>> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Ignite 2022. Dave we're just talking about how many times we're in Vegas. And we were here two weeks ago with our guest who's back in Alumni. And it's a blur, right? >> It's true, I lost count. Luckily I'm not flying red eye tonight. So that's good. >> I'm impressed. >> Excited about that. >> Yeah >> I'm actually going to enjoy the, nightlife here for a period of time. And, you know, we were at re-Invent. >> Yeah. >> And what a difference. This is nice and relaxed. You have time. You're not getting bumped in the hallway. >> Right. >> A lot of time for learning. So it's been great show. >> It's been great. And one of the things that we've been talking about is the supply chain. Securing the modern software supply chain is really complicated. We've got an Alumni back with us, to talk about what Palo Alto is doing in that respect. Ankur Shah joins us. The SVP and GM of Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back. >> Yeah, happy to be back. Good to see you again. Dave and Lisa. >> It's been two long weeks. >> Ankur: I know. It's been two weeks, yeah >> Dave: It's kind of crazy. I mean, ReInvent really was a blur. And it's like you had everything coming at you. And there was obviously a big chunk of security, but you. It was just so much to absorb. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Yeah, and I couldn't get into any of the sessions versus at Ignite. I mean, you could, you could learn a lot. To your point Dave. And 70,000 people versus 3000 in change. Big difference. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. So we touched on the Cider acquisition. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Which was announced the intent to acquire last month. Let's dig into a little bit more of that, and then some of the great things that had been announced. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> In the last couple of days. >> Oh, absolutely. So, this is something that we have been marinating for last nine months. Thinking about how best to secure supply chain. And this is software supply chain. The modern application software is fairly complex. You know, back in the days when I was a developer, it was a simple three tier application. Ship the code once a year, et cetera. But now with microservices, new architectures, Kubernetes Public Cloud, we talked about this. It's getting super complicated, and the customers are really worried about securing their entire supply chain. Which is nothing but the software pipeline. And so we started looking at a whole bunch of companies and Cider really stood out. I mean, they had, they were the innovators in this space. Very early days, we've seen supply chain attack. But there hasn't been a really good and strong solution in that space. And Cider just delivered that incredible team. Great technology, super excited about what that integration will look like. in the coming quarters. >> What do we need to know about them? I mean, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't familiar with Cider until I saw you guys made the announcement of the intent to acquire them. What, what should we know about them? Why Cider? What was it that attracted you to them? >> Ankur: Yeah, so, you know, we have a history of technology acquisitions as you know, over the last four years, just in the public cloud. We acquire over half a a dozen companies, small and large. And typically we are always looking for companies who have the next gen technology available. Technology that is more in tune with how application software is going to look like in future. So we're not always going after companies that are making you know, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in a year and all. We're looking for the right tech. The future. And that's what we found in Cider. Like they have a really strong application security background. And AppSec just broadly speaking, supply chain is part of it. But application security, just broadly speaking, is right for disruption. You've got a lot of vendors, who have been around for like last two decades. Old school stuff, lots and lots of false positives. So we've been bolstering, beefing up our portfolio in the application security space. And Cider really fits right nicely into it. Because it can like I said, secure a lot of technology and tooling, that software developers use as part of their software supply chain. So, great founding team, great technology. It was a perfect fit. >> Talk about integration. We spoke with Nikesh yesterday, with Nir, with a whole bunch of folks. Lee this morning. BJ yesterday as well. And one of the things that seems to stick out at me. With all the shows that we do, is the focus that Palo Alto has on ensuring that it's making the right acquisitions. But that it's the integration, is really seems to be like leading part of the strategy. That seems to be a little bit of a differentiator to me. >> Yeah, it absolutely is. There are two ways to integrate a technology into an existing platform. And Prisma Cloud is a platform as you know. Code-to-cloud, CNAPP platform as we call it. One is just kind of slotted in, put the whole thing in a box. And that's basically making one plus one equal to two. We're looking for high leverage in integrations, whereby once that integration comes along. It makes the rest of the platform even better and superior. It makes that technology look even better. So that's why there's a lot of focus on ensuring that we're delivering the right type of integration, that delivers instant customer value. And that makes the overall platform even superior. So customers don't feel like hey, like there's just one more add-on, on top of the other thing. >> Lisa: Right, not a bolt on. >> So that's why there's a lot of focus on that. Getting the strategy nailed. Because the founding teams generally have a preconceived notion about how the world looks like. Then they understand how Prisma cloud and Palo Alto Networks think about it. And then, we sort of merge the two ideas, and build something that's incredible. So I am, we're spending a lot of time in integration. That honeymoon phase of like, let's high five acquisitions done, that's over. Now it's the grinding work of actually getting this right. And you know, getting hundreds and thousands of customers. >> Well I like how you don't have the private equity mentality. It's not about EBITDA and cashflow. We'll take care of that. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, it's about getting that integration. Getting that flywheel effect, inside the platform. You know, we said one plus one equals, maybe even more than two. Can you explain Prisma Cloud Secrets Security? What is that all about? What do we need to know about that? >> Ankur: Absolutely. So, the developers, you know generally store some stuff in the code repo for their automation work to build application. And that thing, the API keys or as Secrets are stored in code repo. It shouldn't be. Or even if they are, they should be encrypted, or locked down and things of that nature. But, you know, the need for speed trumps everything else. Developers want to go fast. And sometimes they're like, okay well. I guess my application needs this particular, you know API access token or secret. I'm just going to stick it in the code. Now the challenge with that is that, if somebody gets hold of your code repo. Now not only is your code repo, which has all your sensitive data. Your code is the life and blood of a technology company. That's in trouble. But also those secrets and API access keys can be used to log into your cloud accounts. And there you may have sensitive customer data. Everything that you have as a technology company stored in that public cloud accounts. So that's the worry. It's usually the initial access for the kill chain. Because that's where the attacks start. Let me get the secret, let me get the API access key. And let me see what I can do in public cloud. So we are now giving customers the visibility into where the secrets are stored. More importantly, it just right there on developer's face. In the code repo as they're checking in the code. They say why, hey, there's a secret here. Are you sure you want to, you want to keep it like this, no? Okay, well then you can either encrypt it, or just get rid of it. So we're making, we're bringing security where the developers are in their code repo, et cetera. >> So I can see a lot of developers saying, yeah, go ahead, encrypt it. So I don't have to do anything else, you know, extra. It's almost, the analogy is a very small you know, version of this. Its like, use a password manager. You store all your passwords in your contacts on your phone, right? I mean, somebody gets a hold of your contacts, you're screwed. >> Ankur: That's exactly right. >> And so, but I could still see a lot of developers say, check in the box. Say, yeah just encrypt it, leave it there. But you're saying best practice is to not to do that, right? >> Yeah, usually you're not supposed to, you know, store all your secrets, et cetera in code repo to begin with. But if you do, you know, you use a key wall like technology to really encrypt it and store it in a secret manner, yeah. >> Dave: There's an old saying, bad user behavior trump's great security every time. >> Ankur: Every time. >> But this is an example where, we know you're going to have bad behavior. So we're going to protect the bad behavior. >> Yeah, and actually, sorry Lisa, just to that point. The bad user behavior trumps good security. The classic example, this happened three weeks ago. Three, four weeks ago, where Dropbox, one of the file sharing companies there. 120 plus code repos were exposed. And the way their attack started, was a simple social engineering attack. Bad user behavior. There was an email, hey, like your passwords are updated for your, you know, this code plugin. Can you enter the password? And boom, now you have access to the code repo. And now if you have secrets inside of it, now, you know all bets are off. >> Are there hard-coded secrets versus like, I mean, like I think like, like you were saying, Dave. Like usernames and passwords and tokens, versus like soft coded secrets. >> Ankur: It's, I think it, this is more so two forms of it, you know. The most primary one is what we call the API access keys. And this keys are used to access cloud accounts, workloads and things of that nature. But there are actually secret secrets. Could be database login passwords, et cetera. The application is using it to spin up databases. Now, you know, you have access to the data stores. Any other application, there's a login password, all of that stuff. So it's less about the user password, but more the application and databases and things of that nature. >> Dave: So again, and, again, everybody should be using password managers. But when you use a password manager, it's going to give you a long list of passwords, that are either been compromised or are weak. And you just go uh, okay. So can you help? How do you help customers identify what the high risk? You know, API, you know, access are versus those ones that they may not have to worry about. >> Ankur: Yeah, look. You know, secrets aside. Risk prioritization is one of the biggest topics that our customers have across the board, in cloud security. All the security vendors are really, really good at one thing, generating alerts. Everybody does it. They generate an alert. You know, your ring camera, if you've got one. I mean this pop up every day, like every minute rather. Well like can you prioritize it for me? What should I really look at it? So that's a number one thing. What Prisma Cloud does is, you know, contextualize it. What the real risk is? They can tell you like, hey, here's the kill chain. If this thing, you know, goes to public internet. These are the potential exposures that you have. So we provide a prioritized risk of critical alerts that customers have to take care of before they can start taking care of more hygiene type of stuff, right? So that's how we do it. Like we leverage a lot of technology. We apply a lot of context. We tell you like, hey, this code repo is not protected by multifactor authentication. And then there's a secret inside. Are you sure, you know, you don't want to fix it? So that's what we do. But it's a great question. Top of mind for all our customers. And that's how we think about it across the board. Versus generating just alerts all the time. >> Dave: Is the strategy, Because we all know phishing is the sort of most, you know obvious way to. It's the top way in which people get hacked. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Is your strategy essentially to say. Okay we know that's going to happen, so we're going to try to protect it at the back end. How much of the, maybe it's an industry question. more so than just a Palo Alto specifically, How much emphasis is do you think the industry is taking or should be taking on stopping that, you know that those phishing attacks? Because if that's the number one problem you know, maybe that's where we should be starting. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's typically the initial vector, for a lot of attacks to your point. But there is one thing that technology and AI cannot solve. Which is the user behavior, to your point. Like we can't get into the heads of the user. I mean, you can train them, you can do everything. You can't prevent somebody from clicking a button. Of course there's technology out there for email security that does that. But your point is, right, it's going to happen. Now what do you do? How do you protect your applications, your crown jewel? You know, whether it's in the cloud or it's in the code repo. So a lot of what we are trying to do in code security, or cloud security, or in general at Palo Alto Networks. is to protect those crown jewel. Because we can't prevent somebody from doing something. User behavior is hard to change. >> Dave: So it's almost like, okay, you left your front door open. Somebody's going to walk in, but oh, they walk into a vault. And they don't know where to go. And there's nowhere they can- >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, nothing they can take. They can't get to the silverware or the jewelry. >> I think that's it, yeah. >> What are some of the things, like as we look at, we're wrapping up calendar year '22 heading into '23. That customers can look to Palo Alto Networks to help them achieve? One of the things that we talked about with Nikesh and Niri yesterday, is consolidation. Like, and you guys just did a recent, survey. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> About the state of Cyber, and organizations on average have 366 apps in their environment. 31 security tools, 30 to 50 security tools. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Consolidation is really key there. What are some of the things that you are excited about to deliver to customers where consolidation is concerned? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Where software supply chain security is concerned in the next year? >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are over 3000 security vendors. And this can be, I mean you talked about average customer having 300. I was talking to a CSO, this was last year for one of the largest financial institution I go, "How many security tools do you have?" He got 120. I said, why? He goes, we have a no vendor left behind policy. >> Wow. >> It's crazy. >> Dave: What? >> Obviously he was joking, but it's crazy, right? Like that's how the CSO's are. >> Dave: I mean, he was kidding. >> Yeah. >> Dave: But recognized that. Wow. >> Yeah, and, this is the state the security industry is in. And our mission has been, and Lee and Nikesh and Niri talked about it. Is just platforms, will platforms take moonshots, things long term. And especially the, macro headwinds that we're seeing. We're hearing more and more from the customers that, look we're not going to buy point product. Then we got to buy another product that stitches it all together. We need platforms, whether it's for zero trust, Prisma SaaS, whether it's cloud. Prisma cloud or for your sock transformation. You know XIM and Cortex line of products. So I think you're going to see more and more of that in 2023. I'm confident in that. >> We heard from Lee today, the world record's 400. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> That's crazy. >> He's going for it. He's got a ways to go. 120 He's got to... >> Maybe he wasn't, that guy wasn't kidding about his no vendor left behind policy. (laughing) Do you have Ankur, a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Palo Alto delivers and continues to. You know, 'cause one of the things that Nikesh said in his keynote was that you know, security's a data problem. Well every company these days, in every industry has to be a data company. But really what they need to be able to be is a secured data company. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> How are you guys enabling that? >> Oh, absolutely. Look, many customer examples come to mind, but speaking of data. You know, one of, some of our largest customers who are protecting their PCI workers where they have sensitive data. They're using for example, Prisma Cloud, to ensure that malicious attacks don't happen. And those workloads are used for credit card processing. They're processing tens of thousands of credit card transactions a second. And make sure that nobody gets hold of that. And that's why they have to make sure that nobody is. No attacker is trying to get hold of the sensitive data, to your point, So we have customers across financial services, media and entertainment technology company. Where we are helping them go as fast as possible in public cloud. Go through digital transformation, by securing their applications. >> Dave: What's the T-shirt say? I see code. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: Secure from Code to Cloud. >> Lisa: Shift Happens. >> Shift Happens, Secrets from Code to Cloud. >> I love that. I was looking at that, going back to that, what's next in cyber survey? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> It said 74% of respondents, and I believe there was 1300 CIO's, CXO's that were surveyed globally. Where they said security is slowing down DevOps. Can customers look to Palo Alto Networks to help them? >> Ankur: Be enablers? >> Yes. >> Yeah, hundred percent. Look, the conversation over the last few years have changed now. Security used to say like, oh, I don't know about these people who are building applications. The DevOps is like security slowing down. I think there's an opportunity for companies like Palo Alto Networks, to build the bridge between the two. And the way we do it is make the securities easy, simple and not super intrusive. Where developers have to do a natural thing. And one part of it, and I talked about it earlier, is bring security where the developers are. In their code repo, in their IDE. Make it super simple. Don't make them do unnatural things. And it just, this is no different from changing the behavior of our kids. Right? Like you make them do unnatural things, they're not going to do it. But if it is part of their regular, you know, day-to-day operating procedures. I think they're going to be more open to change. Yeah. So I think it's possible. And Palo Alto has a huge responsibility to bridge the divide between the apps team, or the DevOps and the security organization. >> Lisa: Lots of great stuff to come. We thank you so much for coming back, two weeks. Only being on two weeks ago. We appreciate your insights, learning more information. It's great to see you at Palo Alto Ignite. And we'll have to have you back on. 'Cause we know that there's so much more to follow with respect to what you're doing. And shifting left, shift happens. >> Awesome. Lisa, Dave, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. For Ankur Shah and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live and emerging tech coverage.

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is braking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> A new era of data is upon us, and we're in a state of transition. You know, even our language reflects that. We rarely use the phrase big data anymore, rather we talk about digital transformation or digital business, or data-driven companies. Many have come to the realization that data is a not the new oil, because unlike oil, the same data can be used over and over for different purposes. We still use terms like data as an asset. However, that same narrative, when it's put forth by the vendor and practitioner communities, includes further discussions about democratizing and sharing data. Let me ask you this, when was the last time you wanted to share your financial assets with your coworkers or your partners or your customers? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to share our assessment of the state of the data business. We'll do so by looking at the data mesh concept and how a leading financial institution, JP Morgan Chase is practically applying these relatively new ideas to transform its data architecture. Let's start by looking at what is the data mesh. As we've previously reported many times, data mesh is a concept and set of principles that was introduced in 2018 by Zhamak Deghani who's director of technology at ThoughtWorks, it's a global consultancy and software development company. And she created this movement because her clients, who were some of the leading firms in the world had invested heavily in predominantly monolithic data architectures that had failed to deliver desired outcomes in ROI. So her work went deep into trying to understand that problem. And her main conclusion that came out of this effort was the world of data is distributed and shoving all the data into a single monolithic architecture is an approach that fundamentally limits agility and scale. Now a profound concept of data mesh is the idea that data architectures should be organized around business lines with domain context. That the highly technical and hyper specialized roles of a centralized cross functional team are a key blocker to achieving our data aspirations. This is the first of four high level principles of data mesh. So first again, that the business domain should own the data end-to-end, rather than have it go through a centralized big data technical team. Second, a self-service platform is fundamental to a successful architectural approach where data is discoverable and shareable across an organization and an ecosystem. Third, product thinking is central to the idea of data mesh. In other words, data products will power the next era of data success. And fourth data products must be built with governance and compliance that is automated and federated. Now there's lot more to this concept and there are tons of resources on the web to learn more, including an entire community that is formed around data mesh. But this should give you a basic idea. Now, the other point is that, in observing Zhamak Deghani's work, she is deliberately avoided discussions around specific tooling, which I think has frustrated some folks because we all like to have references that tie to products and tools and companies. So this has been a two-edged sword in that, on the one hand it's good, because data mesh is designed to be tool agnostic and technology agnostic. On the other hand, it's led some folks to take liberties with the term data mesh and claim mission accomplished when their solution, you know, maybe more marketing than reality. So let's look at JP Morgan Chase in their data mesh journey. Is why I got really excited when I saw this past week, a team from JPMC held a meet up to discuss what they called, data lake strategy via data mesh architecture. I saw that title, I thought, well, that's a weird title. And I wondered, are they just taking their legacy data lakes and claiming they're now transformed into a data mesh? But in listening to the presentation, which was over an hour long, the answer is a definitive no, not at all in my opinion. A gentleman named Scott Hollerman organized the session that comprised these three speakers here, James Reid, who's a divisional CIO at JPMC, Arup Nanda who is a technologist and architect and Serita Bakst who is an information architect, again, all from JPMC. This was the most detailed and practical discussion that I've seen to date about implementing a data mesh. And this is JP Morgan's their approach, and we know they're extremely savvy and technically sound. And they've invested, it has to be billions in the past decade on data architecture across their massive company. And rather than dwell on the downsides of their big data past, I was really pleased to see how they're evolving their approach and embracing new thinking around data mesh. So today, we're going to share some of the slides that they use and comment on how it dovetails into the concept of data mesh that Zhamak Deghani has been promoting, and at least as we understand it. And dig a bit into some of the tooling that is being used by JP Morgan, particularly around it's AWS cloud. So the first point is it's all about business value, JPMC, they're in the money business, and in that world, business value is everything. So Jr Reid, the CIO showed this slide and talked about their overall goals, which centered on a cloud first strategy to modernize the JPMC platform. I think it's simple and sensible, but there's three factors on which he focused, cut costs always short, you got to do that. Number two was about unlocking new opportunities, or accelerating time to value. But I was really happy to see number three, data reuse. That's a fundamental value ingredient in the slide that he's presenting here. And his commentary was all about aligning with the domains and maximizing data reuse, i.e. data is not like oil and making sure there's appropriate governance around that. Now don't get caught up in the term data lake, I think it's just how JP Morgan communicates internally. It's invested in the data lake concept, so they use water analogies. They use things like data puddles, for example, which are single project data marts or data ponds, which comprise multiple data puddles. And these can feed in to data lakes. And as we'll see, JPMC doesn't strive to have a single version of the truth from a data standpoint that resides in a monolithic data lake, rather it enables the business lines to create and own their own data lakes that comprise fit for purpose data products. And they do have a single truth of metadata. Okay, we'll get to that. But generally speaking, each of the domains will own end-to-end their own data and be responsible for those data products, we'll talk about that more. Now the genesis of this was sort of a cloud first platform, JPMC is leaning into public cloud, which is ironic since the early days, in the early days of cloud, all the financial institutions were like never. Anyway, JPMC is going hard after it, they're adopting agile methods and microservices architectures, and it sees cloud as a fundamental enabler, but it recognizes that on-prem data must be part of the data mesh equation. Here's a slide that starts to get into some of that generic tooling, and then we'll go deeper. And I want to make a couple of points here that tie back to Zhamak Deghani's original concept. The first is that unlike many data architectures, this puts data as products right in the fat middle of the chart. The data products live in the business domains and are at the heart of the architecture. The databases, the Hadoop clusters, the files and APIs on the left-hand side, they serve the data product builders. The specialized roles on the right hand side, the DBA's, the data engineers, the data scientists, the data analysts, we could have put in quality engineers, et cetera, they serve the data products. Because the data products are owned by the business, they inherently have the context that is the middle of this diagram. And you can see at the bottom of the slide, the key principles include domain thinking, an end-to-end ownership of the data products. They build it, they own it, they run it, they manage it. At the same time, the goal is to democratize data with a self-service as a platform. One of the biggest points of contention of data mesh is governance. And as Serita Bakst said on the Meetup, metadata is your friend, and she kind of made a joke, she said, "This sounds kind of geeky, but it's important to have a metadata catalog to understand where data resides and the data lineage in overall change management. So to me, this really past the data mesh stink test pretty well. Let's look at data as products. CIO Reid said the most difficult thing for JPMC was getting their heads around data product, and they spent a lot of time getting this concept to work. Here's the slide they use to describe their data products as it related to their specific industry. They set a common language and taxonomy is very important, and you can imagine how difficult that was. He said, for example, it took a lot of discussion and debate to define what a transaction was. But you can see at a high level, these three product groups around wholesale, credit risk, party, and trade and position data as products, and each of these can have sub products, like, party, we'll have to know your customer, KYC for example. So a key for JPMC was to start at a high level and iterate to get more granular over time. So lots of decisions had to be made around who owns the products and the sub-products. The product owners interestingly had to defend why that product should even exist, what boundaries should be in place and what data sets do and don't belong in the various products. And this was a collaborative discussion, I'm sure there was contention around that between the lines of business. And which sub products should be part of these circles? They didn't say this, but tying it back to data mesh, each of these products, whether in a data lake or a data hub or a data pond or data warehouse, data puddle, each of these is a node in the global data mesh that is discoverable and governed. And supporting this notion, Serita said that, "This should not be infrastructure-bound, logically, any of these data products, whether on-prem or in the cloud can connect via the data mesh." So again, I felt like this really stayed true to the data mesh concept. Well, let's look at some of the key technical considerations that JPM discussed in quite some detail. This chart here shows a diagram of how JP Morgan thinks about the problem, and some of the challenges they had to consider were how to write to various data stores, can you and how can you move data from one data store to another? How can data be transformed? Where's the data located? Can the data be trusted? How can it be easily accessed? Who has the right to access that data? These are all problems that technology can help solve. And to address these issues, Arup Nanda explained that the heart of this slide is the data in ingestor instead of ETL. All data producers and contributors, they send their data to the ingestor and the ingestor then registers the data so it's in the data catalog. It does a data quality check and it tracks the lineage. Then, data is sent to the router, which persists the data in the data store based on the best destination as informed by the registration. This is designed to be a flexible system. In other words, the data store for a data product is not fixed, it's determined at the point of inventory, and that allows changes to be easily made in one place. The router simply reads that optimal location and sends it to the appropriate data store. Nowadays you see the schema infer there is used when there is no clear schema on right. In this case, the data product is not allowed to be consumed until the schema is inferred, and then the data goes into a raw area, and the inferer determines the schema and then updates the inventory system so that the data can be routed to the proper location and properly tracked. So that's some of the detail of how the sausage factory works in this particular use case, it was very interesting and informative. Now let's take a look at the specific implementation on AWS and dig into some of the tooling. As described in some detail by Arup Nanda, this diagram shows the reference architecture used by this group within JP Morgan, and it shows all the various AWS services and components that support their data mesh approach. So start with the authorization block right there underneath Kinesis. The lake formation is the single point of entitlement and has a number of buckets including, you can see there the raw area that we just talked about, a trusted bucket, a