single digits. Right. It was mainly SAS environments that we had, uh, sitting in cloud when we, uh, when we started, um, Don mentioned that air on a really significant transformation project, um, that we've on the Turk and recently gone live on a multi-year one. Um, you know, that's all stood up on AWS and there's a, a significant portion of our environment, um, in terms of what we can move to cloud. Uh, we're probably at about 80 or 90% now. And the balanced bit is, um, legacy infrastructure that is just gonna retire as we go through the cycle rather than migrate to the cloud. Um, so we are significantly cloud biased and, uh, you know, we're reaping the benefits of it in a year, like 2020, and makes you glad that you did all of the hard yards in the previous years when you start business challenges starting out as, yeah. >>So I think any common reaction. Yeah. Still the cloud percentage penetration. Okay. >>So I do, I do guys, all I was going to say was, I think it's like the 80 20 rule, right? We, we, we worked really hard in the, you know, I think 2018, 19 to get any person off the application onto the cloud. And over the last year is the 20% that we have been migrating to extend. Right. Uh, not, I think that is also, that's going to be good diet. And I think our next big step is going to be obviously, you know, the icing on the cake, which is to decommission all of these apps as well. Right. So, you know, to get the real benefits out of, uh, the whole conservation program from a, uh, from a reduction of cap ex >>Douglas and Stuart, can you guys talk about the decision around the cloud because you guys have had success with AWS, why AWS how's that decision made? Can you guys give some insight into some of those thoughts? >>I can, I can stop, start off. I think back when the decision was made and it was, it was a while back, um, you know, there's some clear advantages of moving relay, Ws, a lot of alignment with some of the significant projects and the trend, that particular one big transformation project that we've alluded to as well. Um, you know, we needed some, um, um, some very robust and, um, just future proof and, um, proven technology. And AWS gave that to us. We needed a lot of those blueprints to help us move down the path. We didn't want to reinvent everything. So, um, you know, having a lot of that legwork done for us and AWS gives you that, right. And particularly when you partner up with, uh, with a company like Accenture as well, you get a combination of the technology and the, and the skills and the knowledge to, to move you forward in that direction. >>So, um, you know, for us, it was a, uh, uh, it was a decision based on, you know, best of breed, um, you know, looking forward and, and trying to predict the future needs and, and, and kind of the environmental that we might need. Um, and, you know, partnering up with organizations that can take you on the journey. Yeah. And just to build on that. So obviously, you know, lions like an NWS, but, you know, we knew it was a very good choice given the, um, uh, the skills and the capability that we had, as well as the assets and tools we had to get the most out of, um, out of the AWS. And obviously our CEO globally has just made an announcement about a huge investment that we're making in cloud. Um, but you know, we've, we've worked very well with AWS. We've done some joint workshops and joint investments, um, some joint POC. So yeah, w we have a very good working relationship, AWS, and I think, um, one incident to reflect upon the cyber is, and again, where we actually jointly, you know, dove in with, um, with Amazon and some of their security experts and our experts, and we're able to actually work through that with wine success, quite them. So, um, you know, really good behaviors as an organization, but also really good capabilities. >>Yeah. As you guys, you're essential cloud outcomes, research shown, it's the cycle of innovation with the cloud. That's creating a lot of benefits knowing what you guys know now, looking back certainly COVID has impacted a lot of people kind of going through the same process, uh, knowing what you guys know now, would you advocate people to jump on this transformation journey? If so, how and what tweaks they make what's, uh, changes, what would you advise? >>I might take that one to start with. Um, I hate to think where we would have been when, uh, COVID kicked off here in Australia and, you know, we were all sent home, literally were at work on the Friday, and then over the weekend. And then Monday, we were told not to come back into the office and all of a sudden, um, our capacity in terms of remote access quadrupled, or more four, five X, uh, what we had on the Friday we needed on the Monday. And we were able to stand that up during the day Monday night into Tuesday, because we were cloud-based and, uh, you know, we just spun up your instances and, uh, you know, sort of our licensing, et cetera. And, and we had all of our people working remotely, um, within, uh, you know, effectively one business day. Um, I know peers of mine in other organizations and industries that are relying on kind of a traditional wise and getting hardware, et cetera, that were weeks and before they could get the right hardware to be able to deliver to their user base. >>So, um, you know, one example where you're able to scale and, uh, um, get, uh, get value out of this platform beyond probably what was anticipated at the time you talked about, um, you know, less this, the, in all of these kinds of things. And you can also think of a few scenarios, but real world ones where you're getting your business back up and running in that period of time is, is just phenomenal. There's other stuff, right? There's these programs that we've rolled out, you do your sizing, um, and in the traditional world, you would just go out and buy more servers than you need. And, you know, probably never realize the full value of those, you know, the capability of those servers over the life cycle of them. Whereas, you know, in a cloud world, you're putting what you think is right. And if it's not right, you bump it up a little bit when, when all of your metrics and so on, I'm tell you that you need to bump it up. And conversely, you Scarlet down at a, at the same rate. So for us with the types of challenges and programs and, uh, uh, and just business need, that's come at as this year, uh, we wouldn't have been able to do it without a strong cloud base, uh, to, uh, to move forward with >>Yeah, Douglas, one of the things I talked to, a lot of people on the right side of history who have been on the right wave with cloud, with the pandemic, and they're happy, they're like, and they're humble. Like, well, we're just lucky, you know, luck is preparation meets opportunity. And this is really about you guys getting in early and being prepared and readiness. This is kind of important as people realize that you gotta be ready. I mean, it's not just, you don't get lucky by being in the right place, the right time. And there were a lot of companies were on the wrong side of history here who might get washed away. This is a super important one >>Yeah. To echo and kind of build on what Stewart said. I think that the reason that we've had success and, and I guess the momentum is we, we didn't just do it in isolation within it and technology. It was actually linked to broader business changes, you know, creating basically a digital platform for the entire business, moving the business, where are they going to be able to come back stronger after COVID, when they're actually set up for growth, um, and actually allows, you know, uh, line to achievements growth objectives, and also its ambitions as far as what it wants to do, uh, with growth and whatever they may do with acquiring other companies and moving into different markets and launching new products. So we've actually done it in a way that is, you know, real and direct business benefit. Uh, it actually enables learning to grow. >>Jim. I really appreciate you coming. I have one final question. If you can wrap up here, uh, Stuart and Douglas, you don't mind weighing in what's the priorities for the future. What's next for lion and essential >>Christmas holidays, I'll start Christmas holidays and it's been a big year and then a, and then a reset, obviously, right? So, um, you know, it's, it's figuring out, uh, transform what we've already transformed, if that makes sense. So God, a huge proportion of our services sitting in the cloud. Um, but we know we're not done even with the stuff that is in there. We need to take those steps. We need more and more automation and orchestration. Uh, we need to, um, uh, our environment is more future growth. We need to be able to work with the business and understand what's coming at them so that we can know, build that into our environment. So again, it's really transformation on top of transformation. It's the way that I'll describe it. And it's really an open book, right? Once you get it in and you've got the capabilities and the evolving tool sets that, uh, AWS continue to bring to the market, um, you know, working with the partners to, to figure out how we unlock that value, um, you know, drive our costs down our efficiency up, uh, all of those kind of, you know, standard metrics. >>Um, but you know, we're looking for the next things to transform and showed value back out to our customer base, um, that, uh, that we continue to, you know, sell our products to and work with and understand how we can better make their names. Yeah, I think just to echo that, I think it's really leveraging this end to end digital capability they have and getting the most out of that investment. And then I think it's also moving to, uh, in a dumping more new ways of working as far as, you know, the state of the business. Um, it's getting up the speed of the market is changing. So being able to launch and do things quickly and also, um, be competitive with it, you know, inefficient operating costs, uh, now that they're in the cloud, right. So I think it's really leveraging the most out of a platform and then, you know, being efficient in launching things. So putting it with the business, >>Sadiq, any word from you on your priorities by UC this year in folding. >>Yeah. So, uh, there's got to say like e-learning squares, right? For me around this journey, this is a journey to the cloud, right. And, uh, you know, as well dug the students at it's getting all, you know, different parts of the organization along the journey business to ID to your, uh, Warnock Legos, et cetera. Right. And it takes time. It is tough, but, uh, uh, you know, you got to get started on it and, you know, once we, once we finish off, uh, it's the realization of the benefits now that, you know, looking forward, I think for, from Alliance perspective is, is, uh, you know, once we migrate all the workloads to the cloud, it is leveraging, uh, our stack drive. And as I think Stewart said, uh, earlier, uh, with, uh, you know, the latest and greatest stuff that non-compete WLC, it's basically working to see how we can really, uh, achieve more better operational excellence, uh, from a, uh, from a cloud perspective. >>Well, Stewart, thanks for coming on with a century, sharing your environment and what's going on and your journey you're on the right wave. Did the work you're in the, it's all coming together with faster, congratulations for your success and, uh, really appreciate Douglas and Steve for coming on as well from Accenture. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay. Just the cubes coverage of executive summit at AWS reinvent. This is where all the thought leaders share their best practices, their journeys, and of course, special programming with Accenture and the cube. I'm Sean ferry, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome to cube three 60 fives coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a cube alum, Karthik, Lorraine. He is Accenture senior managing director and lead Accenture cloud. First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >>Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. Um, I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >>I think, um, COVID-19 is being a eye-opener from, you know, various facets, you know, um, first and foremost, it's a, it's a hell, um, situation that everybody's facing, which is not just, uh, highest economic bearings to it. It has enterprise, um, an organization with bedding to it. And most importantly, it's very personal to people, um, because they themselves and their friends, family near and dear ones are going through this challenge, uh, from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organization enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything well, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and, uh, um, near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's what big change to get things done in a completely different way, from how they used to get things done. >>Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client customers, how they go innovate with their partners on how that employees contribute to the success of an organization at all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations, um, that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are, you know, launching to innovate faster in this. And there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and legs are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders, um, with a lot of pivot their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the lag guides, uh, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, uh, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >>So you just talked about the widening gap. I've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well, uh, in this, in this time, talk a little bit about Accenture cloud first and why, why now? >>I think it's a great question. Um, we believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned, uh, cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an origin mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says we don't believe in cloud are, we don't want to do cloud. It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting. They were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as, uh, their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to collect faster and not actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. >>So we are seeing that spend to make is actually fast-forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen. This, uh, uh, moving to cloud over the next decade is fast forward it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud first moment where organizations will use cloud as the, the, the canvas and the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. Uh, and this requires a whole new strategy. Uh, and as Accenture, we are getting a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that, gave him a piece together because we need a strategy for addressing, moving to cloud are embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture cloud first brings together a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to Delaware, that holistic strategy to our clients. So I want you to >>Delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >>Yeah. The reason why we say that as a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the nest to cloud. Certain other organizations say that well, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud. Certain other organizations said, well, I'm going to build this Greenfield application or workload in cloud. Certain other said, um, I'm going to use the power of AI ML in the cloud to analyze my data and drive insights. But a cloud first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey to say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same passion that I did in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be the matching, how they interact with that customers and partners need to be revisited, how they bird and operate their IP systems need to be the, imagine how they unearthed the data from all of the systems under which they attract need to be liberated so that you could drive insights of cloud. >>First strategy hands is a corporate wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CIO, but the CIO is, and CDI was felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it. And everyone as being a customer, now, the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDI is the instrument to execute that that's a holistic cloud-first strategy >>And it, and it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done? What I need to get done. Talk a little bit about how this has changed, the way you support your clients and how Accenture cloud first is changing your approach to cloud services. >>Wonderful. Um, you know, I did not color one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is to do all of this. I talked about all of the variables, uh, an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, uh, because you do, the employees are able to embrace this change. If they are able to, uh, change them, says, pivot them says retool and train themselves to be able to operate in this new cloud. First one, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is deadly proposed there, do the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot for any kind of experimentation. >>There's a probability of success. Organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster for which they need to experiment a lot, the more the experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot. And they experiment demic speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track that innovation journey, and this is going to happen. Like I said, across the enterprise and every function across every department, I'm the agent of this change is going to be the employees or weapon, race, this change through new skills and new grueling and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >>So Karthik what you're describing it, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic wary workforce, that's been working remotely that may be dealing with uncertainty if for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is, is often the hardest part. >>Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come off for something else to go in. That's what you're saying is absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that can create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing that complex infrastructure, complex ID landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult underground about with cloud has simplified. And democratised a lot of these activities. So that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the, um, the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud. >>So that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because you, every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The word of platform economy is about democratising innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise, >>It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because that employee, the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into her, his or her day-to-day activities too. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is, this is a normal evolution we would have seen everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that, uh, gets performed buying by those individuals. And this is, um, you know, no more true than how the United States, uh, as an economy has operated where, um, this is the power of a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up to value chain. And, um, us leverage is the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States and that global economic, uh, phenomenon is very proof for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do them soon. There are things an employee needs to do themselves. Um, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >>So at Accenture, you have long, long, deep Stan, sorry, you have deep and long-standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture cloud first strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >>Yeah, we have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first, um, capability that we started about years ago, uh, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a pharma partnership with joint investments to build this partnership. And we named that as a Accenture, AWS business group ABG, uh, where we co-invest and brought skills together and develop solutions. And we will continue to do that. And through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like, uh, an invoice and gecko that we made acquisitions in in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is two cloud first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in, uh, through cloud-first. >>We are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones foundation, um, cloud packs with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, uh, billable, pharmaceutical giant, um, between we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where we are, the two organizations are coming together. We have created a partnership as a power of three partnership, where the three organizations are jointly hoarding hats and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to with this. We are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing and flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Tequila has a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. >>How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, um, come up with breakthrough R and D uh, accelerate clinical trials and improve the patient experience using AI ML and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joined investment from Accenture cloud first, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And, uh, their senior actually made a statement that five years from now, every ticket an employee will have an AI assistant. That's going to make that beginner employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of tequila with the AI assistant, making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >>So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for, for Accenture cloud first? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture executive summit? Yeah, the future >>Is going to be, um, evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is, uh, uh, a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution from industry first, second, and third industry. The third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of Silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened here in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of, uh, physical, digital and biological boundaries. And there's a great article, um, in one economic forum that people, uh, your audience can Google and read about it. Uh, but the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years are seeing a Blackwing of the, um, labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. When you see that kind of phenomenon over that longer period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next, you know, base camp, as I would call it to further this productivity, um, lack that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital and biological boundaries. >>And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that where it's the edge, especially is good to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Yeah. Pick totally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center or in a public cloud, you know, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far reaching and coming close to where we live and maybe work and very, um, get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's good to be, uh, intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of, um, manufacturing in the field of, um, you know, mobility. When I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud first is going to be, uh, you know, blowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human grace of mankind, um, our person kind of being very gender neutral in today's world. Um, go first needs to be that beacon of, uh, creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why it, Accenture, are we saying that there'll be change as our, as our purpose? >>I genuinely believe that cloud first is going to be the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the work. >>Excellent. Let there be changed. Indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of Q3 60 fives coverage of the Accenture executive summit >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cube virtual and our coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today, we are talking about the power of three. And what happens when you bring together the scientific, how of a global bias biopharmaceutical powerhouse in Takeda, a leading cloud services provider in AWS, and Accenture's ability to innovate, execute, and deliver innovation. Joining me to talk about these things. We have Aaron, sorry. Arjan Beatty. He is the senior managing director and chairman of Accenture's diamonds leadership council. Welcome Arjun. Thank you, Karl hick. He is the chief digital and information officer at Takeda. >>What is your bigger, thank you, Rebecca >>And Brian Beau Han global director and head of the Accenture AWS business group at Amazon web services. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. So, as I said, we're talking today about this relationship between, uh, your three organizations. Carl, I want to talk with you. I know you're at the beginning of your cloud journey. What was the compelling reason? Why w why, why move to the cloud and why now? >>Yeah, no, thank you for the question. So, you know, as a biopharmaceutical leader, we're committed to bringing better health and a brighter future to our patients. We're doing that by translating science into some really innovative and life transporting therapies, but throughout, you know, we believe that there's a responsible use of technology, of data and of innovation. And those three ingredients are really key to helping us deliver on that promise. And so, you know, while I think a I'll call it, this cloud journey is already always been a part of our strategy. Um, and we've made some pretty steady progress over the last years with a number of I'll call it diverse approaches to the digital and AI. We just weren't seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see. Um, and I think that, you know, there's a, there's a need ultimately to, you know, accelerate and broaden that shift. >>And, you know, we were commenting on this earlier, but there's, you know, it's been highlighted by a number of factors. One of those has been certainly a number of the acquisitions we've made Shire, uh, being the most pressing example, uh, but also the global pandemic, both of those highlight the need for us to move faster, um, at the speed of cloud, ultimately. Uh, and so we started thinking outside of the box because it was taking us too long and we decided to leverage the strategic partner model. Uh, and it's giving us a chance to think about our challenges very differently. We call this the power of three, uh, and ultimately our focus is singularly on our patients. I mean, they're waiting for us. We need to get there faster. It can take years. And so I think that there is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed, so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy. >>So as you are embarking on this journey, what are some of the insights you want to share about, about what you're seeing so far? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. So, I mean, look, maybe right before I highlight some of the key insights, uh, I would say that, you know, with cloud now as the, as a launchpad for innovation, you know, our vision all along has been that in less than 10 years, we want every single to kid, uh, the associate or employee to be empowered by an AI assistant. And I think that, you know, that's going to help us make faster, better decisions. That'll help us, uh, fundamentally deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to, to that ecosystem, to our patients, to physicians, to payers, et cetera, much faster than we previously thought possible. Um, and I think that technologies like cloud and edge computing together with a very powerful I'll call it data fabric is going to help us to create this, this real-time, uh, I'll call it the digital ecosystem. >>The data has to flow ultimately seamlessly between our patients and providers or partners or researchers, et cetera. Uh, and so we've been thinking about this, uh, I'll call it weekly, call up sort of this pyramid, um, that helps us describe our vision. Uh, and a lot of it has to do with ultimately modernizing the foundation, modernizing and rearchitecting, the platforms that drive the company, uh, heightening our focus on data, which means that there's an accelerated shift towards, uh, enterprise data platforms and digital products. And then ultimately, uh, uh, uh, you know, really an engine for innovation sitting at the very top. Um, and so I think with that, you know, there's a few different, I'll call it insights that, you know, are quickly kind of come zooming into focus. I would say one is this need to collaborate very differently. Um, you know, not only internally, but you know, how do we define ultimately, and build a connected digital ecosystem with the right partners and technologies externally? >>I think the second component that maybe people don't think as much about, but, you know, I find critically important is for us to find ways of really transforming our culture. We have to unlock talent and shift the culture certainly as a large biopharmaceutical very differently. And then lastly, you've touched on it already, which is, you know, innovation at the speed of cloud. How do we re-imagine that? You know, how do ideas go from getting tested in months to kind of getting tested in days? You know, how do we collaborate very differently? Uh, and so I think those are three, uh, perhaps of the larger I'll call it, uh, insights that, you know, the three of us are spending a lot of time thinking about right now. >>So Arjun, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit. Let's, let's delve into those a bit. Talk first about the collaboration, uh, that Carl was referencing there. How, how have you seen that? It is enabling, uh, colleagues and teams to communicate differently and interact in new and different ways? Uh, both internally and externally, as Carl said, >>No, thank you for that. And, um, I've got to give call a lot of credit because as we started to think about this journey, it was clear. It was a bold ambition was, uh, something that, you know, we had all to do differently. And so the concept of the power of three that Carl has constructed has become a label for us as a way to think about what are we going to do to collectively drive this journey forward. And to me, the unique ways of collaboration means three things. The first one is that, um, what is expected is that the three parties are going to come together and it's more than just the sum of our resources. And by that, I mean that we have to bring all of ourselves, all of our collective capabilities, as an example, Amazon has amazing supply chain capabilities. They're one of the best at supply chain. >>So in addition to resources, when we have supply chain innovations, uh, that's something that they're bringing in addition to just, uh, talent and assets, similarly for Accenture, right? We do a lot, uh, in the talent space. So how do we bring our thinking as to how we apply best practices for talent to this partnership? So, um, as we think about this, so that's, that's the first one, the second one is about shared success very early on in this partnership, we started to build some foundations and actually develop seven principles that all of us would look at as the basis for this success shared success model. And we continue to hold that sort of in the forefront, as we think about this collaboration. And maybe the third thing I would say is this one team mindset. So whether it's the three of our CEOs that get together every couple of months to think about, uh, this partnership, or it is the governance model that Carl has put together, which has all three parties in the governance and every level of leadership, we always think about this as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center. >>And what I think ultimately has enabled us to do is it's allowed us to move at speed, be more flexible. And ultimately all we're looking at the target the same way, the North side, the same way, >>Brian, about you, what have you observed and what are you thinking about in terms of how this is helping teams collaborate differently? Yeah, >>Absolutely. And RJ made some, some great points there. And I think if you really think about what he's talking about, it's that, that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint and even culture, right? And so we see that in the power of three. And then I think if we drill down into what we see at Takeda and frankly Takeda was, was really, I think, pretty visionary and on their way here, right. And taking this kind of cross-functional approach and applying it to how they operate day to day. So moving from a more functional view of the world to more of a product oriented view of the world, right? So when you think about we're going to be organized around a product or a service or a capability that we're going to provide to our customers or our patients or donors in this case, it implies a different structure all to altogether and a different way of thinking, right? >>Because now you've got technical people and business experts and marketing experts all working together in this is sort of cross collaboration. And what's great about that is it's really the only way to succeed with cloud, right? Because the old ways of thinking where you've got application people and infrastructure, people in business, people is suboptimal, right? Because we can all access this tool as these capabilities and the best way to do that. Isn't across kind of a cross collaborative way. And so this is product oriented mindset. It's a keto was already on. I think it's allowed us to move faster. >>Carl, I want to go back to this idea of unlocking talent and culture. And this is something that both Brian and Arjun have talked about too. People are an essential part of their, at the heart of your organization. How will their experience of work change and how are you helping re-imagine and reinforce a strong organizational culture, particularly at this time when so many people are working remotely. >>Yeah. It's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I think we all have to think a lot about, I mean, I think, um, you know, driving this, this color, this, this digital and data kind of capability building, uh, it takes a lot of, a lot of thinking. So, I mean, there's a few different elements in terms of how we're tackling this one is we're recognizing, and it's not just for the technology organization or for those actors that, that we're innovating with, but it's really across all of the Qaeda where we're working through ways of raising what I'll call the overall digital leaders literacy of the organization, you know, what are the, you know, what are the skills that are needed almost at a baseline level, even for a global bio-pharmaceutical company and how do we deploy, I'll call it those learning resources very broadly. >>And then secondly, I think that, you know, we're, we're very clear that there's a number of areas where there are very specialized skills that are needed. Uh, my organization is one of those. And so, you know, we're fostering ways in which, you know, we're very kind of quickly kind of creating, uh, avenues excitement for, for associates in that space. So one example specifically, as we use, you know, during these, uh, very much sort of remote, uh, sort of days, we, we use what we call global it meet days, and we set a day aside every single month and this last Friday, um, you know, we, we create during that time, it's time for personal development. Um, and we provide active seminars and training on things like, you know, robotic process automation, data analytics cloud, uh, in this last month we've been doing this for months and months now, but in his last month, more than 50% of my organization participated, and there's this huge positive shift, both in terms of access and excitement about really harnessing those new skills and being able to apply them. >>Uh, and so I think that that's, you know, one, one element that can be considered. And then thirdly, um, of course every organization has to work on how do you prioritize talent, acquisition and management and competencies that you can't rescale? I mean, there are just some new capabilities that we don't have. And so there's a large focus that I have with our executive team and our CEO and thinking through those critical roles that we need to activate in order to kind of, to, to build on this, uh, this business led cloud transformation. And lastly, probably the hardest one, but the one that I'm most jazzed about is really this focus on changing the mindsets and behaviors. Um, and I think there, you know, this is where the power of three is, is really, uh, kind of coming together nicely. I mean, we're working on things like, you know, how do we create this patient obsessed curiosity, um, and really kind of unlock innovation with a real, kind of a growth mindset. >>Uh, and the level of curiosity that's needed, not to just continue to do the same things, but to really challenge the status quo. So that's one big area of focus we're having the agility to act just faster. I mean, to worry less, I guess I would say about kind of the standard chain of command, but how do you make more speedy, more courageous decisions? And this is places where we can emulate the way that a partner like AWS works, or how do we collaborate across the number of boundaries, you know, and I think, uh, Arjun spoke eloquently to a number of partnerships that we can build. So we can break down some of these barriers and use these networks, um, whether it's within our own internal ecosystem or externally to help, to create value faster. So a lot of energy around ways of working and we'll have to check back in, but I mean, we're early in on this mindset and behavioral shift, um, but a lot of good early momentum. >>Carl you've given me a good segue to talk to Brian about innovation, because you said a lot of the things that I was the customer obsession and this idea of innovating much more quickly. Obviously now the world has its eyes on drug development, and we've all learned a lot about it, uh, in the past few months and accelerating drug development is all, uh, is of great interest to all of us. Brian, how does a transformation like this help a company's ability to become more agile and more innovative and at a quicker speed to, >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think some of the things that Carl talked about just now are critical to that, right? I think where sometimes folks fall short is they think, you know, we're going to roll out the technology and the is going to be the silver bullet where in fact it is the culture, it is, is the talent. And it's the focus on that. That's going to be, you know, the determinant of success. And I will say, you know, in this power of three arrangement and Carl talked a little bit about the pyramid, um, talent and culture and that change, and that kind of thinking about that has been a first-class citizen since the very beginning, right. That absolutely is critical for, for being there. Um, and so that's been, that's been key. And so we think about innovation at Amazon and AWS and Chrome mentioned some of the things that, you know, a partner like AWS brings to the table is we talk a lot about builders, right? >>So we're kind of obsessive about builders. Um, and, and we meet what we mean by that is we, we, at Amazon, we hire for builders, we cultivate builders and we like to talk to our customers about it as well. And it also implies a different mindset, right? When you're a builder, you have that, that curiosity, you have that ownership, you have that stake and whatever I'm creating, I'm going to be a co-owner of this product or this service, right. Getting back to that kind of product oriented mindset. And it's not just the technical people or the it people who are builders. It is also the business people as, as Carl talked about. Right. So when we start thinking about, um, innovation again, where we see folks kind of get into a little bit of, uh, innovation, pilot paralysis, is that you can focus on the technology, but if you're not focusing on the talent and the culture and the processes and the mechanisms, you're going to be putting out technology, but you're not going to have an organization that's ready to take it and scale it and accelerate it. >>Right. And so that's, that's been absolutely critical. So just a couple of things we've been doing with, with the Qaeda and Decatur has really been leading the way is, think about a mechanism and a process. And it's really been working backward from the customer, right? In this case, again, the patient and the donor. And that was an easy one because the key value of Decatur is to be a patient focused bio-pharmaceutical right. So that was embedded in their DNA. So that working back from that, that patient, that donor was a key part of that process. And that's really deep in our DNA as well and Accentures. And so we were able to bring that together. The other one is, is, is getting used to experimenting and even perhaps failing, right. And being able to iterate and fail fast and experiment and understanding that, you know, some decisions, what we call it at Amazon are two two-way doors, meaning you can go through that door, not like what you see and turn around and go back. And cloud really helps there because the costs of experimenting and the cost of failure is so much lower than it's ever been. You can do it much faster and the implications are so much less. So just a couple of things that we've been really driving, uh, with Decatur around innovation, that's been really critical. >>Carl, where are you already seeing signs of success? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And so we chose, you know, uh, with our focus on, on innovation to try to unleash maybe the power of data digital in, uh, in focusing on what I call sort of a nave. And so we chose our, our, our plasma derived therapy business, um, and you know, the plasma-derived therapy business unit, it develops critical life-saving therapies for patients with rare and complex diseases. Um, but what we're doing is by bringing kind of our energy together, we're focusing on creating, I'll call it state of the art digitally connected donation centers. And we're really modernizing, you know, the, the, the donor experience right now, we're trying to, uh, improve also I'll call it the overall plasma collection process. And so we've, uh, selected a number of alcohol at a very high-speed pilots that we're working through right now, specifically in this, in this area. And we're seeing really great results already. Um, and so that's, that's one specific area of focus >>Arjun. I want you to close this out here. Any ideas, any best practices advice you would have for other pharmaceutical companies that are, that are at the early stage of their cloud journey for me? Yes. >>Yeah, no, I was breaking up a bit. No, I think they, um, the key is what's sort of been great for me to see is that when people think about cloud, you know, you always think about infrastructure technology. The reality is that the cloud is really the true enabler for innovation and innovating at scale. And, and if you think about that, right, in all the components that you need, that ultimately that's where the value is for the company, right? Because yes, you're going to get some cost synergies and that's great, but the true value is in how do we transform the organization in the case of the Qaeda and the life sciences clients, right. We're trying to take a 14 year process of research and development that takes billions of dollars and compress that, right. Tremendous amounts of innovation opportunity. You think about the commercial aspect, lots of innovation can come there. The plasma derived therapy is a great example of how we're going to really innovate to change the trajectory of that business. So I think innovation is at the heart of what most organizations need to do. And the formula, the cocktail that the Qaeda has constructed with this Fuji program really has all the ingredients, um, that are required for that success. >>Great. Well, thank you so much. Arjun, Brian and Carl was really an enlightening conversation. >>Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks Rebecca. >>Thank you for tuning into the cube virtuals coverage of the Accenture executive summit from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Welcome everyone to the cubes of Accenture >>Executive summit here at AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight for this segment? We have two guests. First. We have Helen Davis. She is the senior director of cloud platform services, assistant director for it and digital for the West Midlands police. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Helen, And we also have Matthew lb. He is Accenture health and public service associate director and West Midlands police account lead. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Matthew, thank you for having us. So we are going to be talking about delivering data-driven insights to the West Midlands police force. Helen, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the West Midlands police force? How big is the force and also what were some of the challenges that you were grappling with prior to this initiative? >>Yes, certainly. So Westerners police is the second largest police force in the UK, outside of the metropolitan police in London. Um, we have an excessive, um, 11,000 people work at Westminster police serving communities, um, through, across the Midlands region. So geographically, we're quite a big area as well, as well as, um, being population, um, density, having that as a, at a high level. Um, so the reason we sort of embarked on the data-driven insights platform and it, which was a huge change for us was for a number of reasons. Um, namely we had a lot of disparate data, um, which was spread across a range of legacy systems that were many, many years old, um, with some duplication of, um, what was being captured and no single view for offices or, um, support staff. Um, some of the access was limited. You have to be in a, in an actual police building on a desktop computer to access it. Um, other information could only reach officers on the frontline through a telephone call back to one of our enabling services where they would do a manual checkup, um, look at the information, then call the offices back, um, and tell them what they needed to know. So it was a very long laborious process and not very efficient. Um, and we certainly weren't exploiting the data that we had in a very productive way. >>So it sounds like as you're describing and an old clunky system that needed a technological, uh, reimagination, so what was the main motivation for, for doing, for making this shift? >>It was really, um, about making us more efficient and more effective in how we do how we do business. So, um, you know, certainly as a, as an it leader and sort of my operational colleagues, we recognize the benefits, um, that data analytics could bring in, uh, in a policing environment, not something that was, um, really done in the UK at time. You know, we have a lot of data, so we're very data rich and the information that we have, but we needed to turn it into information that was actionable. So that's where we started looking for, um, technology partners and, um, suppliers to help us and sort of help us really with what's the art of the possible, you know, this hasn't been done before. So what could we do in this space that's appropriate for policing >>Helen? I love that idea. What is the art of the possible, can you tell us a little bit about why you chose AWS? >>I think really, you know, as with all things and when we're procuring a partner in the public sector that, you know, there are many rules and regulations quite rightly as you would expect that to be because we're spending public money. So we have to be very, very careful and, um, it's, it's a long process and we have to be open to public scrutiny. So, um, we sort of look to everything, everything that was available as part of that process, but we recognize the benefits that tide would provide in this space because, you know, without moving to a cloud environment, we would literally be replacing something that was legacy with something that was a bit more modern. Um, that's not what we wanted to do. Our ambition was far greater than that. So I think, um, in terms of AWS, really, it was around scalability, interoperability, you know, disaster things like the disaster recovery service, the fact that we can scale up and down quickly, we call it dialing up and dialing back. Um, you know, it's it's page go. So it just sort of ticked all the boxes for us. And then we went through the full procurement process, fortunately, um, it came out on top for us. So we were, we were able to move forward, but it just sort of had everything that we were looking for in that space. >>Matthew, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here. How are you working with the wet with the West Midlands police, sorry, and helping them implement this cloud first journey? >>Yeah, so I guess, um, by January the West Midlands police started, um, pay for five years ago now. So, um, we set up a partnership with the force I, and you to operate operation the way that was very different to a traditional supplier relationship. Um, secretary that the data difference insights program is, is one of many that we've been working with less neutral on, um, over the last five years. Um, as having said already, um, cloud gave a number of, uh, advantages certainly from a big data perspective and the things that that enabled us today, um, I'm from an Accenture perspective that allowed us to bring in a number of the different themes that we have say cloud themes, security teams, um, interacted from a design perspective, as well as more traditional services that people would associate with the country. >>So much of this is about embracing comprehensive change to experiment, innovate, and try different things. Matthew, how, how do you help an entity like West Midlands police think differently when they are, there are these ways of doing things that people are used to, how do you help them think about what is the art of the possible, as Helen said, >>There's a few things for that, you know, what's being critical is trying to co-create solutions together. Yeah. There's no point just turning up with, um, what we think is the right answer, try and say, um, collectively work through, um, the issues that the forest are seeing the outcomes they're looking to achieve rather than simply focusing on the long list of requirements I think was critical and then being really open to working together to create the right solution. Um, rather than just, you know, trying to pick something off the shelf that maybe doesn't fit the forces requirements in the way that it should to, right. It's not always a one size fits all. Obviously, you know, today what we thought was critical is making sure that we're creating something that met the forces needs, um, in terms of the outcomes they're looking to achieve the financial envelopes that were available, um, and how we can deliver those in a, uh, iterative agile way, um, rather than spending years and years, um, working towards an outcome, um, that is going to outdate before you even get that. >>How, how are things different? What kinds of business functions and processes have been re-imagined in, in light of this change and this shift >>It's, it's actually unrecognizable now, um, in certain areas of the business as it was before. So to give you a little bit of context, when we, um, started working with essentially century AWS on the data driven insights program, it was very much around providing, um, what was called locally, a wizzy tool for our intelligence analysts to interrogate data, look at data, you know, decide whether they could do anything predictive with it. And it was very much sort of a back office