refined bucket, et cetera. Depending on the data characteristics at the data catalog registration block where you see the glue catalog, that determines in which bucket the router puts the data. And you can see the many AWS services in use here, identity, the EMR, the elastic MapReduce cluster from the legacy Hadoop work done over the years, the Redshift Spectrum and Athena, JPMC uses Athena for single threaded workloads and Redshift Spectrum for nested types so they can be queried independent of each other. Now remember very importantly, in this use case, there is not a single lake formation, rather than multiple lines of business will be authorized to create their own lakes, and that creates a challenge. So how can that be done in a flexible and automated manner? And that's where the data mesh comes into play. So JPMC came up with this federated lake formation accounts idea, and each line of business can create as many data producer or consumer accounts as they desire and roll them up into their master line of business lake formation account. And they cross-connect these data products in a federated model. And these all roll up into a master glue catalog so that any authorized user can find out where a specific data element is located. So this is like a super set catalog that comprises multiple sources and syncs up across the data mesh. So again to me, this was a very well thought out and practical application of database. Yes, it includes some notion of centralized management, but much of that responsibility has been passed down to the lines of business. It does roll up to a master catalog, but that's a metadata management effort that seems compulsory to ensure federated and automated governance. As well at JPMC, the office of the chief data officer is responsible for ensuring governance and compliance throughout the federation. All right, so let's take a look at some of the suspects in this world of data mesh and bring in the ETR data. Now, of course, ETR doesn't have a data mesh category, there's no such thing as that data mesh vendor, you build a data mesh, you don't buy it. So, what we did is we use the ETR dataset to select and filter on some of the culprits that we thought might contribute to the data mesh to see how they're performing. This chart depicts a popular view that we often like to share. It's a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the horizontal axis. And we filtered the data on sectors such as analytics, data warehouse, and the adjacencies to things that might fit into data mesh. And we think that these pretty well reflect participation that data mesh is certainly not all compassing. And it's a subset obviously, of all the vendors who could play in the space. Let's make a few observations. Now as is often the case, Azure and AWS, they're almost literally off the charts with very high spending velocity and large presence in the market. Oracle you can see also stands out because much of the world's data lives inside of Oracle databases. It doesn't have the spending momentum or growth, but the company remains prominent. And you can see Google Cloud doesn't have nearly the presence in the dataset, but it's momentum is highly elevated. Remember that red dotted line there, that 40% line, anything over that indicates elevated spending momentum. Let's go to Snowflake. Snowflake is consistently shown to be the gold standard in net score in the ETR dataset. It continues to maintain highly elevated spending velocity in the data. And in many ways, Snowflake with its data marketplace and its data cloud vision and data sharing approach, fit nicely into the data mesh concept. Now, a caution, Snowflake has used the term data mesh in it's marketing, but in our view, it lacks clarity, and we feel like they're still trying to figure out how to communicate what that really is. But is really, we think a lot of potential there to that vision. Databricks is also interesting because the firm has momentum and we expect further elevated levels in the vertical axis in upcoming surveys, especially as it readies for its IPO. The firm has a strong product and managed service, and is really one to watch. Now we included a number of other database companies for obvious reasons like Redis and Mongo, MariaDB, Couchbase and Terradata. SAP as well is in there, but that's not all database, but SAP is prominent so we included them. As is IBM more of a database, traditional database player also with the big presence. Cloudera includes Hortonworks and HPE Ezmeral comprises the MapR business that HPE acquired. So these guys got the big data movement started, between Cloudera, Hortonworks which is born out of Yahoo, which was the early big data, sorry early Hadoop innovator, kind of MapR when it's kind of owned course, and now that's all kind of come together in various forms. And of course, we've got Talend and Informatica are there, they are two data integration companies that are worth noting. We also included some of the AI and ML specialists and data science players in the mix like DataRobot who just did a monster $250 million round. Dataiku, H2O.ai and ThoughtSpot, which is all about democratizing data and injecting AI, and I think fits well into the data mesh concept. And you know we put VMware Cloud in there for reference because it really is the predominant on-prem infrastructure platform. All right, let's wrap with some final thoughts here, first, thanks a lot to the JP Morgan team for sharing this data. I really want to encourage practitioners and technologists, go to watch the YouTube of that meetup, we'll include it in the link of this session. And thank you to Zhamak Deghani and the entire data mesh community for the outstanding work that you're doing, challenging the established conventions of monolithic data architectures. The JPM presentation, it gives you real credibility, it takes Data Mesh well beyond concept, it demonstrates how it can be and is being done. And you know, this is not a perfect world, you're going to start somewhere and there's going to be some failures, the key is to recognize that shoving everything into a monolithic data architecture won't support massive scale and agility that you're after. It's maybe fine for smaller use cases in smaller firms, but if you're building a global platform in a data business, it's time to rethink data architecture. Now much of this is enabled by the cloud, but cloud first doesn't mean cloud only, doesn't mean you'll leave your on-prem data behind, on the contrary, you have to include non-public cloud data in your Data Mesh vision just as JPMC has done. You've got to get some quick wins, that's crucial so you can gain credibility within the organization and grow. And one of the key takeaways from the JP Morgan team is, there is a place for dogma, like organizing around data products and domains and getting that right. On the other hand, you have to remain flexible because technologies is going to come, technology is going to go, so you got to be flexible in that regard. And look, if you're going to embrace the metaphor of water like puddles and ponds and lakes, we suggest maybe a little tongue in cheek, but still we believe in this, that you expand your scope to include data ocean, something John Furry and I have talked about and laughed about extensively in theCUBE. Data oceans, it's huge. It's the new data lake, go transcend data lake, think oceans. And think about this, just as we're evolving our language, we should be evolving our metrics. Much the last the decade of big data was around just getting the stuff to work, getting it up and running, standing up infrastructure and managing massive, how much data you got? Massive amounts of data. And there were many KPIs built around, again, standing up that infrastructure, ingesting data, a lot of technical KPIs. This decade is not just about enabling better insights, it's a more than that. Data mesh points us to a new era of data value, and that requires the new metrics around monetizing data products, like how long does it take to go from data product conception to monetization? And how does that compare to what it is today? And what is the time to quality if the business owns the data, and the business has the context? the quality that comes out of them, out of the shoot should be at a basic level, pretty good, and at a higher mark than out of a big data team with no business context. Automation, AI, and very importantly, organizational restructuring of our data teams will heavily contribute to success in the coming years. So we encourage you, learn, lean in and create your data future. Okay, that's it for now, remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast, and please subscribe. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus for all the data and all the survey information. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can get in touch with us, email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me @dvellante, or you can comment on my LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody, stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're a virtual this year. But we'll be in real life soon, right around the corner, as we come out of COVID. We got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow VP, CTO for IBM automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since almost since the early days of theCUBE. Good to see you >> Yeah, John. Thrilled to be back again. Thank you. >> What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt. You're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called "The Art of Automation", which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and Hybrid Cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First give us a little background for the folks that may not know you, about your history with IBM and who you are. >> Yeah. So thanks John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM blockchain initiative and now all about AI powered automation. Which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, really enjoying the topic. >> It's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in Computer Science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering AKA now DevOps, DevSecOps, coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts. Whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position, you've been there done that, now you're on the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. That literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around and in its simplest form, automation whether it was back then, whether it was in the eighties or today it's about applying technology that uses technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us, humans. But now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, it's a sentence of two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills. And to use automation, to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. >> And it's interesting too, as a student of the history of the computer industry, as you are and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second. You're starting to see the intersection of these concerts and not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation. And it is the innovation, innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, jeez, look around us. The pandemic has made, transformation and specifically digital transformation, the default. So everything is digital. Whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine, or this zoom WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10 X more users, they can't hire 10 X more support staff. And think about it. I forgot my password, does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that that comes into play, which is just in time. So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this, businesses like cars have become computers. So they're programmable. So automation software just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla model three, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >> Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. And I was just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business you're implying, you said the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second. If it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, okay. Let's go in the old days you had a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, applications software construct. If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM will kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could, because they're not breaking system company. So if Hybrid Cloud is the system, edge, hybrid, then you got the application suite is all software for the business. >> That's right. That's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's Hybrid Cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. You mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is, is that automation sometimes gets stuck. It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. With that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI and its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and, and Hybrid Cloud Park. Well, think about it this way, when you shop, how many stores do you... You don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special catsup, I don't know or mustard. (audio cuts) In one store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google, involving search and AI related to search. And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. From that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy. They're going to be using Salesforce or Servicenow, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud. So when you think about automating that world, it's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud. The Hybrid Cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red hat really does. >> It's interesting. I'll just share with you though. When I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM when he was at Red Hat summit 2019 in San Francisco. Before he made the acquisition, I was peppering him with questions. Like, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling. He just wanted to say it, he wanted to just say it. And I think Red hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS of the middleware, which is now software which is software defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called "Art of Automation". We want to get that in there, for the folks watching. Search for the podcast, "Art of Automation". This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories, from this phenomena. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >> Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customer. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned, and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion, and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then, we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside. Starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation in healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them, about automation is not going to take the place of doctors. But automation will help better read x-rays and look at those shades of gray on the x-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for Cooperators, to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Akkiraju, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research. Talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code and all the modern programming languages. And really automating application modernization and the like. Four keyed episodes in, we have those under our belt. About 6,000 downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. >> The key is you're a content creator now, as well as a fellow. And this is the democratization, as we say direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an ebook. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug for the ebook. >> The book echoes the podcast. Chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. >> All right, Jerry Cuomo. IBM fellow VP, CTO, IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast "Art of Automation." Jerry, we're going to list it out on our Silicon angle and our cube sites, gets you some extra love on that. Love the podcast, love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.

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

>> announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE DISCOVER VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of HPE DISCOVER 2020, the virtual event this year. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have a couple of women from HPE joining me next first time on theCUBE. Very pleased to welcome Jas Sood, the US VP of Sales, Commercial and SLED at HPE, and Sandy Ono, the VP of Marketing Strategy at HPE. Ladies great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Wow, excited. >> So we want to talk about customers, what's going on. The SMB market is one that has been near journal. A lot of folks hearts the last few months, we're hearing so much, even in our local neighborhood about small and medium local businesses, really being challenged as COVID has just disrupted everything. What are some of the things Jas, we'll start with you that you're seeing in today's SMB market? >> Yeah, so I think the SME market is dynamic. And you got a lot of really, really small customers. You have the medium-sized businesses and so forth. So there is a wide range of what customers are feeling today. I think on the one spectrum, just thinking about, how are they going to stay open as a viable business, given the current economic condition? Whereas others are trying to figure out, now that we are in more of a remote working environment, how do they support their employees? How do they make sure that there's remote connectivity that we're able to communicate? Obviously, we're all using the same sort of bandwidth. How do we make that work? I'm also thinking about, there was still a lot of exchange of data going through the remote workplace. And so, how do we make sure that information coming back is secure and so forth? So, one of the things that we're trying to do is just make sure that we're there for our customers, let them know that, "Hey, we just want to hear you. "We want to be there for you." And be able to provide many, many options, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a couple of minutes. But Sandy, what's your take? >> Certainly, Jas, I echo everything you're saying. I think revenue and cash flow is very much on top of everybody's mind, and just 75% of SMEs revenues have been disrupted. And when you think about that, really, how do you not just move to the new normal, but a lot of businesses are going to have to go through some change. Now, change really first is how do we contain costs? Look at the cost things we need to get done to service customers, have a supply chain, how can infrastructure an IT help with that to contain costs? And then, second, how do you find new revenue streams? The world is much more virtual today than it was yesterday. How do we evolve our businesses in order to actually find new revenue streams? I think is very much on that people signed. >> That's an interesting one, Sandy, that you bring up new revenue streams. Jas, let me ask you as the leader of Sales for Commercial and SLED in the US, how are you finding new revenue streams, knowing that as Sandy said, 75% of SMBs are dramatically affected by COVID, what are you doing? What do you think, even working with your channel partners to open up some new revenue opportunities? >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, channel partners are a key part of our strategy. To go to market strategy first. So we work with them on a daily basis trying to think about, "Hey, how could we really help? "How can we really be out there to provide certain options for customer?" So, one of the few things in terms of helping SMB customers to continue the revenue stream is to provide really lucrative financing options as well. So currently, we have many offers that they don't have to pay until the end of this calendar year, which is the end of our fiscal year. So being able to really think out of the box to say, how could we come together and really be able to help when there is a certain sort of cash flow shortfall right now. I think the other thing too is there are certain industries within SMBs that actually have higher demand right now, healthcare customers, some financial services customers as well. I mean, those are areas that as people in the community that we rely on heavily these days. So, again, being able to be there for those customers to help them think through ways that we can help them to monetize their businesses a little bit more proactively today is also an area where we're trying to help. >> And Jas, how has your role as an executive sponsor in a lot of accounts, how is it changing? >> Very interesting question. And it's more actually often conversation now that we've all been at home. It's not really a, "Hey, can we talk about this project?" Or, "Can we talk about what you have kind of coming up "and how can I help," but it's just more around just a general conversation. So I've had so many conversations with customers just to say, "Hey, how are you guys coping? "How are you dealing with being able to... "Are you able to work remotely? "First of all." I mean, I think we all have that capability, but really to have all your employee base, being able to do that, what impacts does that have on their business long term, short term? And I think that's just opened up just a general, how's it going conversation, we share best practices, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're trying to figure that out as well. We are all at home as well. And so it really creates more of a personal conversation. I think the main thing that we want to make sure is that we're just there for our customers. We realize that it's a trying time right now, and cash flow might be tight, and that's okay. Because, eventually, we're going to come back as the United States, as the economy and things are going to come back in, we just want to make sure that we're there for our customer base, whenever that time comes for them. >> That personal vision is so important. Is there I'm a marketer you're a marketer. And for a long time, we've been talking about personalization and how effective those marketing tactics can be when they can really deliver a message to a perspective buyer that hits exactly, "That's what I'm looking for." Even more, as Jas was saying, now it's even more important, not just your SMB customers, to get personal with them, but to allow them to have that experience with their customers. Sandy, how have you changed your marketing mix or even your marketing messaging in light of this new need for a different type of personal touch, that's only virtual? >> It's a great question. Two things are from how you talk to your customer-based perspective. And it's true for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and it's true for all of our customers out there. Really it has to be authentic to the point where we can't just be selling the thing anymore. Everybody is not only cash-strapped, time-strapped. But they're also looking for a genuine connection to something that they need. So to be much more articulate around the problems we solve, the solutions that are readily deployable, how can we help in these moments has been much more forefront and the marketing messages and just the way we talk with our customers. The other thing is from a marketing mix perspective. We're going to the same thing everybody else is right? I was just thinking the other day, probably half of our typical marketing investment is in physical events, just like Discover was a year ago. And really having to rethink what that is now, how do you stay connected with customers? What does a virtual event have to be? What is a meetup now in a Zoom. Getting really comfortable with that. And these technologies that can help us, but still maintaining those customer touchpoints. And particularly, as we think about... Everybody's thinking about new revenue streams, how do you get to the newer customers that don't know you yet? What are the points of personalization, interconnectedness, the ongoing ways you can stay in touch via digital, all become much more forefront as we think about conical the new normal? And along those lines engagement, is so key. You brought a Discover being for how many years before this year physical event, and the cute covers many physical events a year. And so it's very... Everyone's trying to figure out how do we actually engage our customers and our prospects as vendors and maintain their engagement? Because now you're not just in an audience with a phone and email and phone calls as distractions, you're at home, you're sharing bandwidth. You've maybe have kids at home. There's more distractions. So Sandy, what are some of the things that HPE is doing at DISCOVER 2020, the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE to engage folks and maintain that engagement? >> Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, talk about getting ourselves an order of being very, I guess I'll use the worst snackable, a lack of anything else. We are used to being in a room, talking about the problems we solve, and the solution we have in for an hour. Discover what you're going to find is 15 minutes, that's all people have in a virtual world is 15 minutes. What used to be two, three hours in terms of a keynote, is much more targeted. And we're doing a lot more on demand. I would say that, if one of the things that we're really trying to do, particularly with this fund and across the board, is, how do you stay connected? And it's not just about one way delivery of content, but it's really that interaction plan. Are people talking to our chat agents? What are they chatting about? How do we get them to the next phase? What are all the different ways you can light up in a digital way that helps people follow up? Again, they're going to come in and out experience something. And this is the world of digital is not a one conversation. It's kind of a... It's like a dating game. You got to keep going. To keep the conversation going just the read of me. >> That two-way conversation, is... I'm glad that you brought that up. Because Jas, so many events, every event probably is a big opportunity for every vendor to close some big deals. There's just something about that face-to-face connection where execs can sit down with customers or whatnot. We can't do that this year. So what are some of the ways that your team and through your channel is doing what Sandy was talking about and doing that really, that dialogue, that interactive conversation through just video conferencing? >> Yeah, well, the neat thing about it is that we've still been able to keep some of those personable tracks through Discover. So we have like the CIO Summit, so that'll be an area of open dialogue. It's sort of an invite-only type of thing event. We will be having customer round table specific to many different topics. I'm hosting a couple of those myself. And so it's an intimate group of 12 to 15 customers doing the same thing on the partner side and having our senior executives being there with us to host it. So I think just the neat thing about it is even though it's virtual and to Sandy's point in trying to keep some of the keynotes and of that nature at a shorter timeframes so that we keep attention and make it succinct. I think at the same time, we're able to still chip the small group environment where we're able to have open dialogue. And I think one of the great things about being able to do that now is, there's so much that customers can learn from one another. We talked about us really sharing with them. I mean, customers are a little bit more open to talking to one another as well, and figuring out, "Hey, what are you doing? "Is this working?" "This is sort of issue that we have, "how are you handling that?" So, I think just in our environment now there's a little bit more opportunity, an openness to share. And the good thing about being virtual is, you can do more of that. 'Cause, as Sandy mentioned, some of that too, the sessions are on demand. So a little bit on your own time also based on your own schedule. So I think having the variety of both will be key and successful. >> Yeah, having that mix of those intimate conversations that can help really HPE, from a revenue perspective, close big deals, as well as allowing folks with 70 cents. Give me some... It's like crazy, right? That snackable digestible content on my time, probably one of the things that we're hearing on theCUBE, the last a couple of months of everything being virtual is that so many events are getting even more and more and more attendees because people don't have to travel and budgets and that sort of thing. But I got to ask you a question, Sandy, as a marketer, how do you measure engagement? Typically they think of like badge stands at a booth or downloads is as this pivot was done so quickly, and I accolade HPE for being able to do that. That's hard thing to do. How are you as a marketer... What are you looking to do to measure success for this event? >> It's a great question. We look at success in kind of three ways. Obviously is the reach, how many folks we can bring in this is the first time we're doing this so global, which is quite fascinating to kind of see it come to life. Really being able to address the global audience, the customers, the partners, and our employee base that we're going to be able to reach. Second is relevance. We're thinking about, are we talking about the right things that are going to resonate with our customers? How are they reacting to that? There's so many mechanisms. We are going to get feedback from social to the way they engage with us. They're going to vote by their clicks. That's the end of the day. They're going to tell us what they're interested in after we put the content out there, and we're going to soak that up as digital signals that come back. And then lastly, obviously just driving pipeline, this is a conversation. And hopefully an acceleration point, we in digital marketing have a lot of different ways that we're going to score engagement. We tend to think about it pretty simply. It's either a hot lead, a warm lead, or a cold lead. And it's a way to kind of almost think about engagement in a way of the speed of follow up. Is the customer ready to engage in the next step? Maybe they're super hot. Maybe they're just slightly warm. But we have kind of data science models that help us take all that data that we're going to sit on because it's digital, turn it into something that makes sense and then be able to hand over to like Jas's team, some of those signals. So our sales teams can actually the next steps. >> I like that. It's all about speed these days, right? >> Yeah. >> HPE, quickly to turn this event digital. We also knew that SMBs and customers are having to work quickly to start in place the right digital equipments to move forward. Last thing I want to leave you guys with, Jas, what are some of the things that are going on at Discover that you're excited about to engage with customers? >> Yeah, so I think just one, the virtual experience, I think, is going to be really cool. We have some cool entertainment type things going on as well. We'll give all that away, but I think that keeps it fun. I think it'll be unique experience. I'm really excited also about the different tracks that we have. So we actually do have a small, medium business track, a lot of on-demand sessions. So there's a lot of vertical sessions. There's a lot of industry sessions as well. So really to be able to go in there depending upon what your area of interest is and focus is, I think you're going to find something and it's really easy to navigate. I'm excited because I think there'll be more customers that can come having our state and local government customers be able to log on, and really get a sense for what's really happening in the industry with all of the cares act funding and so forth. So I think it'll be really exciting to be able to showcase tracks like that now that we have a virtual environment that we didn't get an opportunity to do for. So I think there's more that we have to offer and I'm really interested and excited about that. >> More without the... As ladies will know and appreciate that the mass of foot ache-- >> That's fine. >> From walking miles and miles and Las Vegas. (Jas and Sandy laughing). And next thing, Sandy, you're hosting a panel, I've discovered. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Yes, I am. Jas mentioned that we have a whole SMB track. So we're hosting a panel that's going to be just geared for the small-medium businesses. It's going to be on June 30th as we kind of continue of rolling thunder with DISCOVER VIRTUAL. It's with an analyst, couple of our SMB experts really talk a little bit deeper around the solutions that we have, the problems we're hoping to help people solve, and certainly have those on-demand sessions. I'll just add onto what Jas is saying. I'm really excited because, for the first time, particularly for our small-medium businesses, this is a no entry fee type of event. So there's no entry fee. We're actually giving $10 back to charity. So for our smaller businesses to be able to kind of consume this content and really see the demos, see the technology, really help shape what's the next step for them. I think what I'm excited about, that's all. >> Excellent, Sandy, Jas, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. It was great talking to you both. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, cool. >> I appreciate it. >> Our pleasure, looking forward to seeing the impact. Well, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Coverage at HPE DISCOVER the VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS. Reinvent 20 nineteens brought to you by Amazon web services and they don't care along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone is the cubes live covers in Las Vegas for AWS. Reinvent 2019 it's our seventh year covering Amazon reinvent. They've only had the conference for eight years. We've been documenting history. I'm John Farrow, stupid man. Dave Alante, John Walls, Jeff, Rick, they're all on the other step two sets sponsored by Intel. Want to thank their support without their generous support to our mission. We wouldn't be able to bring this great content. Our next guest to talk about the IOT edge jerk DDoSs column. Perfect. Welcome back. VP of IOT. Well the Greek names. Yeah, I'm half Greek, half German so I can expect, okay. Is smart. Good. So Derek, I gotta ask you, so IOT is hot. Explain quickly your role at AWS because you're not an I-Team specifically define your scope. So my scope is owning all or my team's sculpt is owning old software services and tools that deal with non it equipment. >>So when you go to AWS and look for IOT, all the service that you'll find, that's the scope of my teams and this it group which have all the it stuff and just feels like cars, manufacturing sensors, all of the axioms for the NFL, all that good stuff. So women, you're going to see Edelweiss so I go AWS, amazon.com and then you're fine either. means all of our compute, all of our databases, all of our storage and there's also all of our and Melanie and I and then there's an IOT section and there you find all of the goodness that we do for IOT. You know, it's exciting. Stu and I talking about all week here, the whole cloud native, you take the T out of cloud native, it's cloud naive. You've got the general commercial business and public sector barely getting their act together. They're transforming, they're doing it now. >>He's $1 trillion on a vouch. Trillions of dollars of of change coming. Good up business opportunity. But if they're having trouble transforming, you get this whole new world of industrial edge which requires computing cars manufactured. This is a hot area. So a lot of change happening. What is the most important story people should pay attention to in your area that that's notable for this collision of all this transformation? I think maybe the most notable story that we currently have is a corporation that they do with the VW, which is the largest a car manufacturer. And you were just lucky that via their CIO mountain Huffman being part of Verona for good's keynote, our CTO. So if you haven't seen that, just go and review the keynote of Verner and then as the larger part then he was talking about all of that, what he calls industrial 4.0, this digitization fourth revolution. And Martin did an awesome job explaining what are we doing together with them to build their industrial cloud. Yeah. >>Uh, well, one of the things we've been really watching is the, the extent that Amazon services are starting to push out. Uh, I've been super excited, really looking at some of the growth of there. Your team did a bunch of announcements ahead of the show including the one that caught my eye the most was the IOT green grass sport for Lambda and Docker. Maybe start there and walk us through some of the new pieces that in your org. Okay. >>Maybe for us to understand the offer three type of offerings for our customers. One is device software, which might sound strange that a cloud company actually gives you a software that it's not running on the cloud, but then you're talking about IOT. You need software running on your devices in order to be able to be controlled and communicate with the cloud and we have an offering in that area which is called IOT Greenglass, which is a software runtime that you can install on edge devices like gateways for example, and via announced junior additions to our IOT Greenglass. One is Docker supports, which was very important because up till now green were supporting machine learning at the edge and Lambda, which is our service offering, but many companies now more established enterprises said, you know what, I have legacy applications which I can package. Can I deploy them as well? >>Now you can deploy Docker containers, Lambda functions, and a melody edge all with one goal with green glass at the edge. So that was one of the announcements we did for our device >> software. They're, I want to get your thoughts on an area that we're reporting on and doing a lot of investigation, collecting a lot of data, talking to a lot of people and that's around the industrial IOT or IOT, industrial IOT. And one of our big concerns, I want to get your reaction to this and thoughts is security is of paramount importance because it's not just a DDoS attack or some malware which is causing credit card data or these kinds of theft. You could actually take over machines. People could die this and serious issues around the guarantee. This is the number one conversation. What is the state of the art security posture in your area around software and the edge? >>So at AWS, whether it's IOT or any other workloads, we always say if you have two primary zeros, one is security and one is operations. Because if any company puts their faith in us, if we are down, their business is down and if there would be any security issues, of course all the trust would be broken and we do the exact same approach. Now with IOT, so we built our services with security in mind. For example, when you connect to AWS IOT core, every single individual device needs to have certificates to be identified. If you require that you can encrypt your data, it doesn't even lo you to connect to the cloud without encryption. We have software, as I said, at the edge with Amazon free artists and Greengrass where we support all of the hardware TM modules that you have security postures there. If you have secrets managers, they even have an award winning clout. >>If you're like security tool, which is called IOT device management, but at any given point in time audits but the you configured correctly and does something like detection. If something's going wrong, like when you get your credit card and said, Hey, by the way, have you been in this country? Candy making any purchase? If you figure out if something's going wrong with your device >> and you feel good that it's built in from zero, I mean you've got DNS tax going on. What? I mean you feel comfortable that it's, I mean we believe whatever we build, you can never be 100% sure and security is always evolving. But we believe that we are at the forefront of being, you're always the latest and greatest technology at the hands of our customers. >>Jerks. That's really powerful. Cause I saw one of the other announcements was really taking the Alexa voice service integration, but if I understand it rightly, it pulls that core along. So you know part of me was like, it's like okay Alexa enabled everywhere. That's great. I don't need 700 devices in my house that all have that. But the security piece is going to be needed everywhere. So help us tease that out. >>Maybe, maybe don't understand what we did you ask about the other launches. We also launched something called AVS integration for IUT and AVS stands for Alexa voice services. So if you know Alexa, that's our digital assistant that runs for example an equity devices, but if you want to build a device as a third party, which you can directly talk to media, there's microphones and speakers that is called AVS or Alexa built in devices and if you wanted to build one today you needed to put quite some resources onto this device because it needs to understand you. It needs to have a lot of audio processing. That means there's a lot of memory involved and quite some processing. Now I'm using some technical terms. You need something like a cortex, a CPU which makes this device expensive. So the bill of material is quite elevated and we were working with our Alexa team saying is how can we make this really, really affordable? >>If you found a trick where we said let's offload all of this audio processing to the cloud that you an eSense can build very dumb devices. The only thing that these devices don't need to do is have microphones, have our speaker and what we call a week work detection. They need to wake up and you say, Alexa, echo computer, everything else gets streamed to the cloud. Ptosis sits there and comes back so that you can reduce cost for those devices by at least a factor of half. And we had a great customer on stage as well because if you can make so cheap Alexa built in devices, you can put this into a light switch and iDevices now believe it or not, non-sales light switch. Yup. Which you can now directly talk to, reach, talks back and place your music. They're talking about your role. Again, I want to understand that you are not technical side, your development teams. What are you, what do you do on a daily basis? What's your job? So officially I'm a VP of engineering, so I'm a tech guy, so I love the hoodie. By the way. This is tech. That's because I'm on video. Okay. >>It looks great. So I'm an engineer by Heights and at Amazon we don't have a separation between businesses and product management and engineering. They call it a single thread of leaders that we believe the teams have to own it all. So that means my teams on everything from the conception of their services, the development operations that what be called dev ops and also the business behind. So that means all of the services, whether it's free outro, screen grabs at the edge, but it's IOT core device management and defender or our data services like IOT analytics or your talked about industrial site wise, their health or being conceived by my teams. They have all been developed and they are all operated today so that all customers can use that as it make. What should people >>totally does. Thanks for clarifying. That's awesome. Uh, what should people pay attention to? What should we be reporting on in your area? What are some of the key things that people watching this should pay attention to in this, in your IOT area? What are the most important items and products and services that you're doing? I think >>one of the most important things to understand is be talk just before the interview about this, that a lot of the technical hurdles actually solve that because we have the software on devices, we have the connectivity controlled services, and we have all the analytic services to make sense of the data that you can take actions. You don't need to be an expert in machine learning anymore to do machine learning at AWS. You don't have to be an embedded software developer to get connected devices. You don't have to be a data scientist to understand what your data does. The most interesting part though is there is a cultural aspect of this because in the past you had to ideally most likely in your old company join said, Oh, I would like to connect something, so do I have a purchase acquisition? Can I go to my finance team? Does it install this today? You don't need that anymore. With AWS IOT, the same thing that happens with the cloud and it happens with IOT. So understanding that via very powerful tools for engineers in the company that you can build at any given point in time. I think that's maybe the most, >>and I think the it, I think that whole process of the time it takes, they go to the