function to sort of tidy things up for us and make us a bit better in that, in that area or a lot better in that area. And it was rolled out to a number of offices, a small number on the front line. Um, I'm really, it was, um, in line with a mobility strategy that we, hardware officers were getting new smartphones for the first time, um, to do sort of a lot of things on, on, um, policing apps and things like that to again, to avoid them, having to keep driving back to police stations, et cetera. >>And the pilot was so successful. Every officer now has access to this data, um, on their mobile devices. So it literally went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do sort of clever whizzbang things to, um, every officer in the force, being able to access that level of data at their fingertips literally. So what they would touch we've done before is if they needed to check and address or check, uh, details of an individual, um, just as one example, they would either have to, in many cases, go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer. Well, they would have to make a call back to, um, a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions either, wait for the answer or wait for a call back with the answer when those people are doing the data interrogation manually. >>So the biggest change for us is the self-service nature of the data we now have available. So officers can do it themselves on their phone, wherever they might be. So the efficiency savings, um, from that point of view are immense. And I think just parallel to that is the quality of our data because we had a lot of data, but just because you've got a lot of data and a lot of information doesn't mean it's big data and it's valuable necessarily. Um, so again, it was having the single source of truth as we, as we call it. So you know, that when you are completing those safe searches and getting the responses back, that it is the most accurate information we hold. And also you're getting it back within minutes as opposed to, you know, half an hour, an hour or a drive back to the station. So it's making officers more efficient and it's also making them safer. The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend, um, out with the public doing what they, you know, we all should be doing. >>And have you seen that kind of return on investment because what you were just describing with all the steps that we'd needed to be taken in prior to this to verify and address say, and those are precious seconds when someone's life is on the line in, in sort of in the course of everyday police work. >>Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult to put a price on it. It's difficult to quantify. Um, but all the, you know, the minutes here and that certainly add up to a significant amount of efficiency savings, and we've certainly been able to demonstrate the officers are spending less time up police stations as a result and more time out on the front line. Also they're safer because they can get information about what may or may not be and address what may or may not have occurred in an area before very, very quickly without having to wait. >>Matthew, I want to hear your observations of working so closely with this West Midlands police. Have you noticed anything about changes in its culture and its operating model in how police officers interact with one another? Have you seen any changes since this technology change, >>Um, unique about the West new misplaces, the buy-in from the top, it depend on the chief and his exact team. And Helen is the leader from an IOT perspective. Um, the entire force is bought in. So what is a significant change program? Uh, uh, not trickles three. Um, everyone in the organization, um, change is difficult. Um, and there's a lot of time effort. That's been put into bake, the technical delivery and the business change and adoption aspects around each of the projects. Um, but you can see the step change that it's making in each aspect to the organization, uh, and where that's putting West Midlands police as a leader in, um, technology I'm policing in the UK. And I think globally, >>And this is a question for both of you because Matthew, as you said, change is difficult and there is always a certain intransigence in workplaces about this is just the way we've always done things and we're used to this and don't try to get us, don't try to get us to do anything new here. It works. How do you get the buy-in that you need to, to do this kind of digital transformation? >>I think it, it would be wrong to say it was easy. Um, um, we also have to bear in mind that this was one program in a five year program. So there was a lot of change going on, um, both internally for some of our back office functions, as well as front tie, uh, frontline offices. So with DDI in particular, I think the stat change occurred when people could see what it could do for them. You know, we had lots of workshops and seminars where we all talk about, you know, big data and it's going to be great and it's data analytics and it's transformational, you know, and quite rightly people that are very busy doing a day job that not necessarily technologists in the main and, you know, are particularly interested quite rightly so in what we are not dealing with the cloud, you know? >>And it was like, yeah, okay. It's one more thing. And then when they started to see on that, on their phones and what teams could do, that's when it started to sell itself. And I think that's when we started to see, you know, to see the stack change, you know, and, and if we, if we have any issues now it's literally, you know, our help desks in meltdown. Cause everyone's like, well, we call it manage without this anymore. And I think that speaks for itself. So it doesn't happen overnight. It's sort of incremental changes and then that's a step change in attitude. And when they see it working and they see the benefits, they want to use it more. And that's how it's become fundamental to our policing by itself, really without much selling >>Matthew, Helen just made a compelling case for how to get buy in. Have you discovered any other best practices when you are trying to get everyone on board for this kind of thing? >>So we've, um, we've used a lot of the traditional techniques, things around comms and engagement. We've also used things like, um, the 30 day challenge and nudge theory around how can we gradually encourage people to use things? Um, I think there's a point where all of this around, how do we just keep it simple and keep it user centric from an end user perspective? I think DDI is a great example of where the, the technology is incredibly complex. The solution itself is, um, you know, extremely large and, um, has been very difficult to, um, get delivered. But at the heart of it is a very simple front end for the user to encourage it and take that complexity away from them. Uh, I think that's been critical through the whole piece of video. >>One final word from Helen. I want to hear, where do you go from here? What is the longterm vision? I know that this made productivity, >>Um, productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time officers. Uh, what's next, I think really it's around, um, exploiting what we've got. Um, I use the phrase quite a lot, dialing it up, which drives my technical architects crazy, but because it's apparently not that simple, but, um, you know, we've, we've been through significant change in the last five years and we are still continuing to batch all of those changes into everyday, um, operational policing. But what we need to see now is we need to exploit and build on the investments that we've made, um, in terms of data and claims specifically, the next step really is about expanding our pool of data and our functions. Um, so that, you know, we keep getting better and better, um, at this, um, the more we do, the more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions. >>Um, you know, we're always being expected to, again, look after the public purse and do more for less. And I think this is certainly an and our cloud journey and cloud first by design, which is where we are now, um, is helping us to be future-proofed. So for us, it's very much an investment. And I see now that we have good at embedded in operational policing for me, this is the start of our journey, not the end. So it's really exciting to see where we can go from here. Exciting times. Indeed. Thank you so much. And Matthew for joining us, I really appreciate it. And you are watching the cube stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the AWS reinvent Accenture executive summit. I'm Rebecca Knight from around the globe with digital coverage, >>AWS reinvent executive summit, 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Everyone. Welcome to the cube virtual coverage of the executive summit at AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. This is the cube virtual. We can't be there in person like we are every year we have to be remote. This executive summit is with special programming supported by Accenture where the cube virtual I'm your host John for a year, we had a great panel here called uncloud first digital transformation from some experts, Stuart driver, the director of it and infrastructure and operates at lion Australia, Douglas Regan, managing director, client account lead at lion for Accenture as a deep Islam associate director application development lead for Accenture gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube virtual that's a mouthful, all that digital, but the bottom line it's cloud transformation. This is a journey that you guys have been on together for over 10 years to be really a digital company. Now, some things have happened in the past year that kind of brings all this together. This is about the next generation organization. So I want to ask Stuart you first, if you can talk about this transformation at lion has undertaken some of the challenges and opportunities and how this year in particular has brought it together because you, you know, COVID has been the accelerant of digital transformation. Well, if you're 10 years in, I'm sure you're there. You're in the, uh, uh, on that wave right now. Take a minute to explain this transformation journey. >>Yeah, sure. So number of years back, we, we looked at kind of our infrastructure and our landscape. I'm trying to figure out where we wanted to go next. And we were very analog based, um, and stuck in the old it groove of, you know, capital refresh, um, struggling to transform, struggling to get to a digital platform and we needed to change it up so that we could, uh, become very different business to the one that we were back then. Um, obviously cloud is an accelerant to that and we had a number of initiatives that needed a platform to build on. And a cloud infrastructure was the way that we started to do that. So we went through a number of transformation programs that we didn't want to do that in the old world. We wanted to do it in a new world. So for us, it was partnering up with a, you know, great organizations that can take you on the journey and, uh, you know, start to deliver a bit by bit incremental progress, uh, to get to the, uh, I guess the promise land. >>Um, we're not, uh, not all the way there, but to where we're a long way along. And then when you get to some of the challenges like we've had this year, um, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile because you can actually change pretty quickly, um, provide capacity and, uh, and increase your environments and, you know, do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously where we might've been waiting for the hardware vendors, et cetera, to deliver capacity for us this year, it's been a pretty strong year from an it perspective and delivering for the business needs, >>Forget the Douglas. I want to just real quick and redirect to you and say, you know, for all the people who said, Oh yeah, you got to jump on cloud, get in early, you know, a lot of naysayers like, well, wait till to mature a little bit. Really, if you got in early and you paying your dues, if you will taking that medicine with the cloud, you're really kind of peaking at the right time. Is that true? Is that one of the benefits that comes out of this getting in the cloud, >>John, this has been an unprecedented year, right. And, um, you know, Australia, we had to live through Bush fires and then we had covert and, and then we actually had to deliver a, um, a project I'm very know transformational product project, completely remote. And then we also had had some, some cyber challenges, which is public as well. And I don't think if we weren't moved into and enabled through the cloud would have been able to achieve that this year. It would have been much different. It would have been very difficult to do the fact that we were able to work and partner with Amazon through this year, which is unprecedented and actually come out the other end and we've delivered a brand new digital capability across the entire business. Um, it wouldn't >>Have been impossible if we could, I guess, stayed in the old world. The fact that we moved into the new Naval by the Navy allowed us to work in this unprecedented gear >>Just quick. What's your personal view on this? Because I've been saying on the Cuban reporting, necessity's the mother of all invention and the word agility has been kicked around as kind of a cliche, Oh, it'd be agile. You know, we're gonna get to Sydney. You get a minute on specifically, but from your perspective, uh, Douglas, what does that mean to you? Because there is benefits there for being agile. And >>I mean, I think as Stuart mentioned writing, and a lot of these things we try to do and, you know, typically, you know, hardware capabilities of the last to be told and, and always the only critical path to be done. You know, we really didn't have that in this case, what we were doing with our projects in our deployments, right. We were able to move quickly able to make decisions in line with the business and really get things going, right. So you, a lot of times in a traditional world, you have these inhibitors, you have these critical path, it takes weeks and months to get things done as opposed to hours and days. And it truly allowed us to, we had to VJ things, move things. And, you know, we were able to do that in this environment with AWS to support and the fact that we can kind of turn things off and on as quickly as we need it. Yeah. >>Cloud-scale is great for speed. So DECA got, Gardez get your thoughts on this cloud first mission, you know, it, you know, the dev ops worlds, they saw this early, that jumping in there, they saw the, the, the agility. Now the theme this year is modern applications with the COVID pandemic pressure, there's real business pressure to make that happen. How did you guys learn to get there fast? And what specifically did you guys do at Accenture and how did it all come together? Can you take us inside kind of how it played out? >>All right. So we started off with us and we work with lions experts and, uh, the lost knowledge that allowed reconstructive being had. Um, we then applied our journey group cloud strategy basically revolves around the seven Oz and, and, uh, you know, the deep peaking steps from our perspective, uh, assessing the current bottom, setting up the new cloud in modern. And as we go modernizing and, and migrating these applications to the cloud now, you know, one of the things that, uh, no we did not along this journey was that, you know, you can have the best plans, but bottom of that, we were dealing with, we often than not have to make changes. Uh, what a lot of agility and also work with a lot of collaboration with the, uh, Lyon team, as well as, uh, uh, AWS. I think the key thing for me was being able to really bring it all together. It's not just, uh, you know, essentially mobilize all of us. >>What were some of the learnings real quick, your journey there? >>So I think perspective the key learnings around that, you know, uh, you know, what, when we look back at, uh, the, the infrastructure that was that we were trying to migrate over to the cloud, a lot of the documentation, et cetera, was not, uh, available. We were having to, uh, figure out a lot of things on the fly. Now that really required us to have, uh, uh, people with deep expertise who could go into those environments and, and work out, uh, you know, the best ways to, to migrate the workloads to the cloud. Uh, I think, you know, the, the biggest thing for me was making Jovi had on that real SMEs across the board globally, that we could leverage across various technologies, uh, uh, and, and, and, you know, that would really work in our collaborative and agile environment would line >>Just do what I got to ask you. How did you address your approach to the cloud and what was your experience? >>Yeah, for me, it's around getting the foundations right. To start with and then building on them. Um, so, you know, you've got to have your, your process and you're going to have your, your kind of your infrastructure there and your blueprints ready. Um, AWS do a great job of that, right. Getting the foundations right. And then building upon it, and then, you know, partnering with Accenture allows you to do that very successfully. Um, I think, um, you know, the one thing that was probably surprising to us when we started down this journey and kind of, after we got a long way down, the track of looking backwards is actually how much you can just turn off. Right? So a lot of stuff that you, uh, you get left with a legacy in your environment, and when you start to work through it with the types of people that civic just mentioned, you know, the technical expertise working with the business, um, you can really rationalize your environment and, uh, um, you know, cloud is a good opportunity to do that, to drive that legacy out. >>Um, so you know, a few things there, the other thing is, um, you've got to try and figure out the benefits that you're going to get out of moving here. So there's no point just taking something that is not delivering a huge amount of value in the traditional world, moving it into the cloud, and guess what it's going to deliver the same limited amount of value. So you've got to transform it, and you've got to make sure that you build it for the future and understand exactly what you're trying to gain out of it. So again, you need a strong collaboration. You need a good partners to work with, and you need good engagement from the business as well, because the kind of, uh, you know, digital transformation, cloud transformation, isn't really an it project, I guess, fundamentally it is at the core, but it's a business project that you've got to get the whole business aligned on. You've got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that you're able to understand the benefits and the value that you're going to drive back towards the business. >>Let's do it. If you don't mind me asking what was some of the obstacles encountered or learnings, um, that might've differed from the expectation we all been there, Hey, you know, we're going to change the world. Here's the sales pitch, here's the outcome. And then obviously things happen, you know, you learn legacy, okay. Let's put some containerization around that cloud native, um, all that rational. You're talking about what are, and you're going to have obstacles. That's how you learn. That's how perfection has developed. How, what obstacles did you come up with and how are they different from your expectations going in? >>Yeah, they're probably no different from other people that have gone down the same journey. If I'm totally honest, the, you know, 70 or 80% of what you do is relative music, because they're a known quantity, it's relatively modern architectures and infrastructures, and you can, you know, upgrade, migrate, move them into the cloud, whatever it is, rehost, replatform, rearchitect, whatever it is you want to do, it's the other stuff, right? It's the stuff that always gets left behind. And that's the challenge. It's, it's getting that last bit over the line and making sure that you haven't invested in the future while still carrying all of your legacy costs and complexity within your environment. So, um, to be quite honest, that's probably taken longer and, and has been more of a challenge than we thought it would be. Um, the other piece I touched on earlier on in terms of what was surprising was actually how much of your environment is actually not needed anymore. >>When you start to put a critical eye across it and understand, um, uh, ask the tough questions and start to understand exactly what, what it is you're trying to achieve. So if you ask a part of a business, do they still need this application or this service a hundred percent of the time, they'll say yes, until you start to lay out to them, okay, now I'm going to cost you this to migrate it or this, to run it in the future. And, you know, here's your ongoing costs and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then, uh, for a significant amount of those answers, you get a different response when you start to layer on the true value of it. So you start to flush out those hidden costs within the business, and you start to make some critical decisions as a company based on, uh, based on that. So that was a little tougher than we first thought and probably broader than we thought there was more of that than we anticipated, which actually resulted in a much cleaner environment post and post migration. Yeah. >>Well, expression, if it moves automated, you know, it's kind of a joke on government, how they want to tax everything, you know, you want to automate, that's a key thing in cloud, and you've got to discover those opportunities to create value, uh, Stuart and Siddique. Mainly if you can weigh in on this love to know the percentage of total cloud that you have now, versus when you started, because as you start to uncover whether it's by design for purpose, or you discover opportunities to innovate, like you guys have, I'm sure it kind of, you took on some territory inside Lyon, what percentage of cloud now versus >>Yeah. At the start, it was minimal, right. You know, close to zero, right. Single and single digits. Right. It was mainly SAS environments that we had, uh, sitting in cloud when we, uh, when we started, um, Doug mentioned earlier a really significant transformation project that we've undertaken recently gone live on a multi-year one. Um, you know, that's all stood up on AWS and is a significant portion of our environment, um, in terms of what we can move to cloud. Uh, we're probably at about 80 or 90% now. And the balanced bit is, um, legacy infrastructure that is just gonna retire as we go through the cycle rather than migrate to the cloud. Um, so we are significantly cloud-based and, uh, you know, we're reaping the benefits of it in a year, like 2020, and makes you glad that you did all of the hard yards in the previous years when you start business challenges, trying out as, >>So do you get any common reaction to the cloud percentage penetration? >>Sorry, I didn't, I didn't catch that, but I, all I was going to say was, I think it's like the typical 80 20 rule, right? We, we, we worked really hard in the, you know, I think 2018, 19 to get 80% off the, uh, application onto the cloud. And over the last year is the 20% that we have been migrating. And Stuart said, right. A lot of it is also, that's going to be your diet. And I think our next big step is going to be obviously, you know, the icing on the cake, which is to decommission all of these apps as well. Right. So, you know, to get the real benefits out of, uh, out of the whole conservation program from a, uh, from a reduction of CapEx, OPEX perspective, >>Douglas and Stuart, can you guys talk about the decision around the clouds because you guys have had success with AWS? Why AWS how's that decision made? Can you guys give some insight into some of those things? >>I can, I can start, start off. I think back when the decision was made and it was, it was a while back, um, you know, there was some clear advantages of moving relay, Ws, a lot of alignment with some of the significant projects and, uh, the trend, that particular one big transformation project that we've alluded to as well. Um, you know, we needed some, um, some very robust and, um, just future proof and, and proven technology. And AWS gave that to us. We needed a lot of those blueprints to help us move down the path. We didn't want to reinvent everything. So, um, you know, having a lot of that legwork done for us and AWS gives you that, right. And particularly when you partner up with, uh, with a company like Accenture as well, you get combinations of technology and the, the skills and the knowledge to, to move you forward in that direction side. Um, you know, for us, it was a, uh, uh, it was a decision based on, you know, best of breed, um, you know, looking forward and, and trying to predict the future needs and, and, and kind of the environmental that we might need. Um, and, you know, partnering up with organizations that can then take you on the journey >>Just to build on that. So obviously, you know, lines like an antivirus, but, you know, we knew it was a very good choice given the, um, >>Uh, skills and the capability that we had, as well as the assets and tools we had to get the most out of an AWS. And obviously our CEO globally just made an announcement about a huge investment that we're making in cloud. Um, but you know, we've, we've worked very well with AWS. We've done some joint workshops and joint investments, um, some joint POC. So yeah, w we have a very good working relationship, AWS, and I think, um, one incident to reflect upon whether it's cyber it's and again, where we actually jointly, you know, dove in with, um, with Amazon and some of their security experts and our experts. And we're able to actually work through that with mine quite successful. So, um, you know, really good behaviors as an organization, but also really good capabilities. >>Yeah. As you guys, your essential cloud outcomes, research shown, it's the cycle of innovation with the cloud, that's creating a lot of benefits, knowing what you guys know now, looking back certainly COVID has impacted a lot of people kind of going through the same process, knowing what you guys know now, would you