airport on Thanksgiving, go through TSA and knows all that pre ocracy. And then the other thing too is that the other IOT used to be kind of a closed system self, um, form dot devices. Now you've got with Clough, you've got a lot more range and compatibility. Can you talk about that address, address that issue? Because there might be still legacy out there and no problem. It's data's data, but those are the days come in the cloud. But there's now a new shift happening where it's not just, you know, fully monolithic OT devices if it, so the pasta >>monolithic what's called machine to machine, close systems, IOT is the opposite there. It's where you say now all the devices and connections can be done in between the devices and the cloud. So it's system of systems. And in order to make that happen. For example, when you call it the legacy systems, we also announced on Monday and our IOT day additional features for IOT core that you can migrate legacy systems much easier to the cloud without that you need to update your devices. >>Yeah. Dirk, one of the things I find most interesting about your space as you span between the consumer and the enterprise piece, so I remember a few years ago there was like a hackathon on building skills for Alexa and it got lots of people involved. There was a giveaway of lots of the devices there. You know, we used to talk about the consumerization of it. How is what's happening in the tumor world? You know, how is the enterprise going to take care of take that and transform business as we see IOT permeating everywhere. >>So the capabilities that you need, whether you're going in industrial or in consumer or in the medical or pick your favorite other vertical is in essence the same. You need to connect the devices. You need to ensure that they're secure. We talked about security. You need to make sense of the data, whether you do this in the home with your television or your light switch or your robot, or you do the exact same thing with the most sophisticated robot in the industry. It's the same thing. The good thing about us handling all of those sites is that the scale that we gain with literally hundreds of millions of devices now managed by our service in the backend of course means we will handle all of that scale also in the industry and the security and postures and complexity that we need to handle an industrial also benefits computer, so our consumer side, so you benefit from both sides, very cheap and scale on the one industrial benefit. Very complex. How do you solve that consumable benefit, so it's very fruitful synergies if you like, >>Oh, you guys love to solve problems at Amazon that's going to eat those. Yeah. Derek, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the insights and what you're working on and what's important. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much. The threaded leader here. Final question for you. Eighth year of reinvent. It gets bigger every year. Louder. Crazier for parties, more business development more. Exactly. I mean just, it's crazy. Yeah. It's just say work hard, play hard. What is your favorite thing going on here? What's the coolest thing that you've seen? >>I think the coolest thing, and it might sound a little cheeky, is, is the excitement from all of our customers and partners coming here every year. >>PR tells you to say, I'm not about fraud. I mean, you're talking about products. I love my products. I'm still so happy about that. I mean, I can talk to a light switch now. Well, you see the comma car and the other quad had the area that we have yet. It's a very different experience that you can do. Don't talk to your lights, which when you get home your wife will think you're going crazy. I love that. Thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having cube coverage here. All I'm, we're going to wrap up here. Keep coverage with Derek runs all the IOT for with an AWS exciting new area. It's going to change the game on architecture and solutions are being baked out in real time. We're here breaking out the cube in real time. I'm John. Thanks for watching.

>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube. Our day one coverage of AWS reinvent 19 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Volante. Dave and I have a couple of guests we'd like you to walk up. We've got Anthony Brooks billions, the CEO of HBR back on the cube. You're alumni. We should get you a pin and snowflake alumni. But Chris, your new Chris Dagon, chief revenue officer from snowflake. Chris, welcome to the program. Excited to be here. All right guys. So even though both companies have been on before, Anthony, let's start with you. Give our audience a refresher about HVR, who you guys are at, what you do. >>Sure. So we're in the data integration space, particularly a real time data integration. So we move data to the cloud in the in the most efficient way and we make sure it's secure and it's accurate and you're moving into environments such as snowflake. Um, and that's where we've got some really good customers that we happy to talk about joint custody that we're doing together. But Chris can tell us a little bit about snowflake. >>Sure. And snowflake is a cloud data warehousing company. We are cloud native, we are on AWS or on GCP and we're on Azure. And if you look at the competitive landscape, we compete with our friends at Amazon. We compete with our friends at Microsoft and our friends at Google. So it's super interesting place to be, but it very exciting at the same time and super excited to partner with Anthony and some others who aren't really a friends. That's correct. So I wonder if we could start by just talking about the data warehouse sort of trends that you guys see. When I talk to practitioners in the old days, they used to say to me things like, Oh, infrastructure management, it's such a nightmare. It's like a snake swallowing a basketball every time until it comes out with a new chips. We chase it because we just need more performance and we can't get our jobs done fast enough. And there's only three. There's three guys that we got to go through to get any answers and it was just never really lived up to the promise of 360 degree view of your business and realtime analytics. How has that changed? >>Well, there's that too. I mean obviously the cloud has had a big difference on that illustrious city. Um, what you would find is in, in, in yesterday, customers have these, a retail customer has these big events twice a year. And so to do an analysis on what's being sold and Casper's transactions, they bought this big data warehouse environment for two events a year typically. And so what's happening that's highly cost, highly costly as we know to maintain and then cause the advances in technology and trips and stuff. And then you move into this cloud world which gives you that Lester city of scale up, scale down as you need to. And then particular where we've got Tonies snowflake that is built for that environment and that elicited city. And so you get someone like us that can move this data at today's scale and volume through these techniques we have into an environment that then bleeds into helping them solve the challenge that you talk about of Yesi of >>these big clunky environments. That side, I think you, I think you kind of nailed it. I think like early days. So our founders are from Oracle and they were building Oracle AI nine nine, 10 G. and when I interviewed them I was the first sales rep showing up and day one I'm like, what the heck am I selling? And when I met them I said, tell me what the benefit of snowflake is. And they're like, well at Oracle, and we'd go talk to customers and they'd say, Oracles, you know, I have this problem with Oracle. They'd say, Hey, that's, you know, seven generations ago were Oracle. Do you have an upgraded to the latest code? So one of the things they talked about as being a service, Hey, we want to make it really easy. You never have to upgrade the service. And then to your point around, you have a fixed amount of resources on premise, so you can't all of a sudden if you have a new project, do you want to bring on the first question I asked when I started snowflake to customers was how long does it take you to kick off a net new workload onto your data, onto your Vertica and it take them nine to 12 months because they'd have to go procure the new hardware, install it, and guess what? >>With snowflake, you can make an instantaneous decision and because of our last test city, because the benefits of our partner from Amazon, you can really grow with your demand of your business. >>Many don't have the luxury of nine to 12 months anymore, Chris, because we all know if, if an enterprise legacy business isn't thinking, there's somebody not far behind me who has the elasticity, who has the appetite, who's who understands the opportunity that cloud provides. If you're not thinking that, as auntie Jessie will say, you're going to be on the wrong end of that equation. But for large enterprises, that's hard. The whole change culture is very hard to do. I'd love to get your perspective, Chris, what you're seeing in terms of industries shifting their mindsets to understand the value that they could unlock with this data, but how are big industries legacy industries changing? >>I'd say that, look, we were chasing Amad, we were chasing the cloud providers early days, so five years ago, we're selling to ad tech and online gaming companies today. What's happened in the industry is, and I'll give you a perfect example, is Ben wa and I, one of our founders went out to one of the largest investment banks on wall street five years ago, and they said, and they have more money than God, and they say, Hey, we love what you've built. We love, when are you going to run on premise? And Ben, Ben wa uttered this phrase of, Hey, you will run on the public cloud before we ever run in the private cloud. And guess what? He was a truth teller because five years later, they are one of our largest customers today. And they made the decision to move to the cloud and we're seeing financial services at a blistering face moved to the cloud. >>And that's where, you know, partnering with folks from HR is super important for us because we don't have the ability to just magically have this data appear in the cloud. And that's where we rely quite heavily on on instance. So Anthony, in the financial services world in particular, it used to be a cloud. Never that was an evil word. Automation. No, we have to have full control and in migration, never digital transformation to start to change those things. It's really become an imperative, but it's by in particular is really challenging. So I wonder if we could dig into that a little bit and help us understand how you solve that problem. >>Yes. A customer say they want to adopt some of these technologies. So there's the migration route. They may want to go adopt some of these, these cloud databases, the cloud data warehouses. And so we have some areas where we, you know, we can do that and keep the business up and running at the same time. So the techniques we use are we reading the transactional logs, other databases or something called CDC. And so there'll be an initial transfer of the bulk of the data initiative stantiating or refresh. At that same time we capturing data out of the transaction logs, wildlife systems live and doing a migration to the new environment or into snowflakes world, capturing data where it's happening, where the data is generated and moving that real time securely, accurately into this environment for somewhere like 1-800-FLOWERS where they can do this, make better decisions to say the cost is better at point of sale. >>So have all their business divisions pulling it in. So there's the migration aspects and then there's the, the use case around the realtime reporting as well. So you're essentially refueling the plane. Well while you're in mid air. Um, yeah, that's a good one. So what does the customer see? How disruptive is it? How do you minimize that disruption? Well, the good thing is, well we've all got these experienced teams like Chris said that have been around the block and a lot of us have done this. What we do, what ed days fail for the last 15 years, that companies like golden gate that we sold to Oracle and those things. And so there's a whole consultative approach to them versus just here's some software, good luck with it. So there's that aspect where there's a lot of planning that goes into that and then through that using our technologies that are well suited to this Appleton shows some good success and that's a key focus for us. And in our world, in this subscription by SAS top world, customer success is key. And so we have to build a lot of that into how we make this successful as well. >>I think it's a barrier to entry, like going, going from on premise to the cloud. That's the number one pushback that we get when we go out and say, Hey, we have a cloud native data warehouse. Like how the heck are we going to get the data to the cloud? And that's where, you know, a partnership with HR. Super important. Yeah. >>What are some of the things that you guys encountered? Because we many businesses live in the multi-cloud world most of the time, not by strategy, right? A lot of the CIO say, well we sort of inherited this, or it's M and a or it's developers that have preference. How do you help customers move data appropriately based on the value that the perceived value that it can give in what is really a multi world today? Chris, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, I think so. So as we go into customers, I think the biggest hurdle for them to move to the cloud is security because they think the cloud is not secure. So if we, if you look at our engagement with customers, we go in and we actually have to sell the value snowflake and then they say, well, okay great, go talk to the security team. And then we talked to security team and say, Hey, let me show you how we secure data. And then then they have to get comfortable around how they're going to actually move, get the data from on premise to the cloud. And that's again, when we engage with partners like her. So yeah, >>and then we go through a whole process with a customer. There's a taking some of that data in a, in a POC type environment and proving that after, as before it gets rolled out. And a lot of, you know, references and case studies around it as well. >>Depends on the customer that you have some customers who are bold and it doesn't matter the size. We have a fortune 100 customer who literally had an on premise Teradata system that they moved from on prem, from on premise 30 to choose snowflake in 111 days because they were all in. You have other customers that say, Hey, I'm going to take it easy. I'm going to workload by workload. And it just depends. And the mileage may vary is what can it give us an example of maybe a customer example or in what workloads they moved? Was it reporting? What other kinds? Yeah. >>Oh yeah. We got a couple of, you mean we could talk a little bit about 1-800-FLOWERS. We can talk about someone like Pitney Bowes where they were moving from Oracle to secret server. It's a bunch of SAP data sitting in SAP ECC. So there's some complexity around how you acquire, how you decode that data, which we ever built a unique ability to do where we can decode the cluster and pool tables coupled with our CDC technique and they had some stringent performance loads, um, that a bunch of the vendors couldn't meet the needs between both our companies. And so we were able to solve their challenge for them jointly and move this data at scale in the performance that they needed out with these articles, secret server enrollments into, into snowflake. >>I almost feel like when you have an SAP environment, it's almost stuck in SAP. So to get it out is like, it's scary, right? And this is where it's super awesome for us to do work like this. >>On that front, I wanted to understand your thoughts on transformation. It's a word, it's a theme of reinvent 2019. It's a word that we hear at every event, whether we're talking about digital transformation, workforce, it, et cetera. But one of the things that Andy Jassy said this morning was that got us start. It's this is more than technology, right? This, the next gen cloud is more than technology. It's about getting those senior leaders on board. Chris, your perspective, looking at financial services first, we were really surprised at how quickly they've been able to move. Understanding presumably that if they don't, there's going to be other businesses. But are you seeing that as the chief revenue officer or your conversations starting at that CEO level? >>It kinda has to like in the reason why if you do in bottoms up approach and say, Hey, I've got a great technology and you sell this great technology to, you know, a tech person. The reality is unless the C E O CIO or CTO has an initiative to do digital transformation and move to the cloud, you'll die. You'll die in security, you'll die in legal lawyers love to kill deals. And so those are the two areas that I see D deals, you know, slow down significantly. And that's where, you know, we, it's, it's getting through those processes and finding the champion at the CEO level, CIO level, CTO level. If you're, if you're a modern day CIO and you do not have a a cloud strategy, you're probably going to get replaced >>in 18 months. So you know, you better get on board and you'd better take, you know, taking advantage of what's happening in the industry. >>And I think that coupled with the fact that in today's world, you mean, you said there's a, it gets thrown around as a, as a theme and particularly the last couple of years, I think it's, it's now it is actually a strategy and, and reality because what Josephine is that there's as many it tech savvy people sit in the business side of organizations today that used to sit in legacy it. And I think it's that coupled with the leadership driving it that's, that's demanding it, that demanding to be able to access that certain type of data in a geo to make decisions that affect the business. Right now. >>I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about some of the innovations that are coming up. I mean I've been really hard on data. The data warehouse industry, you can tell I'm jaded. I've been around a long time. I mean I've always said that that Sarbanes Oxley saved the old school BI and data warehousing and because all the reporting requirements, and again that business never lived up to its promises, but it seems like there's this whole new set of workloads emerging in the cloud where you take a data warehouse like a snowflake, you may be bringing in some ML tools, maybe it's Databricks or whatever. You HVR helping you sort of virtualize the data and people are driving new workloads that are, that are bringing insights that they couldn't get before in near real time. What are you seeing in terms of some of those gestalt trends and how are companies taking advantage of these innovations? >>I think one is just the general proliferation of data. There's just more data and like you're saying from many different sources, so they're capturing data from CNC machines in factories, you know like like we do for someone like GE, that type of data is to data financial data that's sitting in a BU taking all of that and going there's just as boss some of data, how can we get a total view of our business and at a board level make better decisions and that's where they got put it in I snowflake in this an elastic environment that allows them to do this consolidated view of that whole organization, but I think it's largely been driven by things that digitize their sensors on everything and there's just a sheer volume of data. I think all of that coming together is what's, what's driven it >>is is data access. We talked about security a little bit, but who has rights to access the data? Is that a challenge? How are you guys solving that or is it, I mean I think it's like anything like once people start to understand how a date where we're an acid compliant date sequel database, so we whatever your security you use on your on premise, you can use the same on snowflake. It's just a misperception that the industry has that being on, on in a data center is more secure than being in the cloud and it's actually wrong. I guess my question is not so much security in the cloud, it's more what you were saying about the disparate data sources that coming in hard and fast now. And how do you keep track of who has access to the data? I mean is it another security tool or is it a partnership within owes? >>Yeah, absolutely man. So there's also, there's in financial data, there's certain geos, data leaves, certain geos, whether it be in the EU or certain companies, particularly this end, there's big banks now California, there's stuff that we can do from a security perspective in the data that we move that's secure, it's encrypted. If we capturing data from multiple different sources, items we have that we have the ability to take it all through one, one proxy in the firewall, which does, it helps him a lot in that aspect. Something unique in our technology. But then there's other tools that they have and largely you sit down with them and it's their sort of governance that they have in the, in the organization to go, how do they tackle that and the rules they set around it, you know? >>Well, last question I have is, so we're seeing, you know, I look at the spending data and my breaking analysis, go on my LinkedIn, you'll see it snowflakes off the charts. It's up there with, with robotic process automation and obviously Redshift. Very strong. Do you see those two? I think you addressed it before, but I'd love to get you on record sort of coexisting and thriving. Really, that's not the enemy, right? It's the, it's the Terra data's and the IBM's and the Oracles. The, >>I think, look, uh, you know, Amazon, our relationship with Amazon is like a, you know, a 20 year marriage, right? Sometimes there's good days, sometimes there's bad days. And I think, uh, you know, every year about this time, you know, we get a bat phone call from someone at Amazon saying, Hey, you know, the Redshift team's coming out with a snowflake killer. And I've heard that literally for six years now. Um, it turns out that there's an opportunity for us to coexist. Turns out there's an opportunity for us to compete. Um, and it's all about how they handle themselves as a business. Amazon has been tremendous in separation of that, of, okay, are going to partner here, we're going to compete here, and we're okay if you guys beat us. And, and so that's how they operate. But yes, it is complex and it's, it's, there are challenges. >>Well, the marketplace guys must love you though because you're selling a lot of computers. >>Well, yeah, yeah. This is three guys. They, when they left, we have a summer thing. You mean NWS have a technological DMS, their data migration service, they work with us. They refer opportunities to us when it's these big enterprises that are use cases, scale complexity, volume of data. That's what we do. We're not necessary into the the smaller mom and pop type shops that just want to adopt it, and I think that's where we all both able to go coexist together. There's more than enough. >>All right. You're right. It's like, it's like, Hey, we have champions in the Esri group, the EEC tuna group, that private link group, you know, across all the Amazon products. So there's a lot of friends of ours. Yeah, the red shift team doesn't like us, but that's okay. I can live in >>healthy coopertition, but it just goes to show that not only do customers and partners have toys, but they're exercising it. Gentlemen, thank you for joining David knee on the key of this afternoon. We appreciate your time. Thank you for having us. Pleasure our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from day one of our coverage of AWS reinvent 19 thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From Seattle, Washington it's the CUBE covering AWS Imagine non-profit. Brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're on the waterfront in Seattle, it's an absolutely gorgeous couple of days here at the AWS Imagine Nonprofit Conference. We went to the AWS Imagine Education Conference, this is really all about nonprofits and we're hearing all kinds of interesting stories about how these people are using AWS to help conquer really big problems. We're going to shift gears a little bit from the two footed problems to the four footed problems and that's animals and everybody likes animals but nobody likes animal shelters and nobody likes the ultimate solution that many animal shelters used to use to take care of problems. But thank you to our next guest, that is not quite the case so much anymore. So we're really happy to have Angie Embree on. She is the CIO of Best Friends Animal Society, Angie great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well and thank you for having me. >> Oh absolutely! So before we got on I just heard this crazy, crazy statistic that when your organization started in 1984 approximately 17 million animals were killed in US shelters per year. That number is now down to 700 thousand, that is a giant, giant reduction. And yet you, with big audacious goals really are looking to get that to zero. So, that's a giant goal, give us a little bit of background on the organization and how you decided to go after a goal like that and some of the ways you are actually going to achieve it. >> Well, the organization started in 1984 and it started with a group of friends in Southern Utah who decided that, you know the killing in America's shelters just had to go. So really the Best Friends founders started the no-kill movement along with a gentleman in San Francisco by the name of Rich Avanzino. And as you said, they took you know the killing down from 17 million in 1984 to approximately 733 thousand now. The organization started as just the sanctuary, we have the largest no-kill companion animal sanctuary in the country where we hold about 17 hundred animals every day. And we also have, you know, knowing that we needed to help out the rest of the country we have built life saving centers in Houston, Texas. Or we're working on Houston, Texas but Los Angels, California, New York City, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Georgia, it seems like I've left somebody out but, >> Probably, but that's okay. >> We have life saving centers all over the country. So it was really, you know, when they realized what was going on in America's shelters it was really the idea that we should not be killing animals for space. So, just recently in fact, I will say recently but in the last few years, Julie Castle our CEO put kind of, did our moon shot, put that stake in the ground and said we're going to take this country no-kill by the year 2025. >> Right. >> So it's super exciting. >> So it's really interesting because you guys are trying to execute your vision, and it's easy to execute your own vision, but it's a whole different thing when you're trying to execute your vision through this huge infrastructure of shelters that have been around forever. So, I wonder if you can explain kind of what's your relationship with shelters that you don't own. I guess, I think you said before we turned on the cameras there are affiliates, so how does that relationship work? How do you help them achieve your goal which is no-kill. >> Yeah, so we have over 27 hundred network partners around the country. And what we do is we help to educate them on, you know we understand their problems, we have creative programs to solve those problems. So we help to educate them on, you know, how they can implement these programs within their shelters. We provide them grant funding, we have an annual conference every year where they can come and learn. But they're really our partners and you know we know we can't do it alone. It's going to take us, it's going to take them and it's going to take everybody in every community to really step up and help solve the problem. >> Right, and what was the biggest thing that changed in terms of kind of attitude in terms of the way they operate the shelter because I think you said before that a lot of the killing was done to make room. >> Right, killing is done usually for space. >> So what do they do know? Clearly the space demands probably haven't changed so what are they doing alternatively where before they would put the animal down? >> Well alternatively we're doing transport programs. So there are areas in the country that actually have a demand for animals. So instead of killing the animals, we put them on some sort of transport vehicle and we take them to the areas that are in demand. We also do what's called a trap-neuter-return program. So one of the biggest problems across the country are community cats so those, a lot of people call them feral cats but they're community cats and usually have a