advocate people to jump on this transformation journey? If so, how, and what tweaks they make, which changes, what would you advise? >>I might take that one to start with. Um, I hate to think where we would have been when, uh, COVID kicked off here in Australia and, you know, we were all sent home, literally were at work on the Friday, and then over the weekend. And then Monday, we were told not to come back into the office and all of a sudden, um, our capacity in terms of remote access and I quadrupled, or more four, five X, what we had on the Friday we needed on the Monday. And we were able to stand that up during the day Monday into Tuesday, because we were cloud-based and, uh, you know, we just spun up your instances and, uh, you know, sort of our licensing, et cetera. And, and we had all of our people working remotely, um, within, uh, you know, effectively one business day. Um, I know peers of mine in other organizations and industries that are relying on kind of a traditional wise and getting hardware, et cetera, that were weeks and months before they could get the right hardware to be able to deliver to their user base. >>So, um, you know, one example where you're able to scale and, uh, uh, get, uh, get value out of this platform beyond probably what was anticipated at the time you talk about, um, you know, less this, the, and all of these kinds of things. And you can also think of a few scenarios, but real world ones where you're getting your business back up and running in that period of time is, is just phenomenal. There's other stuff, right? There's these programs that we've rolled out, you do your sizing, um, and in the traditional world, you would just go out and buy more servers than you need. And, you know, probably never realize the full value of those, you know, the capability of those servers over the life cycle of them. Whereas, you know, in a cloud world, you put in what you think is right. And if it's not right, you pump it up a little bit when, when all of your metrics and so on telling you that you need to bump it up and conversely Scarlett down at the same rate. So for us with the types of challenges and programs and, uh, uh, and just business need, that's come at as this year, uh, we wouldn't have been able to do it without a strong cloud base, uh, to, uh, to move forward with >>Yeah, Douglas, one of the things that I talked to, a lot of people on the right side of history who have been on the right wave with cloud, with the pandemic, and they're happy, they're like, and they're humble. Like, well, we're just lucky, you know, luck is preparation meets opportunity. And this is really about you guys getting in early and being prepared and readiness. This is kind of important as people realize, then you gotta be ready. I mean, it's not just, you don't get lucky by being in the right place, the right time. And there were a lot of companies were on the wrong side of history here who might get washed away. This is a second >>I think, to echo and kind of build on what Stewart said. I think that the reason that we've had success and I guess the momentum is we, we didn't just do it in isolation within it and technology. It was actually linked to broader business changes, you know, creating basically a digital platform for the entire business, moving the business, where are they going to be able to come back stronger after COVID, when they're actually set up for growth, um, and actually allows, you know, a line new achievements, growth objectives, and also its ambitions as far as what he wants to do, uh, with growth in whatever they may do as acquiring other companies and moving into different markets and launching new product. So we've actually done it in a way that there's, you know, real and direct business benefit, uh, that actually enables line to grow >>General. I really appreciate you coming. I have one final question. If you can wrap up here, uh, Stuart and Douglas, you don't mind waiting, and what's the priorities for the future. What's next for lion and a century >>Christmas holidays, I'll start Christmas holidays. And I spent a third year and then a, and then a reset, obviously, right? So, um, you know, it's, it's figuring out, uh, transform what we've already transformed, if that makes sense. So God, a huge proportion of our services sitting in the cloud. Um, but we know we're not done even with the stuff that is in there. We need to take those next steps. We need more and more automation and orchestration. We need to, um, our environment, there's more future growth. We need to be able to work with the business and understand what's coming at them so that we can, um, you know, build that into, into our environment. So again, it's really transformation on top of transformation is the way that I'll describe it. And it's really an open book, right? Once you get it in and you've got the capabilities and the evolving tool sets that AWS continue to bring to the market base, um, you know, working with the partners to, to figure out how we unlock that value, um, you know, drive our costs down our efficiency, uh, all of those kind of, you know, standard metrics. >>Um, but you know, we're looking for the next things to transform and show value back out to our customer base, um, that, uh, that we continue to, you know, sell our products to and work with and understand how we can better meet their needs. Yeah, I think just to echo that, I think it's really leveraging this and then digital capability they have and getting the most out of that investment. And then I think it's also moving to, >>Uh, and adopting more new ways of working as far as, you know, the state of the business. Um, it's getting up the speed of the market is changing. So being able to launch and do things quickly and also, um, competitive and efficient operating costs, uh, now that they're in the cloud, right. So I think it's really leveraging the most out of a platform and then, you know, being efficient in launching things. So putting the, with the business, >>Cedric, any word from you on your priorities by UC this year and folding. >>Yeah. So, uh, just going to say like e-learning squares, right for me were around, you know, just journey. This is a journey to the cloud, right. And, uh, you know, as well dug into sort of Saturday, it's getting all, you know, different parts of the organization along the journey business to ID to your, uh, product windows, et cetera. Right. And it takes time with this stuff, but, uh, uh, you know, you gotta get started on it and, you know, once we, once we finish off, uh, it's the realization of the benefits now that, you know, I'm looking forward? I think for, from Alliance perspective, it's, it is, uh, you know, once we migrate all the workloads to the cloud, it is leveraging, uh, all stack drive. And as I think Stewart said earlier, uh, with, uh, you know, the latest and greatest stuff that AWS it's basically working to see how we can really, uh, achieve more better operational excellence, uh, from a, uh, from a cloud perspective. >>Well, Stewart, thanks for coming on with a century and sharing your environment and what's going on and your journey you're on the right wave. Did the work you were in that it's all coming together with faster, congratulations for your success, and really appreciate Douglas with Steve for coming on as well from Accenture. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay. Just the cubes coverage of executive summit at AWS reinvent. This is where all the thought leaders share their best practices, their journeys, and of course, special programming with the center and the cube. I'm Sean ferry, your host, thanks for watching From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cube virtuals coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are talking today about reinventing the energy data platform. We have two guests joining us. First. We have Johan Krebbers. He is the GM digital emerging technologies and VP of it. Innovation at shell. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Johan you're welcome. And next we have Liz Dennett. She is the lead solution architect for O S D U on AWS. Thank you so much, Liz. You'll be. So I want to start our conversation by talking about OSD. You like so many great innovations. It started with a problem Johan. What was the problem you were trying to solve at shell? >>Yeah, the ethical back a couple of years, we started summer 2017, where we had a meeting with the deg, the gas exploration in shell, and the main problem they had. Of course, they got lots of lots of data, but are unable to find the right data. They need to work from once the day, this was scattered in is scattered my boss kind of Emirates all over the place and turned them into real, probably tried to solve is how that person working exploration could find their proper date, not just a day of loss of date. You really needed that we did probably talked about is summer 2017. We said, okay. The only way ABC is moving forward is to start pulling that data into a single data platform. And that, that was at the time that we called it as the, you, the subsurface data universe in there was about the shell name was so in, in January, 2018, we started a project with Amazon to start grating a freaking that building, that Stu environment that the, that universe, so that single data level to put all your exploration and Wells data into that single environment that was intent and every cent, um, already in March of that same year, we said, well, from Michele point of view, we will be far better off if we could make this an industry solution and not just a shelf solution, because Shelby, Shelby, if you can make this industry solution, but people are developing applications for it. >>It also is far better than for shell to say we haven't shell special solution because we don't make money out of how we start a day that we can make money out of, if you have access to the data, we can explore the data. So storing the data we should do as efficiently possibly can. So in March, we reached out to about eight or nine other large, uh, I gas operators, like the economics, like the totals, like the chefs of this world and say, Hey, we inshallah doing this. Do you want to join this effort? And to our surprise, they all said, yes. And then in September, 2018, we had our kickoff meeting with your open group where we said, we said, okay, if you want to work together, lots of other companies, we also need to look at, okay, how, how we organize that, or is that if you started working with lots of large companies, you need to have some legal framework around some framework around it. So that's why we went to the open group and said, okay, let's, let's form the ODU forum as we call it the time. So it's September, 2080, where I did a Galleria in Houston, but the kick off meeting for the OT four with about 10 members at the time. So there's just over two years ago, we started an exercise for me called ODU, kicked it off. Uh, and so that's really then we'll be coming from and how we got there. Also >>The origin story. Um, well, so what digging a little deeper there? What were some of the things you were trying to achieve with the OSD? >>Well, a couple of things we've tried to achieve with OSU, um, first is really separating data from applications. And what is the, what is the biggest problem we have in the subsurface space that the data and applications are all interlinked or tied together. And if you have them and a new company coming along and say, I have this new application and has access to the data that is not possible because the data often interlinked with the application. So the first thing we did is really breaking the link between the application, the data as those levels, the first thing we did, secondly, put all the data to a single data platform, take the silos out what was happening in the subsurface space. And they got all the data in what we call silos in small little islands out there. So we're trying to do is first break the link to great, great. >>They put the data in a single data bathroom, and a third part who does standard layer. On top of that, it's an API layer on top of the, a platform. So we could create an ecosystem out of companies to start developing soft applications on top of dev data platform across you might have a data platform, but you're only successful. If you have a rich ecosystem of people start developing applications on top of that. And then you can explore today, like small companies, last company, university, you name it, we're getting after create an ecosystem out here. So the three things, whereas was first break the link between application data, just break it and put data at the center and also make sure that data, this data structure would not be managed by one company. It would only be met. It will be managed the data structures by the OT forum. Secondly, then the data of single data platform certainly has an API layer on top and then create an ecosystem. Really go for people, say, please start developing applications because now you have access to the data. I've got the data no longer linked to somebody whose application was all freely available for an API layer. That was, that was all September, 2018, more or less. >>And to bring you in here a little bit, can you talk a little bit about some of the imperatives from the AWS standpoint in terms of what you were trying to achieve with this? Yeah, absolutely. And this whole thing is Johan said started with a challenge that was really brought out at shell. The challenges that geo-scientists spend up to 70% of their time looking for data, I'm a geologist I've spent more than 70% of my time trying to find data in these silos. And from there, instead of just figuring out how we could address that one problem, we worked together to really understand the root cause of these challenges and working backwards from that use case OSU and OSU on AWS has really enabled customers to create solutions that span, not just this in particular problem, but can really scale to be inclusive of the entire energy chain and deliver value from these use cases to the energy industry and beyond. Thank you, Lee, uh, Johann. So talk a little bit about Accenture's cloud first approach and how it has, uh, helped shell work faster and better with speed. >>Well, of course, access a cloud first approach only works together in an Amazon environment, AWS environment. So we really look at, at, at, at Accenture and others altogether helping shell in this space. Now the combination of the two is what we're really looking at, uh, where access of course can be, this is not a student who that environment operates, support knowledge to an environment. And of course, Amazon would be doing that to today's environment that underpinning, uh, services, et cetera. So, uh, we would expect a combination, a lot of goods when we started rolling out and put in production, the old you are three and bubble because we are anus. Then when the release feed comes to the market in Q1 next year of ODU, when he started going to Audi production inside shell, but as the first release, which is ready for prime time production across an enterprise will be released one just before Christmas, last year when he's still in may of this year. But release three is the first release we want to use for full scale production deployment inside shell, and also all the operators around the world. And there is what Amazon, sorry. Um, extensive can play a role in the ongoing, in the, in deployment building up, but also support environment. >>So one of the other things that we talk a lot about here on the cube is sustainability. And this is a big imperative at so many organizations around the world in particular energy companies. How does this move to OSD you, uh, help organizations become, how is this a greener solution for companies? >>Well, firstly make it, it's a great solution because you start making a much more efficient use of your resources, which is, which is already an important one. The second thing they're doing is also, we started with ODU in the oil and gas space with the expert development space. We've grown, uh OTU but in our strategy of growth, OSU now also do an alternative energy sociology. We'll all start supporting next year. Things like solar farms, wind farms, uh, the, the dermatomal environment hydration. So it becomes an and, and an open energy data platform, not just for the, for the, I want to get into steam that's for new industry, any type of energy industry. So our focus is to create, bring that data of all those various energy data sources together into a single data platform. You're going to use AI and other technology on top of that to exploit the data, to meet again in a single data platform. >>Liz, I want to ask you about security because security is, is, is such a big concern when it comes to how secure is the data on OSD you, um, actually, can I talk, can I do a follow up on the sustainability talking? Oh, absolutely. By all means. I mean, I want to interject though security is absolutely our top priority. I don't mean to move away from that, but with sustainability, in addition to the benefits of the OSU data platform, when a company moves from on-prem to the cloud, they're also able to leverage the benefits of scale. Now, AWS is committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible. And our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than a typical on-prem data center. Now, a recent study by four 51 research found that AWS is infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed enterprise data centers. Two thirds of that advantage is due to higher server utilization and a more energy efficient server population. But when you factor in the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases, four 51 found that AWS performs the same task with an 88% lower carbon footprint. Now that's just another way that AWS and OSU are working to support our customers is they seek to better understand their workflows and make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive. >>That's that's those are those statistics are incredible. Do you want to talk a little bit now about security? Absolutely. And security will always be AWS is top priority. In fact, AWS has been architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy. There are the security requirements for the military global banks and other high sensitivity organizations. And in fact, AWS uses the same secure hardware and software to build and operate each of our regions. So that customers benefit from the only commercial cloud that's had hits service offerings and associated supply chain vetted and deemed secure enough for top secret workloads. That's backed by a deep set of cloud security tools with more than 200 security compliance and governmental service and key features as well as an ecosystem of partners like Accenture, that can really help our customers to make sure that their environments for their data meet and or exceed their security requirements. Johann, I want you to talk a little bit about how OSD you can be used today. Does it only handle subsurface data >>And today it's hundreds of servers or Wells data. We got to add to that production around the middle of next year. That means that the whole upstate business. So we've got, if you look at MC, obviously this goes from exploration all the way to production. You've been at the into to a single data platform. So production will be added the round Q3 of next year. Then it principal, we have a difficult, the elder data that single environment, and we want to extended them to other data sources or energy sources like solar farms, wheat farms, uh, hydrogen hydro at San Francisco. We want to add a whore or a list of other day. >>And he saw a student and B all the data together into a single data club. So we move from an fallen guest, a data platform to an energy data platform. That's really what our objective is because the whole industry we've looked at, I've looked at our company companies all moving in that same direction of quantity, of course are very strong at all, I guess, but also increase the, got into all the other energy sources like, like solar, like wind, like, like the hydrogen, et cetera. So we, we move exactly the same method that, that, that the whole OSU can really support at home. And as a spectrum of energy sources, of course, >>And Liz and Johan. I want you to close us out here by just giving us a look into your crystal balls and talking about the five and 10 year plan for OSD. You we'll start with you, Liz. What do you, what do you see as the future holding for this platform? Um, honestly, the incredibly cool thing about working at AWS is you never know where the innovation and the journey is going to take you. I personally am looking forward to work with our customers, wherever their OSU journeys, take them, whether it's enabling new energy solutions or continuing to expand, to support use cases throughout the energy value chain and beyond, but really looking forward to continuing to partner as we innovate to slay tomorrow's challenges. >>Yeah. First, nobody can look that far ahead, any more nowadays, especially 10 years mean now, who knows what happens in 10 years, but if you look what our whole objective is that really in the next five years owes you will become the key backbone for energy companies for storing your data. You are efficient intelligence and optimize the whole supply energy supply chain in this world out there. >>Rubbers Liz Dennett. Thank you so much for coming on the cube virtual, >>Thank you, >>Rebecca nights, stay tuned for more of our coverage of the Accenture executive summit >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight today we're welcoming back to Kubila. We have Kishor Dirk. He is the Accenture senior managing director cloud first global services lead. Welcome back to the show >>Kishore. Thank you very much. >>Nice to meet again. And, uh, Tristin moral horse set. He is the managing director, Accenture cloud first North American growth. Welcome back to YouTube. >>Great to be back in. Great to see you again, Rebecca. >>Exactly. Even in this virtual format, it is good to see your faces. Um, today we're going to be talking about my nav and green cloud advisor >>Capability. Kishor I want to start with you. So my NAB is a platform that is really celebrating its first year in existence. Uh, November, 2019 is when Accenture introduced it. Uh, but it's, it has new relevance in light of this global pandemic that we are all enduring and suffering through. Tell us a little bit about the miner platform, what it is. >>Sure, Rebecca, you know, we lost it and now 2019 and, uh, you know, it is a cloud platform to help our clients navigate the complexity of cloud and cloud decisions and to make it faster and obviously innovate in the cloud, uh, you know, with the increased relevance and all the, especially over the last few months with the impact of COVID crisis and exhibition of digital transformation, you know, we are seeing the transformation of the acceleration to cloud much faster. This platform that you're talking about has enabled hundred and 40 clients globally across different industries. You identify the right cloud solution, navigate the complexity, provide a cloud specific solution simulate for our clients to meet the strategy business needs and the clients are loving it. >>I want to go to you now trust and tell us a little bit about how my nav works and how it helps companies make good cloud choices. >>Yeah. So Rebecca we've talked about cloud is, is more than just infrastructure and that's what mine app tries to solve for. It really looks at a variety of variables, including infrastructure operating model and fundamentally what clients business outcomes, um, uh, our clients are, are looking for and, and identify as the optimal solution for what they need. And we design this to accelerate and we mentioned the pandemic. One of the big focus now is to accelerate. And so we worked through a three-step process. The first is scanning and assessing our client's infrastructure, their data landscape, their application. Second, we use our automated artificial intelligence engine to interact with. We have a wide variety and library of, uh, collective plot expertise. And we look to recommend what is the enterprise architecture and solution. And then third, before we aligned with our clients, we look to simulate and test this scaled up model. And the simulation gives our clients a wait to see what cloud is going to look like, feel like and how it's going to transform their business before they go there. >>Tell us a little bit about that in real life. Now as a company, so many of people are working remotely having to collaborate, uh, not in real life. How is that helping them right now? >>So, um, the, the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on systems, uh, because of the demand on those systems. And so we talk about resiliency. We also now need to collaborate across data across people. Um, I think all of us are calling from a variety of different places where our last year we were all at the cube itself. Um, and, and cloud technologies such as teams, zoom that we're we're leveraging now has fundamentally accelerated and clients are looking to onboard this for their capabilities. They're trying to accelerate their journey. They realize that now the cloud is what is going to become important for them to differentiate. Once we come out of the pandemic and the ability to collaborate with their employees, their partners, and their clients through these systems is becoming a true business differentiator for our clients. >>Sure. I want to talk with you now about my NABS multiple capabilities, um, and helping clients design and navigate their cloud journeys. Tell us a little bit about the green cloud advisor capability and its significance, particularly as so many companies are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about sustainability. >>Yes. So since the launch of my NAB, we continue to enhance capabilities for our clients. One of the significant, uh, capabilities that we have enabled is the brain trust advisor today. You know, Rebecca, a lot of the businesses are more environmentally aware and are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, uh, and obviously carbon emissions and, uh, and run a sustainable operations across every aspect of the enterprise. Uh, as a result, you're seeing an increasing trend in adoption of energy, efficient infrastructure in the global market. And one of the things that we did, a lot of research we found out is that there's an ability to influence our client's carbon footprint through a better cloud solution. And that's what we entered by brings to us, uh, in, in terms of a lot of the client connotation that you're seeing in Europe, North America and others, lot of our clients are accelerating to a green cloud strategy to unlock beta financial, societal and environmental benefit, uh, through obviously cloud-based circular, operational and sustainable products and services. That is something that, uh, we are enhancing my now and we are having active client discussions at this point of time. >>So Tristan, tell us a little bit about how this capability helps clients make greener. >>Yeah. Um, well, let's start about the investments from the cloud providers in renewable and sustainable energy. Um, they have most of the hyperscalers today, um, have been investing significantly on data centers that are run or renewable energy, some incredibly creative constructs on the how to do that. And sustainability is therefore a key, um, key item of importance for the hyperscalers and also for our clients who now are looking for sustainable energy. And it turns out this marriage is now possible. I can, we marry the, the green capabilities of the cloud providers with a sustainability agenda of our clients. And so what we look into way the mine EF works is it looks at industry benchmarks and evaluates our current clients, um, capabilities and carpet footprint leveraging their existing data centers. We then look to model from an end-to-end perspective, how the, their journey to the cloud leveraging sustainable and, um, and data centers with renewable energy. We look at how their solution will look like and, and quantify carbon tax credits, um, improve a green index score and provide quantifiable, um, green cloud capabilities and measurable outcomes to our clients, shareholders, stakeholders, clients, and customers, um, and our green plot advisors, sustainability solutions already been implemented at three clients. And in many cases in two cases has helped them reduce the carbon footprint by up to 400% through migration from their existing data center to green club. Very, very important. Yeah, >>That is remarkable. Now tell us a little bit about the kinds of clients. Is this, is this more interesting to clients in Europe? Would you say that it's catching on in the United States where we're at? What is the breakdown that you're seeing right now? >>Sustainability is becoming such a global agenda and we're seeing our clients, um, uh, tie this and put this at board level, um, uh, agenda and requirements across the globe. Um, Europe has specific constraints around data sovereignty, right, where they need their data in country, but from a green, a sustainability agenda, we see clients across all our markets, North America, Europe, and our growth markets adopt this. And we have seen case studies in all three markets >>Kisha. I want to bring you back into the conversation. Talk a little bit about how mine up ties into Accenture's cloud first strategy, your Accenture's CEO, Julie Sweet has talked about post COVID leadership requiring every business to become a cloud first business. Tell us a little bit about how this ethos is in Accenture and how you're sort of looking outward with it too. >>So Rebecca mine is the launch pad, uh, to a cloud first transformation for our clients. Uh, Accenture, see you, uh, Julie Sweet, uh, shared the Accenture cloud first and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment and is delivering data value for our clients when they need it the most. And with the district transformation requiring cloud at scale, you know, we're seeing that in the post COVID leadership, it requires that every business should become a cloud business. And my nap helps them get there by evaluating the cloud landscape, navigating the complexity, modeling architecting and simulating an optimal cloud solution for our clients. And as Justin was sharing a greener cloud, Tristan, talk a little >>Bit more about some of the real life use cases in terms of what are we, what are clients seeing? What are the results? >>Yes, thank you, Rebecca. I would say two key things right around my now the first is the iterative process. Clients don't want to wait, um, until they get started, they want to get started and see what their journey is going to look like. And the second is fundamental acceleration, dependent make, as we talked about, has accelerated the need to move to cloud very quickly. And my nav is there to do that. So how do we do that? First is generating the business cases. Clients need to know in many cases that they have a business case by business case, we talk about the financial benefits, as well as the business outcomes, the green green cloud impact sustainability impacts with minus we can build initial recommendations using a basic understanding of their environment and benchmarks in weeks versus months with indicative value savings in the millions of dollars arranges. >>So for example, very recently, we worked with a global oil and gas company, and in only two weeks, we're able to provide an indicative savings for $27 million over five years. This enabled the client to get started, knowing that there is a business case benefit and then iterate on it. And this iteration is, I would say the second point that is particularly important with my nav that we've seen in bank, the clients, which is, um, any journey starts with an understanding of what is the application landscape and what are we trying to do with those, these initial assessments that used to take six to eight weeks are now taking anywhere from two to four weeks. So we're seeing a 40 to 50% reduction in the initial assessment, which gets clients started in their journey. And then finally we've had discussions with all of the hyperscalers to help partner with Accenture and leverage mine after prepared their detailed business case module as they're going to clients. And as they're accelerating the client's journey, so real results, real acceleration. And is there a journey? Do I have a business case and furthermore accelerating the journey once we are by giving the ability to work in an iterative approach, >>It sounds as though that the company that clients and and employees are sort of saying, this is an amazing time savings look at what I can do here in, in so much in a condensed amount of time, but in terms of getting everyone on board, one of the things we talked about last time we met, uh, Tristin was just how much, uh, how one of the obstacles is getting people to sign on and the new technologies and new platforms. Those are often the obstacles and struggles that companies face. Have you found that at all? Or what is sort of the feedback that you're getting from? >>Yeah. Sorry. Yes. We clearly, there are always obstacles to a con journey. If there weren't obstacles, all our clients would be already fully in the cloud. What man I gives the ability is to navigate through those, to start quickly. And then as we identify obstacles, we can simulate what things are going to look like. We can continue with certain parts of the journey while we deal with that obstacle. And it's a fundamental accelerator. Whereas in the past one, obstacle would prevent a class from starting. We can now start to address the obstacles one at a time while continuing and accelerating the contrary. That is the fundamental difference. Kishor I want to give you the final word here. Tell us a little bit about what is next for Accenture might have and what we'll be discussing next year at the Accenture executive summit >>Sort of echo, we are continuously evolving with our client needs and reinventing, reinventing for the future. For my advisor, our plan is to help our clients reduce carbon footprint and again, migrate to a green cloud. Uh, and additionally, we're looking at, you know, two capabilities, uh, which include sovereign cloud advisor, uh, with clients, especially in, in Europe and others are under pressure to meet stringent data norms that Kristen was talking about. And the sovereign cloud advisor health organization to create an architecture cloud architecture that complies with the green. Uh, I would say the data sound-bitey norms that is out there. The other element is around data to cloud. We are seeing massive migration, uh, for, uh, for a lot of the data to cloud. And there's a lot of migration hurdles that come within that. Uh, we have expanded mine app to support assessment capabilities, uh, for, uh, assessing applications, infrastructure, but also covering the entire state, including data and the code level to determine the right cloud solution. So we are, we are pushing the boundaries on what might have can do with mine. And we have created the ability to take the guesswork out of cloud, navigate the complexity. We are rolling risks costs, and we are achieving clients strategy, business objectives, while building a sustainable lots with being cloud, >>Any platform that can take some of the guesswork out of the future. I'm I'm on board with. Thank you so much, Kristin and Kishore. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Rebecca. Stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. I'm Rebecca Knight. >>Yeah, Yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, actually, CUBE virtual coverage of Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE. We're not in person this year. Normally we're on the floor, we're talking to all the guests. This year, obviously, because of the pandemic we're going to be doing remote and of course, I'm proud to have a CUBE alumni back on the program. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing for Dell Technologies. Cheryl, great to see you remotely, bummer we couldn't be in person, thanks for coming on. >> I know, thank you John. It's great to be with you virtually again. >> You know, I just want to just point out that obviously we're not face to face. Normally Dell Technology World is a real celebration. It's the, it's a culmination of all the announcements, all the community, all the partners, it's, it's actually a huge partner event as well as a customer event. You're running global partners. How has this pandemic changed your world? People still got to do business. More pressure for modern apps, programmable infrastructure Hybrid Cloud. The world's not stopping. What is your take on this? Because it's been a real challenge but it's an also an opportunity for the folks who can get through it. What's your take? >> Yeah, it's just been remarkable. You know, I tell people in some ways I find this the great equalizer because it has all of us around the world in the exact same place but our partners have just been remarkable. You know, we see inspirational work all over the place. They're so resilient and they have just been focused on the customer. And so together we have just been really focused on helping all of our customers as we know, in the early weeks and months of this now, you know, it was pivoting to support business continuity and enabling their employees to work remotely. And our partners just rallied to the cause. You know, they bring their expertise and their capabilities and their services. And you know, we've all been talking about digital transformation and the need to modernize all of our infrastructures. And I think we're all seeing it just accelerate. So in so many ways, it's just pushed it to the forefront and a lot of us, because we don't have an alternative, we're all engaging in modalities like this, but we're getting business done, right? We're helping our customers really respond to the needs of the business. And I think in the early stages of this, you know, we've been characterizing it as there was a lot of go fast, go light. Now we're seeing, you know, that we're all recognizing we're going to be in this circumstance for the foreseeable future, a little longer than maybe we all intended and now it's do it right. So we see a lot of just good work around hardening infrastructure, working on security vulnerabilities. How do we harden a VPN environment? So to be candid, you know, the breadth of our portfolio and a lot of the infrastructure solutions, our partnership with VMware has never been more relevant. And a lot of those capabilities our partners are leveraging to be able to support their customers needs and demands. >> Yeah, that's a great point about the VMware and I want to bring that up because I've been doing a lot of interviews and one of the themes for Dell Tech World Digital Experience this year has been the VMware integration. And what's interesting is is that that investment of being tightly coupled with VMware and your other partners is paying off now because as people need to be truly agile and flexible because of the disruption, the way the work environment, the workforce, workloads and the workplace has been changed they really need to lean on Dell. And you guys have that slogan, the power of partnering with Dell Technologies. I want to dig into what that means because the customers, your partners, end user customer there's kind of two spectrums. There's the, this is a tailwind, I have to go faster and put this modern app, I'm going to double down and solve problems. Whether it's a call center is getting stuff built quickly to solve needs. Two, well, this is a pandemic that's integral. So we're going to retool while we're kind of downtime. I won't say downtime, but like, while they're not truly active, whether you're in airlines or whatever, there's different spectrums and everything in between. You guys are bringing a lot to the table through these partnerships and the integrations. Can you talk about how that's paying off and two, how you guys are helping your partners and give some examples? >> Yeah, well, thank you John. And, you know, we have been saying for some time that we really do think the cross sell up, sell opportunity is a differentiated opportunity for our partners teaming with Dell Technologies. You know, even in the last several months while we've all been kind of working from home, our innovation engine hasn't stopped. I mean, we've launched nine new products in nine weeks all of which are just innovations that continue to represent areas where partners can team with us to bring those modernized applications to bear. And to your point, many of our partners and our customers are using this time when we're all remote and you can't go onsite, they're doubling down on their training. You know, we've seen an unbelievable demand in our competency training and our certification capabilities, clearly with the product launches. I just mentioned, there's new training to enable them around the new offerings. Our PowerStore product was just launched. So unbelievable opportunities. And as you said with VMware, you know, we have been for some time, when we talk about cross sell our partners that sell two and three lines of business, their revenues are multiples higher than partners that don't and candidly partners that sell three lines of business and sell VMware are selling like 148 times the revenue and I think it's a reflection of their engaging in strategic sticky services, rich deployments of hybrid cloud implementations with their customers, and the customers need their help and expertise like never before. So I think the results are showing true. And I also think in this dynamic of everything's gone digital, everything's pivoted to digital, you know, our partners have been asking how can we help them be more effective and successful in their digital marketing efforts and activities? How can we assist them in virtual selling? You know, everybody's accustomed to face to face sales contacts and we've all learned how to use your platform and Zoom and teams and all these other modalities that allow us to frankly be highly effective and efficient. And our partners candidly are leaning into some of our services and tools and capabilities that honestly have been there for some time, but like remote diagnostics, for example, remote capabilities so that you don't have to go on the data center floor and you can still be doing assessments and provisioning and orchestration and deployment for your customers in this time. And you're right, some customers and partners are using this as an opportunity to invest so that, you know, when the world opens up, this will end at some point, they are incredibly well positioned to move forward and take advantage of what's already been a fast moving market. And I just think this environment it's accelerated, the move and adoption, like never before. >> Yeah, and to your point, I think the thing we're seeing is that the vendors and the customers that have been prepared, suppliers and customers that have been thinking about it, you can see them having performance. Even in the challenging handcuffed environment that they're in with the whole, you know, disruption working at home to the data center because the edge and the data center are now connecting and you've got hybrid public, multi-cloud developing and everyone's got to learn and build out at the same time. So it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on this because you know, the word virtual event has been kicked around. We have our own virtual event thing and everyone's doing it. This is theCUBE virtual but they don't use the word digital, but we say digital transformation. Is it digital, virtual transformation? So you've got virtual, I guess, reality virtual spaces, digital as digital, explain this from your perspective, how you see digital and virtual marketing and, or learning as a critical part of your program offerings because people still got to get the new things, they got to learn. >> I honestly, I think it's gone from a nice to have, and we all acknowledge that it's a transformation in the world of marketing to a, now it's a must have, right? I mean, when you no longer can do in person events, and many of our partners would have looked at that as a demand generation activity, they'd be capturing the leads from all the conversations we'd be having on a solution expo floor. We'd be having our in person events to now, we're going to convey our information and knowledge and maybe a virtual setting but that pivot to digital marketing, your online presence, the personalization at scale, making sure we acknowledged and understand that we have to meet our buyers and acknowledge the buyer journey has changed. And I think it's a must have now. So it's no longer a nice to have and we've all been describing the pace of change. But I think when you couple some of the trends in the industry with just the reality of this pandemic, that's making each of us be more resourceful than ever. You know, we, for example, I've seen our partners pivot the utilization of their MDF dollars into digital alternatives. They are certainly doing these Zoom experiences but they're also investing in their web properties and their search and making sure that as we pivot to digital we, for example, on the marketing side, we pivoted quickly to kind of stand up what we're calling an agile pod and it was a digital first agile pod that was frankly all aimed at training, enablement, social media guides, webinars on expertise on how we as a company were responding. What was our internal communication strategy, our external communication strategy. And I just think this appetite for training, knowledge. Some of it was necessity and some of it is we're all home and we have time and we want to hone our skills to ensure that we're ready. So I've never been busier as much as we're all working from home. We have never been busier on supporting the great and innovative work that our partners are doing but also really focused on the training, best practice sharing, enablement and webinars on how we're in it together, right? How can we help each other really respond in a sustaining way? Honestly, not just an interim way of our new digital capabilities, marketing capabilities. And I think we're experiencing, you know, what I think the opportunity of this digital trend in marketing is the handshake between marketing and sales has never been tighter. And I think really done well, we are going to provide a more personalized experience for our prospects and our customers. We're going to make our sellers more productive. We're going to be engaging along that continuum. We kind of it a digital heartbeat. We're going to be responding to where they are online and then we're also going to be meeting in person or over a virtual Zoom. And you're going to be accelerating in a highly relevant, much more personalized way to drive to the outcome of these solutions. It's a richer experience. So it's less about is marketing creating a bunch of leads that I can hand over to my sellers as much as what's the overall customer experience? And that experience needs to be a rich, personalized one that kind of transcends over marketing and sales. >> Yeah, Cheryl, you have an amazing vision, I think that is so spot on, you're on point. And I think you bring up a whole kind of sea change. It's really transformational just in the thinking, you mentioned, oh, just put out leads, also just, it's not about just standing up events either. You mentioned sustainability, how to have that heartbeat. This is a whole new level of thinking. I mean, every company the adage used to be, every company used to be a data company, every company will be a data company, true. Now you're seeing every company becoming a media company. Where you are probably doing more hosting of things. You're on camera more. So this new media API is developing where you want the command control, you want the truth, you want the community, you want the authenticity. This is the new, this is the new digital marketing, real time, agile and fast and relevant and cool too. What's your, expand more on your vision? >> And test and learn, you know, is a word we use a lot because instead of, you know, having to build something, go put it out, let's have some metrics and measures on how effective it was. The speed with which you can garner real time feedback. You know, everything needs to be more modular in natures, you know, snackable, if you will in nature, so that you can adapt and respond to what your customers are telling you, right? And I mean, I think we've been talking about consumerization of IT for some time. And I think this digital marketing is just the expression within marketing of how each of us come to work. And we're all at home as consumers engaging in this digital way as a consumer every day. So now when we bring it to work we bring our own preferences and in a B2B setting and a B2B context, we want to engage and it accelerates just the learning cycle. So I think it's a combination of the tools, the automation that exists now. So when you talk about leveraging AI and machine learning in the context of marketing automation, it's just putting to use all these technical trends that we've been discussing for some time in the context of customer experience. So I think this, like I said, the handshake between marketing and sales it's all about staying customer centric, listening to what the customers are telling you, their interests and preferences are. How do we respond in the most, highly relevant way around how we can help them, and done well, it's a positive experience but it's also an accelerated experience. You can get to the answer faster. And as long as we get to the answer faster, that's what the customer is looking for. Then it's a win, win for everybody. >> That's awesome, I love, I love that conversation because this brings up kind of the future for that, for your organization and your customers as you guys have this global partner network. Okay, and one of the things that the pandemic has shown is that with these digital technologies and virtual technologies, it's not a physical event, it's global. I mean, instantly Dell Technologies World you'd have to fly there, certainly from overseas, you could certainly do that. But now with one click of a button, you're in The programs that you have are global in nature. I'm sure there's some regional segmentation that's done with cloud and all that good stuff but you aren't going to have to recast your partner programs. Can you share how you're helping partners with their digital transformation? Didn't just give a couple examples of specifics of if I'm a partner what's in for me, Cheryl, what's going on? How is Dell helping me today? >> Yeah, well, I commented a little bit about this digital first kind of agile pod work we did. Some of that is selling guides, social media guides, how to actually do social selling, how to pivot some best practices around, you know, what activities can you put your MDF to good use that is showing really positive returns in the short term. So it's a lot of best practice sharing. And then candidly, we as a company, as we put campaigns in market, or we're giving marketing assets, collateral, social opportunities to our partners, it's all about how to help them get educated and use what we're already providing for them. So we recognize that, you know, partner's capabilities will vary across the board and certainly regionally, as you said but we definitely are helping them with, you know, here's what we're seeing around industry solutions. Here are certain industry verticals we know are responding or, you know, coming out of this environment faster than others. Here's campaigns that you can leverage both modularly or full-term key to be able to drive that. So to your point, the handshake, the support, the overall engagement of our partner community has never been higher. I mean, I'll give you a good example. You know, we talked about training and this opportunity to reach more people through these forums than in person. You know, we conduct trainings of presale technical teams around the world. We call it our heroes events, and these are in, you know, typically in person, but now they've gone virtual. We've trained over 18,000 presales technical engineers just in the first half alone to be able leverage our remote tools lean in and leverage the integration around VMware like we were just discussing. What are the new capabilities that have launched around, you know, VxRail with VCF Foundation and how they can go deploy. So in many ways we actually are touching and addressing the audience much wider than we might have otherwise. And I can put my subject matter experts, my best experts in the company on a Zoom forum like this. And I can have him in Sydney, Australia, Paris. I can have them in San Francisco on the same day and they never leave their home. So it's actually, we've all been very resilient, but are finding I think in the go-forward world, it'll be a hybrid model. We're going to leverage some of these best practices and tools. Even when the world reopens, we certainly will be doing in person events, again, that's going to come back but I do think it will be forever changed. And we're going to leverage this hybrid model with our partners and they're bringing their expertise to bear. And a lot of the vertical industry capabilities they bring, they're able to reach an audience broader over capabilities like this. >> You know, it's going to be a lot of fun too, all this new learning and all this headroom from asynchronous progressions that are nonlinear. As you mentioned training, people are getting trained faster to made for TV experiences. You're going to start to see, and then when hybrid events come back, they're going to be different. They may be more intimate. All new opportunities to learn and move fast and that's something that you guys have done. So congratulations, Cheryl, thanks for that great insight. My final question for you, this year for the partners watching who are there in person, 'cause we're not, we're remote. What should they take away from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience event this year? What's your, what's your, what's your summary here? >> Well, I hope they enjoy the couple of days and you certainly have heard, you know, Michael and Jeff and Pat and others talk about the innovation engine at Dell Technologies is not slowing down. You know, the tight partnership we have with VMware and the level of capabilities that we're bringing in this as a service, Hybrid Cloud, 5G, world of Hybrid Cloud deployments. We absolutely have our foot on the gas and are going to continue to be that partner to provide the world's best infrastructure and capabilities. And when you look at the power of partnership and to your point on what we're describing with our global alliance partners, the innovative and inspirational work, some of our OEM customers and partners have done is just remarkable. And like I said, we are growing faster than the competition, even in this environment. So we just really appreciate the partnership very much. And I want them to lean in with Dell Technologies because it's not going to slow down as we've just been discussing. I think it's going to continue to move fast and we absolutely are committed for the longterm to continue to innovate and bring new capabilities to market. >> Well, certainly people who have good business performance in this environment certainly are relevant and have the right product mix, made the right moves and it's paying off, a lot more to do. Cheryl, congratulations for all the success and the you're a great leader heading up the global partner marketing group over there. Congratulations, you've got a great vision, we totally agree. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John, it's been a pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here with Cheryl Cook, senior vice president, global partner marketing at Dell Technologies, theCUBE virtual covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Data is at the heart of transformation and the change. Every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for thought leaders. >>Welcome to thought leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Volante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. >>And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my cohosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer, the ThoughtSpot is Cindy Hausen. Cindy is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of successful business intelligence unlock the value of BI and big data. Cindy was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindy. Great to see you welcome to the show. Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO, sedition air. Hello. Sudheesh how are you doing today? I am validating. It's good to talk to you again. That's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here now Sateesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. >>Thanks, Dave. >>I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Um, look, since we have all been, you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up know sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time. Then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. >>And number three, has we planned through this? You know, we are living through these difficult times. You want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because teens can, as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like through the VA. I think of it changes sort of like if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, uh, you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, most businesses, it is somewhat scary. >>Change becomes all the more difficult, ultimately change requires courage, courage. To first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they've may feel that I'm, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about, you know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. >>So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force. Sometimes it could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessarily the group of people that we are brought in. The four people, including Cindy, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope, that you will be safe. And you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. >>So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Ternopil Chernobyl. What went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, no, we're perfect. Hide it. Don't dare tell anyone which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands, getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. >>So I'll talk about culture and technology. Isn't really two sides of the same coin, real world impacts. And then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, you know, Cindy, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other. What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on premises, data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise, nice data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. >>And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and it or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse, the collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. >>It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. None of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still proud of that ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and double monetized, not just for people, how are users or analysts, but really at the of impact what we like to call the new decision makers or really the front line workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. >>Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor, 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology. How did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. >>And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody's hard coding of report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. >>You use to be able to create an investment place. A bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier the data science, tier data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So thoughts about was the first to market with search and AI driven insights, competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. >>They re require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate the pace of change. It's acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gardner it score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data driven. As Michelle spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. >>And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, Hey, we're not doing good cross selling customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage. >>They opened fake accounts, basing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker spinal implant diabetes, you know, this brand and at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the us federal government said, well, you can't turn them off. >>He said, we'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, you know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it with them and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics, officer chief, digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that. Oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of just eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, national Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. >>So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is with them, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor, okay. We could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your seventies or eighties for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is with them. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change. Management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data driven insights. >>The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead to the year ahead and exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture. That's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Masa, Pharaoh, chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Very happy to be here and, uh, looking forward to, uh, to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, uh, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how did it connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across, uh, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. >>And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our, that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to being, you gone to Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find an answer ThoughtSpot for us, it's the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. >>Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action needed to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place on top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our Elequil environments. And as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So the portion of us though, is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the, the, the it teams together to really hit the drive, these holistic end to end solution, the capabilities to really support the actual business into the future. >>That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, as upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that, uh, that become crucial as you move forward, right, uh, into this, uh, into this new age, especially with COVID with COVID now taking place across the world, right? >>Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers. And these, these very difficult times as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those, those capabilities. And those solutions forward as we go through this journey, uh, boasted both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change has only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what our customers want, what our customers need and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. >>This is all around becoming a more data driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data, to actually better support your customers and to support your business there's important, your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when he talked to get large dividends from his investments into the future. But that being said, uh, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data driven organization. And I'm looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you, >>Tom. That was great. Thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent. You've come in this rusted. And how long have you been at Western union? >>Uh, well in nine months. So just, uh, just started this year, but, uh, there'd be some great opportunities and great changes and we were a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >>Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent most recently, Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs. Gustavo. Welcome. >>So hi everyone. My name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindy, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is a high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment transformations and I have less many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. >>And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening, society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the Koresh. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about Nadina afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes in your swimming upstream. >>But what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, eh, you know, workforce? So the bigger, good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication. So my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seeing politically speaking, what are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. >>And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindy has mentioned, these topic about culture is sexually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and he wants about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation in set us state, eh, deadline to say, Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. Why do we need to do, to empower and enable this change engines to make it happen? >>You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through. As I think the transformations most recently, as Cindy mentioned in Schneider, there are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time. And here is how having successful while working the past is not going to work. Now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a, in a way that is super fast, the second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? >>We went on implementation and a lot of the way the it team function. So the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prison of the prior auth success criteria for the traditional BIS. And that's not going to work again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as this experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. >>We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest. And these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by your organization. >>Maturity is going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work. When you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do a hundred things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a hundred dollars. >>But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flow data by using this assumption that Florida is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to a hundred dollars. This just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CSRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really close in the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see this snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and, and, and love modeling and, you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff. >>That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. >>They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data driven culture, that's where you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, it, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tablo to other tools like, you know, you need to really explain them. >>What is the difference in how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools? Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindy's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership in shape the culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest, but I meant analytics. >>And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, our safe user experience and adoption. So for our safe or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption, 80% in just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%, really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from it, legal communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, eh, basically stakeholders in this whole process. >>So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You hire a change agent, you need to have the courage to make this decision and understand that. I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it says to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody wants to believe in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know, workforce or customers that in community better, as you can tell, there is a lot of effort. >>There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. We, the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just, I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, what would mentors, where we, people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort bodies, well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well. And it's been a pleasure talking to you. Take care. Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. >>I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage employees on the front lines. And of course the data, as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward. So let's get right into, so Gustavo, let's start with you. If, if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a, I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >>I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's club, Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, different certain transformations that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do. So I can help to inform the functions organizations and do the change management decision of mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. A thank you for that, that is inspiring. And, and Sydney, you love data. And the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspective to this conversation. >>Yeah. So Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible, >>Great perspectives. Thank you, Tom. I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans. We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last 12 months, really, uh, even in celebration, right? Once, once COBIT hit, uh, we really saw that, uh, that, uh, in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers. And today that, uh, been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, uh, friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, uh, we, you know, we we're, we are, uh, very, uh, honored to get to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. >>So as part of that, uh, we, we did do some, uh, some the pivots and we did, uh, a solo rate, some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in there to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those, those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, uh, really our part that our services come into play that, you know, we really support those families. So it was really a, a, a, a, a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. Awesome. Thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom. I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in, in doing things with, with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was, it was, it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >>Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform. And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know, the varying points or making repetitive business cases onto people, connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, Hey, the CEO is making a one two year, you know, efficiency goal. >>The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo. We need to find a way to accelerate it's information. That's the way, how, how about Utah? We were talking earlier was sedation Cindy, about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? Yeah. You know, I think you hit upon, uh, right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team. This is that you need to be, need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically, uh, scale, right, expand and support that the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening. >>Right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at what, uh, how you're operating today and your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align and to drive the actual transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that is what we're putting in place here, right. Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindy, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >>Yeah. Well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago. I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, um, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, um, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know, what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are gonna happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not, do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish gonna go on to junk >>Guys. Fantastic discussion, really, thanks again, to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service is sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament, tremendous results. Know what does that mean? Getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. >>And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. So these please bring us home. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. The cube team, and thanks. Thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. >>Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to make the positive change that you want to see happen when you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk, Cindy talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force and apply that force, make sure your ideas are we start with talking about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone, sometimes building the importance of building the Koran. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it, Tom, instead of a single take away. >>What I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years sold 200 companies, 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle stock. And the last thing is these go to topspot.com/beyond our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year, we, we have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. You'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas or engineers. All of those things will be available for you at hotspot beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Docker Con Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Everyone welcome back to Docker Con 2020 Docker Con 20. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here for virtual event docker con docker, con dot com, and check out all the great footage. And also great guests were talking to all the major thought leaders and people in the industry making it happen as we have this new reality, a great guest and a great segment here from Engine. It's now part of F five, Robb said. Who's the vice president? Product management Sydney, thanks for coming on this segment. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. >>No problem. Happy to be here >>so and UNIX Everyone that does development knows about you. Guys have been very popular product with developers. Number one in the Docker hub will get to that later on this segment. So it's known really in the industry is really easy, easy to use and very reliable component of cloud native and cloud, if you will Anything that working So So I got I got to ask you with the new reality we're living with Covert 19 we now see the new reality that's now apparent to everyone in the world that with new work style, working at home VPNs are under provision now. People working from home, more service area with security. The at scale problems are surface for the executives and business, saying, We need to figure this new reality out because this is not going to change. It's going to move to hybrid when it comes back. But ultimately it exposes and highlights the opportunities around cloud native and kind of shows the operating model of how applications are going to be using. So I think this is going to be mainstream trend for what used to be an inside baseball kind of industry. Conversation around micro services, containers, docker containers, kubernetes. This is all now a tailwind for what will be a massive surge in new APS. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that as you guys are in the middle of it with your product and the developers would have to build new value on top of it. What's your reaction? >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We're also dealing with our own version of this new way of working right. We're also working from home and working remotely and seeing how that impacts us. But as we think about our customers and the folks that leverage in genetics, we started with scaling applications. We have 10 X solution that made it easier to deploy an application, have it scale in a very efficient way. And so it's folks are moving online more and more, relying more on staying connected, no matter where they're working from. Providing that capability is something that's going to continue to be core and will increase in importance. And these folks are looking to build more modern applications or modernize what they already have. Leveraging our technologies is just a natural extension. It's the technology they're already familiar with. They've been relying on it for many years and, you know, as they look to the future, has the capabilities they need to continue to rely on it going forward. >>What are some of the new things that you're working on? You can share with the audience because you're known for tried and true, very reliable. Okay, now you got micro services, which is emerging and very dynamic, literally, figuratively. So what's the new stuff? What do you guys focused on? Can you share some insights into how you're thinking about it and some things that you're doing? >>Yeah, a big part of what we're focusing on is really taking with headaches that come with scaling up applications, especially in the modern world. Now, those headaches are all about understanding the complexity of these new applications, being in the confidence needed to be able to deploy them at scale and understand not only what they're doing, but make sure that if something were to go wrong, they could figure out what was happening. And so, as we think about the investments we're making at the help folks modernize versus just making it easier to employ at modern applications of scale, which is one category of things, second is making sure that you have a really strong understanding of how the application is really working, so that, you know, with if it breaks, it could be fixed quickly. But there opportunities to improve it. We can quickly see the impact of it, and, you know, there's a lot of capabilities we're building in on those two dimensions. And in the third dimension, I would say is around security. I think there's a lot of new surface area. It's being exposed as folks start to build more micro services based applications. And you know, with the technology we have way allow people to buy both rich security capabilities as well as very surgical capabilities, depending on where they need the right functionality. >>And the container business has been really great ride to watch the rise of containers that really someone who has been in software engineering since I was 17. You know, the old way of systems thinking is modernized with containers, and you saw that the beginning of a surge of a sea change Now, actually, with micro services, you just pointed out it's gonna create a whole nother level level of head room. But containers really brought in this notion of making systems work better together, and I think that's really been a great boon for developers. So I got to ask you, you know, Docker containers and now kubernetes on this trend, you guys have been very popular, if not the most popular downloaded container in the hub, and so you've been super popular developers. So what happens next? First? Well, why is that the case and talk to the developers? Why will you continue to be popular? What do you guys have got to keep that that satisfaction going. Why so popular? And how are you going to keep that rolling? >>Yeah, I think. Why so popular? I think we've been fortunate to ride the wave of trusted solutions, right? So folks were already leveraging us for their critical applications. I've been very critical location. It's natural to look to that same text technology as you move to new environments. And, yeah, we've been very fortunate. Teoh have folks continue to trust us with their applications as they move to new environments as a containerized things. And we appreciate that. And we continue to invest in making sure that our feature set is just as capable in those environments as it is anywhere else. And in addition to that, we do invest heavily in making sure that our capabilities and those in the container, space and micro services space specifically, are you staying ahead of where there's a lot of work we're doing to support the next generation capabilities that folks want to be able to leverage but aren't necessarily yet. And that scales from kind of near term things like like G rpc all the way out to HDP three. That's on the horizon. So as we look at the space, we're privileged to have the footprint already. But at the same time, we're not resting on our laurels. We're absolutely investing and making sure that we allow folks to continue to deliver that high quality, high performance application experience no matter what environment they choose to use. >>You know, you know, this whole covert crisis brings up the glass is half full or half empty, depending on your view is you know that due to the two worlds are certainly getting more collision oriented when it come together. The CSO level size of sides of the business and the developer side. We've always said for years other developers on the front lines and it's true, have been cloud native and cloud has been great for developers, but now more than ever, the conversation having on the business side would CSO CIO, CIO, CSO, or whatever have been Hey, my house is on fire after I don't have worry about I don't need to worry about the appliances and what's going on in my kitchen. I need to save my business. And so they're then gonna call the developers to the table. And you're seeing this this kind of formation of critical path thinking around OK, we need to come out of this crisis on a reinvention growth trajectory, which brings the developers into the mix even faster. So I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what does that actually mean? Are they gonna be called in for projects? I mean, what's the media's look like? Because you have a zoom meeting or whatever this is going to be now a new dynamic, A new psychology of the business models of these companies with developers are going to be very active leaders in that new role. Because the virtualized world, now that we live in, is going to be different. The applications have more demands and more more needs more capabilities. So take us through your thinking on this and what what should developers expect when they get called to those meetings? >>Yeah, I think you know the trend that we're seeing that's going to accelerate. I believe as a result of this is the internal transformation. So there's a lot of technologies that developers already leverage be able to deliver that absent. There's technologies that they'd like to be able to leverage more and more, especially if they're using more modern environments. And that tends to come into sharp relief against the legacy infrastructure that exists in the legend legacy tooling that oftentimes exists in large organizations. And so, as organizations start to see, not only about the in the world has changed prior to code, and they need to modernize and transform. I think you know this. This crisis will also spur folks toe really put more thought into how they operate. We're already looking at from the remote work perspective, but also the agility that businesses really want to be able to have but traditionally have been prevented from having. And so I think that the developers are really gonna have an opportunity here to really drive that agile change they want to see in an organization so they can get the capabilities they want help to market quickly. That's going to require new tools, new processes within the organization and those types of things that we're fully supported about. We work in legacy environments, work in modern environments. We allow companies to be as agile as they like to be. I think developers have a really good opportunity here to really be leaders of that change. >>That's awesome. Great insight. So let's talk about the developer side. I'll put my developer hat on for a second here. Sydney. OK, The business guys came to me. We're gonna We're gonna do more cool stuff. I get that. That's totally relevant. Very good insight there. But now in the developer and I have been working with engineers, and I know of Engine X. What's in it for me? What's in it for me? The developer? What do I need to know about Engine X now for me, as a developer, going forward? >>Look, I mean, way come from a really strong, open source tradition. And you know the main reason folks use our solutions. Because if we take headaches away right, I mean, we're a tool that allows folks to deliver their applications, deploy their applications without having to worry about the mechanics. And so for the developers, you know what's in it for you is you build, the application will take care of. The rest will make sure it gets delivered with the controls that are required with security and authentication is required. We operate as an extension of your application. We provide a lot of nice things in the front door. All the way back to you know, into the bedroom is technically a spark, as the application infrastructure is concerned. But, you know, we take care of that common infrastructure. They keep infrastructure set of capabilities needed. That application. Developers can simply focus on building the best applications they can, and we'll make sure that they were >>awesome. Now let's get into the F five acquisition combination with Engine X. What does that do for you guys? As a change of capabilities as it increased more head room for solutions? Is there a new joint tech take us through some of the impacts of that combination? >>Yeah, so it's been a good right. It's been just over a year since the deal closed, and we've been aggressively investing in scaling up the vision that we had previously have. We really want to bring applications to life. You make it so that your application not only scalable and highly available, but it's able to adapt over time. And that, of course, would require input from operations teams, of course, but you know, we're trying to make sure that folks have the ability to operate their applications under any circumstances, whether they're being attacked, whether they're under high demand, whether people are moving all over the place, and we're really trying to make it so that the application is essentially bullet proof. So with that five, we have the ability to invest more in that road map in that vision, in addition to bringing on some pretty cool, complimentary capabilities. One of the things that we're really happy to see is the rich security capabilities that five have has that we're now able todo leverage with the Internet solutions side by side, providing no again new ways to get really advanced security capabilities into the right places in your application greeting. Yeah, >>great insights. I really appreciate that That commentary love to get your thoughts on just something that's always been near and dear to my heart, being cloud world since the early days and trying stuff. Now it's fully enterprise ready and doing all sorts of new things that multi cloud hybrid. But remember the days back when Dev Ops was kind of debated? All that is the day of is it ops? And it always had that Dev ops kind of. I'm an operations person or a devil developer. That's kind of generally been resolved in the sense that infrastructure is code is kind of resolve that. But now, with the Covad crisis, you're seeing operations clearly front and center again, right? So you got security ops now coming online, networking up. So I think the new reality and the edge exploding people are home. That's technically an edge. Perimeter security is now the edge point. More and more edge is more and more network traffic is getting more and more complicated. This >>is >>put bring up a lot of conversation around. What is the new formula As you navigate this, how do you attack the problem? Space is how do you create solutions? Is there a playbook? Is there anything that you could share in terms of this new thinking? Because it's gonna be a new trajectory. I think this is an inflection point came from explosions coming of APS. I believe we've been reporting on that. But the thinking has to change. It's going to be pretty crazy. What's your what's your thoughts on this? >>Yeah, I think folks are getting more and more experience with this new way of working on infrastructure of code is absolutely here. Um, automation is absolutely your orchestrations. Absolutely here. And so I see no more and more of these capabilities will get stitched together. And as I said earlier, you know this this organizational transformation It's all about taking the human more and more out of the loop for certain things to be ableto benefit or to the benefit of being able to move more quickly, but in a predictable way. So you're living failures that come with moving quickly. But you're getting that elasticity that you really want. And so, yeah, I think there's more, more adoption of practices. It's not gonna be overnight for folks. But I do think again, this this crisis is gonna give folks an opportunity to really take a deeper look at how they've been operating and where they want to get to, and it's gonna provide an opportunity to accelerate that move, >>you know, from a developer's perspective. The tried and true form of making something complex, easy with us through abstractions making highly performing and highly available. Always a good formula, right? I mean, as the world gets more complex, you still got to move packets around. You still got to run applications. It's just gonna be that tried and true formula of reduce the complexity, make things easier but makes things run faster, make things runs higher scale. This seems to be the play book. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, things that once were hard to becoming easy. And I think we look back three years. Five years from now, we'll see a world that's that's even more automated, moving much more quickly. And some of the things that look difficult now are gonna become commoditized, right? So, you know, as I talked about bringing applications of life and making applications more resilience, more able to protect themselves more ableto, he'll defend all that kind of stuff. The things that the advanced things that we're doing now that folks are playing with will become the easy things, and we'll have new challenges to focus on, especially as we look at things like Ai. We're really starting to get a sense for some of the capabilities we can apply Teoh impact application behaviors and performance. But once you get to the point where you build up a good library of capabilities now, you really have a nice playbook that can become a foundation for even more advanced things. >>Yeah, build that foundation. Scale it up. It's beautiful scales and new competitive Advantage. Lovett Final question. Just take a minute to give the plug for Engine X. Really appreciate your insights here in this segment on this new reality, this new new developer environments going to be huge. Give the plug for engines. What are you guys working on? What should people know about share? What's happened? >>Yeah, so Internet spent, you know, the last decade plus making applications work at scale. I'm really focused now on making applications easy and bringing them to life. And so, you know, the laser focus we have is on taking away the headaches that folks might have, you know, as they try to scale up on their applications. So we're focused on that space we're focused on taking with headaches that folks have is they're trying to make sure that the applications more secure we're taking away the headaches of folks have is they're dealing with complexity of applications. Um, and 80 eyes. You know, that's that's the hottest thing. Right now, people are talking about applications, but they're actually talking about AP eyes that needs to be leveraged, to be able to make their applications really saying so, you know, in all of those spaces, our focus is on making modernization much easier And taking where the headaches associated with doing so. >>Sidney, wrap side with VP of product management at engine X now part of F five. Great conversation. Um, him up on Twitter. He's out there. Great conversation with the community. Really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Him up on Twitter? If any questions jump into the event, this is Docker con 2020. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios. Getting all the moat interviews as fast as we can get them to you. Here is Docker con segment. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Docker con live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >>Okay, everyone. Welcome back. We're in between segments, we just had Sydney from engine on Jenny, Peter. We're getting down to the last stretch. So our last little segment, before we go to the full wrap up where Jenny, you're going to give away the awards, Peter going to give it away. The awards for the captains, the community. How are you guys feeling? >>Right? Um, I'm feeling great. Peter, how about you? >>Awesome. It's been, it's been fun. Well, Peter, your internet celebrity. Now I hear, I don't know. Is there a special tweet we want to show? I think so. Okay. You see that tweet? It says you're internet famous. Your mom and dad are watching your presentation. Jenny, can you read that? Yeah. >>Yeah. And to be fair, right? They didn't tweet it. They, uh, they watched either session and, and joined and typed in the comments, even though, uh, they had to ask if he was speaking English. Cause they didn't understand anything. He was saying. >>I saw in the chat, I saw my dad's name go by and just, >>I feed her, but wait a minute. And then my wife >>Came in later, said, yeah, your mom and dad are watching your talk. Do we, do we ever stop parenting? >>I don't. Well, I had the opposite effect. I was in one of the sessions and I see a great comment. I'm like, who wrote this? It's my son, Alec farrier, like son, get out of the chat. He said, it's a dope. He said, it's a dope session. It could have been worse. Went in totally random. So it was good. Just look at it, which everywhere the cube and dr. Khan, what a great, uh, no boundaries, age geography has been. I'm really blown away guys. I really gotta say I'm super impressed with the community content program you put together. It's been so much fun. I learned so much. And so appreciate it. Thank you. >>Oh, thank you. I have to agree. Uh, Amanda silver said earlier that coding is the, and you know, Docker con is a team sport too. Uh, I have to take some time to think all the people, uh, that have participated in helped make this event so great. And we'll definitely do it again as we give out the community awards at the end. Okay. I guess 40 minutes from now, but thank you to the doctor theme. Um, many of them have been awakened for hours and hours, hours helping engage and have a great time. Thank you. Okay. Okay. An awesome platform. Rocks scheduling is next level. Um, and the captains, right? I don't know if anyone's had the chance that's watching to go check out the captain stream, especially Brett Fisher. Who's been on all day and he's been so involved in helping us plan to make sure that this is a conversation and not a large webinar. Right. Um, and then our sponsors, we could not have done this without our sponsors. They've been delivering great talks. They're all on demand, uh, except for the one coming up. So make sure to catch those. They'll have giveaways as well, um, that you can, that you can join into two more speakers. You've done awesome, uh, content and production. And then of course the thoughtfulness of the community, right. Thank you for bringing it here today, around the world. >>That's awesome. And I always just say the content presentations were really, really good. The graphics there's templates, but the work that was put into the video and the demos really just next level, as you said. So really just great. I mean, that makes the conference is the presentation. So those talks were engaging. Um, the comments were awesome. Again, I learned a ton and I love love when it's dynamic like that. Uh, Peter, you gotta be psyched developer relations, any, any new insights on the, uh, from the devs? >>Oh, it was great. Great talks. A lot of great. And I was really, really surprised with the chat that the interaction was tremendous. Uh, and I can't believe I used tremendous, but we'll just skip that anyways. Um, but also check out, uh, hashtag Docker con jobs. If you're looking for a job or if you have openings, please, please, uh, hashtag that in your, in your tweets, um, want to help the community out as much as possible. There's a ton of work out there. Just gotta help connect everybody and love to be part of that for sure. >>Yeah. Just so you know, in case you missed the Justin Warren who was live said on live cube, Docker TV, that if he gets 500 upvotes on Linux for Docker, desktop, I think it was. Or was it hub? Might've been desktop. I think he'll triage it out. So there it is. >>All right. I hope the internet heard that cause that's a popular one for sure. Yeah. >>He was on the record and he leaned in on that too. He said it like that. So he meant cool. Any other, uh, shout outs? I mean, I thought Brad was great. Um, the, his, uh, posse, uh, captains were amazing. Um, good feedback there. So gruesome some great chit chatter on that. Um, I didn't have a chance to peek into the session because we're hosting these mainstreams, but yeah. What are you hearing on the captains? >>Uh, tons of knowledge being dropped on that channel for sure. And really great in depth conversations there, uh, answering questions, interacting with the audience. Uh, and you know, a lot of these captains are teachers, uh, as their, as their day job. And a lot of them have, uh, fabulous Docker and Kubernetes content and are running sales right now. So if you do want learn more, if you like, what you heard today, definitely check out right? The horses are on sale this week or under $10, a huge investment in your future. And then Manning books is also running a promotion, a DTW Docker 20 for 40% off their content and a dr. Popkin Elton Stoneman, Jeff Nicola they'll have content there as well. And then Nigel, uh, is, is, has a number of training, uh, courses and, and books as well to check out. Um, and then the captains are running a charity stream. Awesome. People have been donating all day. It's been awesome. Uh, Docker's going to make sure that we reach our $10,000 goal. They wanted to announce that as well. >>I noticed cockroach labs had a similar thing for women for coding. They had another kind of virtual bag swipe. So check them out. They're donating cash as well to women who code. Okay. >>Right. >>Which is very cool. Um, anything else that we missed? Swag giveaways? >>I have one little, um, little comment, a little secret. So I don't know if anybody's caught it yet, Jenny, but if you go back and watch the, the, uh, you know, with Scott, there might be a surprise in there and anybody that finds it first and tweets me might have something for you. >>So Easter egg in there. Is there something going on there? >>I went on, I don't know. I'm just, just saying, >>Okay. All right. Check out the keynote. That was a pro tip right there for everyone's watching. So if you're watching this stream right now, as we get into our awesome next segment, which is going to be really one of my favorites, the children's cancer Institute, this was not only a moving segment from an impact standpoint, but talking about the people that interns and young developers really solving a big problem with Docker, this is a really high impact statement. So that segment, so, so watch it guys. Thanks so much. We'll see. On the wrap up after this next segment, of course, does the catalog of content in the schedule when it's not streaming, it becomes a catalog. So if you're watching it, check out all the sessions, we'll see you in the wrap up.

>> 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 with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios on this kind of continuing leadership series that we've put together. Reaching out to the community for tips and tricks on kind of getting through what is, this kind of ongoing COVID crisis and situation as it continues to go weeks and weeks and weeks. And I'm really excited to have one of my favorite members of our community, is Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight. Had the real pleasure of interviewing him a couple times and had to get him on. So Nick, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy day to join us. >> Jeff, honored to be here, thank you. >> Pleasure, so let's just jump into it. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on, is that Gainsight has been a distributed company from the beginning, and so I think the COVID, suddenly everyone got this work from home order, there was no prep, there was no planning, it's like this light switch digital transformation moment. So love to hear from someone who's been doing it for awhile. What are some of the lessons? How should people think about running a distributed company? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, Jeff, 'cause we are just by happenstance, from the beginning, distributed where we have, our first two offices were St. Louis and Hyderabad, India. So two places you cannot get there through one flight. So, you have to figure out how to collaborate asynchronously and then over time, we have offices in the Bay Area. We have tons of people that work from home. And so we try to tell people we don't have a headquarters. The headquarters is wherever you are, wherever you live and wherever you want to work. And so we've always been super flexible about come in to the office if you want, don't come in, et cetera. So different than some companies in that respect. And because of that, pre-COVID, we always a very heavy video culture, lots of video conferencing. Even if some people were in an office, there's always somebody else dialing in. One benefit we got from that is you never had to miss your kids' stuff or your family things. I would go to my daughter's performance in the middle of the day and know I can just dial into a call on the way there. And so we always had that. But what's amazing is now we're all on a level playing field, there's nobody in our office. And I got to say, this is, in some ways, even better 'cause I feel like when you're the person dialed in, and a lot of people are in a room, you probably had that experience, and it feels like you're kind of not on the same playing field, right? Hard to hear the jokes or the comments and you might not feel like you're totally in crowd, so to speak, right? But now everyone's just at their computer, sitting there in a chair all day doing these Zooms and it does feel like it's equalizing a little bit. And what it's caused us to do is say, hey, what are ways we can all recreate that community from home? So as an example, every 7:45 a.m. every day, we have a Zoom call that's just pure joy and fun. Trivia, pets, kids. The employees' kids announce people's birthdays and the weather. And so these ways we've been able to integrate our home and our work that we never could before, it's really powerful. It's a tough situation overall, and we feel for all the people affected. But even in tough situations, there are silver linings, and we're finding 'em. >> Yeah, it's funny, we just had Darren Murph on the other day. I don't know if you know Darren. He is the head of Remote Work at GitLab, and he-- >> Oh, yeah. >> And he talked about kind of the social norms. And one of the instances that he brought up was, back in the day when you had some people in the office, some people joining via remote, that it is this kind of disharmony because they're very different situations. So one of his suggestions was have everybody join via their laptop, even if they're sitting at their desk, right? So, as you said, you get kind of this level playing field. And the other thing which dovetails off what you just said is he always wanted executives to have a forcing function to work from home for an extended period of time, so they got to understand what it's all about. And it's not only looking through a little laptop or this or that, but it's also the distractions of the kids and the dogs and whatever else is happening around the house. So it is wild how this forcing function has really driven it. And his kind of takeaway is, as we, like say, move from can we get it into cloud to cloud first? And does it work on mobile to mobile first? >> Now it's really-- >> Yeah. >> It's really remote first. And if you-- >> Remote first. >> A remote first attitude about it and kind of turn it on it's head, it's why shouldn't it be remote versus can it be remote? It really changes the conversation and the dynamic of the whole situation. >> I love that. And just, GitLab, by the way, has been a true inspiration 'cause they are the most remote, remote company. And they share so much, I love what you said. As just two examples of reacting to what you said, pre-COVID, we always wanted to keep a level playing field. So we actually moved our all-hands meetings to be instead of being broadcast from one room, and you're kind of seeing this small screen with all these people, we all just were at computers presenting. And so everyone's on a level playing field. So I thought what GitLab said is great. And then the other point, I think post-COVID we have learned is the kids and the dogs aren't distractions, they're part of our life. And so embracing those and saying, hey, I see that kid in the background, bring them onto the screen. Even during work meetings, even customer meetings, you know? And I'm seeing, I'm on a customer meeting and the customer's bringing their kids onto the screen and it's kind of breaking this artificial wall between who we are at home and who we are at work 'cause we're human beings all throughout. At Gainsight, we talk about a human first approach to business and we've never been more human as a world than we are right now. >> Love it, love it. So another, get your thoughts on, is this whole idea of measurement and productivity at home. And it's really, I have to say, disturbing to see some of the new product announcements that are coming out in terms of people basically snoopin' on people. Whether it's trackin' how many hours of Zoom calls they're on, or how often are they in the VPN, or having their camera flip on every so many minutes or something. We had Marten Mickos on, who's now the CEO of HackerOne. He was CEO at MySQL years ago before it went to Sun and he had the great line, he said, it's so easy to fake it at the office, but when you're at home and you're only output is your deliverable, it makes it a lot easier. So I wonder if you can share some of your thoughts in terms of kind of managing output, setting expectations, to get people to get their work done. And then, as you see some of these new tools for people that are just entering this thing, it's just not right (chuckles). >> Yeah, I agree with you and Marten. I'm a huge fan of Marten, as well, I totally agree with both of it. And I think there's an older approach to work, which is more like a factory. It's like you got to see how many widgets you're processing and you got to micromanage and you got to monitoring and inspecting. Look, I don't run a factory, so maybe there are places where that model makes sense. So I'm not going to speak for every leader, but I could say if you're in a world where your job is information, services, software, where the value is the people and their knowledge, managing them that way is a losing battle. I go back to, some folks probably know, this famous TED Talk by Dan Pink on basically what motivates people. And in these knowledge worker jobs, it's autonomy, mastery and purpose. So autonomy, we have the freedom to do what we want. Mastery, we feel like we're getting better at jobs. And purpose, which is I have a why behind what I do. And I think, take that time you spend on your micromanagement and your Zoom, analyzing the Zoom sessions, and spend it on inspiring your team, on the purpose. Spend it on enabling your team in terms of mastery. Spend it on taking away barriers so they have more autonomy. I think you'll get way more out of your team. >> Yeah, I agree. I think it's, as Darren said, again, he's like, well, would you trust your people if you're on the fourth floor and they're on the sixth? So just-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> If you don't trust your people, you got to bigger issue than worrying about how many hours they're on Zoom, which is not the most productive use of time. >> People waste so much time in the office, and getting to the office. And by the way, I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's fine too. But it's not like the office is just unfettered productivity all the time, that's a total myth. >> Yes, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about events. So, obviously, the CUBE's in the event business. We've had to flip completely 'cause all the events are, well, they're all going digital for sure, and/or postponing it or canceling. So we've had to flip and do all dial-ins and there's a whole lot of stuff about asynchronous. But for you, I think it's interesting because as a distributed company, you had Gainsight Pulse as that moment to bring people together physically. You're in the same boat as everybody else, physical is not an option this year. So how are you approaching Gainsight Pulse, both because it's a switch from what you've done in the past, but you at least had the benefit of being in a distributed world? So you probably have a lot of advantages over people that have never done this before. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, insightful observation. So just for a context, Pulse is an event we do every year to bring together the customer success community. 'Cause, as you observed, there is value in coming together. And so this is not just for our employees, this is for all the customer success people, and actually increasingly product management people out there, coming together around this common goal of driving success for your customers. And it started in 2013 with 300 people, and last year, we had 5,000 people at our event in San Francisco. We had similar events in London and Sydney. And so it's a big deal. And there's a lot of value to coming together physically. But obviously, that's not possible now, nor is it advisable. And we said, okay, how do we convert this and not lose what's special about Pulse? And leverage, like you said, Jeff, the fact that we're good at distributed stuff in general. And so we created what we call Pulse Everywhere. We didn't want to call it Pulse Virtual or something like that, Pulse Webinar, because we didn't want to set the bar as just like, oh, my virtual event, my webinar. This is something different. And we called it Everywhere, 'cause it's Pulse wherever you are. And we joke, it's in your house, it's in your backyard, it's on the peloton, it's walking the dog. You could be wherever you are and join Pulse this year, May 13th and 14th. And what's amazing is last year we had 5,000 people in person, this year we already have 13,000 people registered as of the end of April. And so we'll probably have more than three times the number of people at Pulse Everywhere. And we're really bringing that physical event concept into the virtual, literally with, instead of a puppy pit, where you're in a physical event, you'll bring puppies often, we have a puppy cam where you can see the puppies. We're not giving up on all of our silly music videos and jokes and we actually ship cameras and high-end equipment to all the speakers' houses. So they're going to have a very nice digital experience, our attendees are. It's not going to be like watching a video conference call. It's going to be like watching a TV show, one much like what you try to do here, right? And so we have this amazing experience for all of our presenters and then for the audience. And we're really trying to say how do we make it so it feels like you're in this really connected community? You just happen to not be able to shake people's hands. So it's coming up in a few weeks. It's a big experiment, but we're excited about it. >> There's so many conversations, and we jumped in right away, when this was all going down, what defines a digital event? And like you, I don't like the word virtual. There's nothing fake or virtual. To me, virtual's second to life. And kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Video game world. And like you, we did, it can't be a webinar, right? And so, if you really kind of get into the attributes of what is a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication for a significant portion of the allocated time and you kind of get your questions in and hopefully they take 'em, right? It's not a truly kind of engaged process. That said, as you said, to have the opportunity to separate creation, distribution and consumption of the content, now opens up all types of opportunity. And that's before you get into the benefits of the democratization, as you said, we're seeing that with a lot of the clients we work with. Their registration numbers are giant. >> Totally. >> Because-- >> You're not traveling to spend money, yeah. >> It'll be curious to see what the conversion is and I don't know we have a lot of data there. But, such a democratizing opportunity. And then, you have people that are trying to force, as Ben Nelson said on, you know Ben from Minerva, right? A car is not a mechanical horse, they're trying to force this new thing into this old paradigm and have people sit for, I saw one today, 24 hours, in front of their laptop. It's like a challenge. And it's like, no, no, no. Have your rally moment, have your fun stuff, have your kind of your one-to-many, but really there's so much opportunity for many-to-many. >> Many-to-many. >> Make all the content out there, yeah. >> We've created this concept in this Pulse Everywhere event called Tribes. And the idea is that when you go to an event, the goal is actually partially content, but a lot of times it's connection. And so in any given big event, there's lots of little communities out there and you want to meet people "like you". Might be people in a similar phase of their career, a similar type of company, in our case, it could be companies in certain industry. And so these Tribes in our kind of Pulse Everywhere experience, let people break out into their own tribes, and then kind of basically chat with each other throughout the event. And so it's not the exact same thing as having a drink with people, but at least a little bit more of that serendipitous conversation. >> Right, no, it's different and I think that's really the message, right? It's different, it's not the same. But there's a lot of stuff you can do that you can't do in the physical way, so quit focusing on what you can't do and embrace what you can. So that's great. And good luck on the event. Again, give the plug for it. >> Yeah, it's May 13th and 14th. If you go to gainsightpulse.com you can sign up, and it's basically anything related to driving better success for your customers, better retention, less churn, and better product experience. It's a great event to learn. >> Awesome, so I want to shift gears one more time and really talk about leadership. That's really kind of the focus of this series that we've been doing. And tough times call for great leadership. And it's really an opportunity for great leaders to show their stuff and let the rest of us learn. You have a really fantastic style. You know I'm a huge fan, we're social media buddies. But you're very personable and you're very, kind of human, I guess, is really the best word, in your communications. You've got ton of frequency, ton of variety. But really, most of it has kind of this human thread. I wonder if you can share kind of your philosophy behind social, 'cause I think a lot of leaders are afraid of it. I think they're afraid that there is reward for saying something stupid is not worth the benefit of saying okay things. And I think also a lot of leaders are afraid of showing some frailty, showing some emotion. Maybe you're a little bit scared, maybe we don't have all the answers. And yet you've really, you're not afraid at all. And I think it's really shines in the leadership activities and behaviors and things you do day in and day out. So how do you think about it? What's your strategy? >> Yeah, it's really interesting you ask, Jeff, because I'm in a group of CEOs that get together on a regular basis, and I'm going to be leading a session on social media for CEOs. And honestly, when I was putting it together, I was like, it's 2020, does that still need to exist? But somehow, there is this barrier. And I'll talk more about it, but I think the barrier isn't just about social media, it's just about how a CEO wants to present herself or himself into the world. And I think, to me, the three things to ask yourself are, first of all, why? Why do you want to be on social media? Why do you want to communicate to the outside? You should have a why. Hopefully you enjoy it, but also you're connecting from a business perspective with your customers. And for us, it's been a huge benefit to really be able to connect with our customers. And then, who are you targeting? So, I actually think an important thing to think about is it's okay to have a micro-audience. I don't have millions of Twitter followers like Lady Gaga, but within the world of SaaS and customer success and retention, I probably have a decent number. And that means I can really connect with my own specific audience. And then, what. So, the what is really interesting 'cause I think there's a lot of non-obvious things about, it's not just about your business. So I can tweet about customer success or retention and I do, but also the, what, about you as an individual, what's happening in your family? What's happening in the broader industry, in my case of SaaS? What's happening in the world of leading through COVID-19? All the questions you've asked, Jeff, are in this lens. And then that gets you to the final which is the, how. And I think the, how, is the most important. It's basically whether you can embrace the idea of being vulnerable. There's a famous TED Talk by Brene Brown. She talks about vulnerability is the greatest superpower for leaders. I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time on social media, is they have a hard time really being vulnerable. And just saying, look, I'm just a human being just like all of you. I'm a privileged human being. I have a lot of things that luckily kind of came my way, but I'm just a human being. I get scared, I get anxious, I get lonely, all those things. Just like all of you, you know. And really being able to take off your armor of, oh, I'm a CEO. And then when you do that, you are more human. And it's like, this goes back to this concept of human first business. There's no work persona and home persona, there's just you. And I think it's surprising when you start doing it, and I started maybe seven, eight, nine years ago, it's like, wow, the world wants more human leaders. They want you to just be yourself, to talk about your challenges. I had the kids, when we got to 13,000 registrations for Pulse Everywhere, they pied me in the face. And the world wants to see CEOs being pied in the face. Probably that one, for sure, that's a guaranteed crowd pleaser. CEOs being pied in the face. But they want to see what you're into outside of work and the pop culture you're into. And they want to see the silly things that you're doing. They want you to be human. And so I think if you're willing to be vulnerable, which takes some bravery, it can really, really pay off for your business, but I think also for you as a person. >> Yeah, yeah. I think it's so insightful. And I think people are afraid of it for the wrong reasons, 'cause it is actually going to help people, it's going to help your own employees, as well, get to know you better. >> Totally, they love it. >> And you touched on another concept that I think is so important that I think a lot of people miss as we go from kind of the old broadcast world to more narrow casting, which is touching your audience and developing your relationship with your audience. So we have a concept here at theCUBE that one is greater than 1% of 100. Why go with the old broadcast model and just spray and you hope you have these really ridiculously low conversion rates to get to that person that you're trying to get to, versus just identifying that person and reaching out directly to those people, and having a direct engagement and a relative conversation within the people that care. And it's not everybody, but, as you said, within the population that cares about it it's meaningful and they get some value out of it. So it's a really kind of different strategy. So-- >> I love that. >> You're always get a lot of stuff out, but you are super prolific. So you got a bunch of projects that are just hitting today. So as we're getting ready to sit down, I see you just have a book came out. So tell us a little bit about the book that just came out. >> Sure, yeah, it's funny. I need to get my physical copy too at my home. I've got so a few, just for context. Five years ago, we released this first book on "Customer Success" which you can kind of see here. It's surprising really, really popular in this world of SaaS and customer success and it ties, Jeff, to what you just said which is, you don't need to be the book that everyone in the world reads, you need to be the book that everyone in your world reads. And so this book turned out to be that. Thousands of company management teams and CEOs in software and SaaS read it. And so, originally when this came out, it was just kind of an introduction to what we call customer success. Basically, how do you retain your customers for the long-term? How do you get them more value? And how do you get them to use more of what they've bought and eventually spend more money with you? And that's a mega-trend that's happening. We decided that we needed an update. So this second book is called "Customer Success Economy." It just came out, literally today. And it's available on Amazon. And it's about the idea that customer success started in tech companies, but it's now gone into many, many industries, like healthcare, manufacturing, services. And it started with a specific team called the customer success management team. But now it's affecting how companies build products, how they sell, how they market. So it's sort of this book is kind of a handbook for management teams on how to apply customer success to your whole business and we call it "Customer Success Economy" 'cause we do think the future of the economy isn't about marketing and selling transactional products, but it's about making sure what your customers are buying is actually delivering value for them, right? That's better for the world, but it's also just necessary 'cause your customers have the power now. You and I have the power to decide how to transport ourselves, whether it's buying a car or rideshare, in the old world when we could leave our house. And we have the power to decide how we're going to stay in a city, whether it's a hotel or Airbnb or whatever. And so customers have the power now, and if you're not driving success, you're not going to be able to keep those customers. And so "Customer Success Economy" is all about that. >> Yeah, and for people that aren't familiar with Gainsight, obviously, there's lots of resources that they can go. They should go to the show in a couple weeks, but also, I think, the interview that we did at PagerDuty, I think you really laid out kind of a great definition of what customer success is. And it's not CRM, it has nothing to do with CRM. CRM is tracking leads and tracking ops. It's not customer success. So, people can also check that. But I want to shift gears again a little bit because one, you also have your blog, MehtaPhysical, that came out. And you just came out again recently with a new post. I don't know when you, you must have a army of helper writers, but you talk about something that is really top of mind right now. And everyone that we get on theCUBE, especially big companies that have the benefit of a balance sheet with a few bucks in it, say we want to help our customers, we want to help our people be safe, obviously, that's first. But we also want to help our customers. But nobody ever really says what exactly does that mean? And it's pretty interesting. You lay out a bunch of things that are happening in the SaaS world, but I jumped on, I think it's number 10 of your list, which is how to think about helping your customers. And you give some real specific kind of guidance and guidelines and definitions, if you will, of how do you help our customers through these tough times. >> Yeah, so I'll summarize for the folks listening. One of the things we observed is, in this terrible tough times right now, your customers are in very different situations. And for simplicity, we thought about three categories. So the companies that we call category one, which are unfortunately, adversely affected by this terrible crisis, but also by the shutdown itself, and that's hotels, restaurants, airlines, and you can put other folks in that example. What do those customers need? Well, they probably need some financial relief. And you have to figure out what you're going to do there and that's a hard decision. And they also just need empathy. It's not easy and the stress level they have is massive. Then you've got, on the other extremes, a small number of your customers might be doing great despite this crisis or maybe even because of it, because they make video conferencing technology or remote work technology, or they make stuff for virtual or telemedicine. And those folks actually are likely to be super busy because they're just trying to keep up with the demand. So what they need from you is time and help. And then you got the people in between. Most companies, right, where there may be a mix of some things going well, some don't. And so what we recommended is think about your strategy, not just inside out, what you want, but outside in, what those clients need. And so as an example, you might think about in that first category, financial relief. The second category, the companies in the middle, they may need, they may not be willing to spend more money, but they may want to do more stuff. So maybe you unlock your product, make it available, so they can use everything in your suite for a while. And maybe in that third category, they're wiling to spend money, but they're just really busy. So maybe you offer services for them or things to help them as they scale. >> Yeah, so before I let you go, I just want to get your reaction to one more great leader. And as you can tell, I love great leaders and studying great leaders. Back when I was in business school we had Dave Pottruck, who at that time was the CEO of Schwab, come and speak and he's a phenomenal speaker and if you ever get a chance to see him speak. And at that point in time, Schwab had to reinvent their business with online trading and basically kill their call-in brokerage for online brokerage, and I think that they had a fixed price of 19.99, whatever it was. This was back in the late 90s. But he was a phenomenal speaker. And we finished and he had a small dinner with a group of people, and we just said, David, you are a phenomenal speaker, why, how, why're you so good? And he goes, you know, it's really pretty simple. As a CEO, I have one job. It's to communicate. And I have three constituencies. I kind of have the street and the market, I have my internal people, and then I have my customers and my ecosystem. And so he said, I, and he's a wrestler, he said, you know I treated it like wrestling. I hired a coach, I practiced my moves, I did it over and over, and I embraced it as a skill and it just showed so brightly. And it's such a contrast to people that get wrapped around the axle with their ego, or whatever. And I think you're such a shiny example of someone who over communicates, arguably, in terms of getting the message out, getting people on board, and letting people know what you're all about, what the priorities are, and where you're going. And it's such a sheer, or such a bright contrast to the people that don't do that that I think is so refreshing. And you do it in a fun and novel and in your own personal way. >> That's awesome to hear that story. He's a inspirational leader, and I've studied him, for sure. But I hadn't heard this specific story, and I totally agree with you. Communication is not something you're born with. Honestly, you might know this, Jeff, or not, as a kid, I was super lonely. I didn't really have any friends and I was one of those kids who just didn't fit in. So I was not the one they would pick to be on stage in front of thousands of people or anything else. But you just do it over and over again and you try to get better and you find, I think a big thing is finding your own voice, your own style. I'm not a super formal style, I try to be very human and authentic. And so finding your style that works for you, I agree, it's completely learnable. >> Yeah, well, Nick, thank you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm sure you're super, super busy getting ready for the show in a couple weeks. But it's always great to catch up and really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and insights with us. >> Thank you, Jeff, it's an honor. >> All right, he's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft music)