caretaker. But what we do is we trap those cats, we take them into the shelter, we neuter them and vaccinate them and then return them to their home. That keeps them from making a lot of other little cats. >> Making babies (laughs) >> So yeah, cat's are one of the biggest problems in shelters today because of the community cats, they're feral cats and they're not adoptable. So if we can, we don't have to kill them. We can, you know, we can keep them from reproducing as I said and then we can put them back in their habitat where they live a long healthy life, happy life. >> Right, so you said you've joined the organization 5 years ago, 5 and 1/2 years ago and you're the CIO, first ever CIO. >> I am (laughs) >> What brought you here and then now that you're here with kind of a CIO hat, what are some of the new perspective that you can bring to the organization that didn't necessarily, that they had had before from kind of a technical perspective? >> Well, what brought me here was, I never expected to be here, if you would have told me I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society you know 10 years ago I would have said you're kidding because I didn't really realize that there were professional positions in organizations like Best Friends. But I, you know, my journey begins the same as, began the same as a lot of peoples did. I was that little kid always bringing home animals and you know my mother hated it. You know it was always something showing up at our doorstep with me, you know. And I just loved animals all my life and as I went through college and got my degree and started my professional career, then I thought well I'm going to of course have animals because I can have as many as I want now, right! (laughs) So I started adopting, and I didn't even realize until I was in my 30s that they were killing in shelters and I learned that in Houston, Texas when I lived there. I was working for IBM at the time, and one day a lady came on the television and she said they were doing a new segment and she said we're a no-kill shelter and I thought oh my god if there are no-kill shelters then there are kill shelters, right? >> There must be the other. >> Yeah so, to make a long story short then I started not working in animal welfare but doing more to support the movement and donating. Adopting from shelters and fostering animals and then one day I had been to Best Friends as a visitor vacationing in this beautiful part of Utah. But I saw the CIO ... >> Position. >> position open and I said I'm going for it. >> Good for you. >> Yeah. >> Good for you, so now you're there so what are some of the things you've implemented from kind of a techy, you know kind of data perspective that they didn't have before? >> Well, they didn't have a lot. >> They probably didn't have a lot, besides email and the obvious things. >> Being the first CIO I don't know that I knew what I was walking into at the time because I got to Kanab, and Kanab Utah where the sanctuary is, is the headquarters. And Kanab is very infrastructure challenged. >> (laughs) Infrastructure challenged, I like that. >> There is one ISP in Kanab and there is no redundancy in networks so we really don't have, you know, you come from the city and you think, you take these things for granted and you find out oh my god, what am I going to do? And Kanab is you know the hub of our network, so if Kanab goes down, you know the whole organization is down so one of the first decisions I made was that we were going to the cloud. >> Right, right. >> Because we had to get Kanab out of that position and that was one of our, one of the first major decisions I made and we chose AWS as our partner to do that so that was very very exciting. We knew that they had infrastructure we couldn't dream of providing. >> Right, right. >> And, you know we could really make our whole network more robust, our applications would be available and we could really do some great things. >> You're not worried about the one ISP provider in Kanab because of an accident that knocks a phone pole down. >> Yeah, yeah. >> All right but then you're talking about some new things that you're working on and a new thing you talked about before we turned the cameras on community lifesaving dashboards, what is that all about? >> Okay, so a couple of years ago the community lifesaving dashboard is the culmination of two years of work. From all across the Best Friends organization not just the IT department, in fact it was the brainchild of our Chief Mission Officer Holly Sizemore. But it's really, in animal welfare there's never been a national picture of what the problem really is regarding killing animals in shelters. So we did this big. >> Because they're all regional right? They're all regional shelters, very local. >> They're all local community shelters, yes. And transparency isn't forced, so you know some states force transparency, they reinforce in the report numbers but a lot of states don't. >> At the state level. >> Yeah, a lot of states don't, so. You know when you're killing animals in shelters you really don't want people to know that. >> Yeah, yeah it's not something you want to advertise. >> Because the American public doesn't believe in it. So anyway we worked really hard to collect all this data from across the country and we put it all into this dashboard and it is now a tool where anybody in the public, it's on our website, can look at it and they can see that where we're at from a national level. They can see where they're at from a state level, they can drill down into their community and they can drill down to an individual shelter. >> Wow. >> And the idea behind the dashboard is to really, is to get communities behind helping their shelters. Because as I said earlier, it's going to take us all. >> Right. >> And not only Best Friends and our partners but the public plays a big part of this. >> Right, and so when did that roll out? Do you have any kind of feedback, how's it working? >> It's working wonderfully, we rolled it out at our conference in July. >> So recently, so it's a pretty new initiative. >> Yeah it's just a few weeks old. >> Okay. >> We rolled it out at our national conference and we were all a bit nervous about it, you know especially from a technology perspective. >> Right, right. >> We knew that being the first of it's kind ever in animal welfare that you know it was going to get a lot of publicity both inside and outside the movement. >> (laughs) How you want to say both pro and con. >> Yeah, and it's sitting on our website, well really pro and con. >> Right, right. >> But it's sitting on our website and we're like okay, we don't know what kind of traffic we're going to get, you know what are we going to do about this? So we spent a lot of time with Amazon prior to the launch, you know having them look at our environment and getting advice, discussing it with them. >> Not going to bring down that ISP in Utah. >> No, thank god! (laughs) >> (laughs) >> No it wasn't, thank god we were in the cloud. So Amazon really helped us prepare and then the day of the launch, we knew the time of the launch. So we actually had a war room set up, a virtual war room and we had Amazon employees participating in our war room. We watched the traffic and we did get huge spikes in traffic at all times through the day when certain things were happening. And I'm happy to say from a technology perspective it was a non-event because we did not crash we stayed up, we handled all the traffic, we scaled when we needed to, and we did it you know, virtually at the press of a button. >> Awesome. >> Or the flick of a switch, whatever you want to say. >> That's what you want right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> You just don't want anyone to know, I was like give a good ref, nobody's talking about you you probably did a good job. >> Yeah, exactly yeah. >> Good, so before I let you go so what are some of your initiatives now looking forward. You've got this great partner in AWS, you have basically as much horsepower as you need to get done what you need to get done. What are some of the things that you see, you know kind of next for your roadmap? >> Well, we have a lot. >> Don't give me the whole list (laughs) >> No I'm just going to hit on a few key points. I think, you know we used Amazon initially as our cloud infrastructure but I think the biggest thing we're looking at is platform as a service. There is so much capability out there with predictive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, ARVR, you name it facial recognitions, so we're really investigating those technologies because we think they have you know they could have a huge impact on our movement and really help us achieve life saving. >> Right, right. >> And, I think that, you know we're starting we have our fledgling data science program. We're using the Amazon data lake technology, Athena, Glue, they were just telling me about data lake formation which I just a few minutes ago emailed my data guy and said start looking at data lake formation. >> Right, right. >> So, I mean we're really investing in the platform as a service. The other thing I see is that we're, animal welfare is sort of broken from a technology perspective and a data perspective. In that we have no interoperability and you know we don't have the data available. So lets say you want to adopt a 5-year old animal. Well, you go to a shelter you can't get 5 years of history on a 5 year old animal. So it's really starting to fix the foundation for the movement as a whole, not just Best Friends. So, making sure that you know the veterinary data is there, all the data from the pet ecosystem is there. So we're investigating with AWS they're actually coming to our sanctuary in a couple of months, we're going to do a workshop to figure out how we do this, how we really fix it so that we have interoperability between every shelter when an animal moves from shelter to rescue or whatever so that their data follows them wherever they go. So adopters are fully informed when adopting an animal. >> Because you're in a pretty interesting position, because you're not with any one particular shelter you kind of cross many many boundaries. So you're in a good position to be that aggregator of that data. >> Yeah, I don't know that we want to be the aggregator but we want to lead the movement towards doing that. Just getting the technology players, the shelter management systems, the other people who play a role in technology for animal welfare, getting them in a room and talking and figuring out this problem is huge. >> Right. >> And with a partner like Amazon we feel it can be solved. >> Right. Well Angie thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing your story, really really enjoyed hearing it. >> All right thank you so much. >> All right, she's Angie, I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at AWS Imagine in Seattle, thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two senior executives from Dell Technologies here with us, Greg Bowen, Senior Vice President, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Garry Wiseman, Senior Vice President, office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on, digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of Cloud stuff, but also a lot of, you know, workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around Client Edge, digital technologies, unified workspaces, all pointing to the benefits of what Cloud and data can do, ultimately at the end of the day, that's what drive great value in apps, but also, user experience. I mean, people are workin', they're mobile, this is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell Digital Way kind of mission. What is that about, tell us about that, 'cause you're doing it in internally, you're not even dog footing, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out, take us through the digital, the Dell Digital Way. >> Yeah, so the Dell Digital Way. If you guys ever Google digital transformation, good luck. The first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there and you know, we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that will allow us to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell Digital Way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture, really the way we interact with the business. Start with the business and the User first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays, and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal all the way through the DM, Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, So we can operate as a multi Cloud environment as well. >> So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training, and this is not just you know, talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone's has all these kind of, they talk the talk, but might not walk the walk. >> It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people, and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment, if they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first 60 that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the Pivotal Way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user centered design. >> How do people get the, how do, how do companies get the people's side right? Because you know, we all kind of work the big companies, you guys are a lot bigger. Now that Dell Technologies, where head of the old world was oh, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize as a matrix organization. You know what agile teams, a lot of kind of HR issues that if someone might be great on one team, not great on another, and so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How you guys get that right? Because that seems to be a big part of it. Because you got to be agile. You don't be doing reorders after the fact Oh, we didn't post the numbers. We weren't successful. Let's reorder, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? >> I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really key, three key skills in this. There's a product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balanced team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today, and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. >> Well, I also have to say, obviously, being a company that presents itself as one that's modern, from a development standpoint, our infrastructure a place where really the next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really, you know, operating in this, this digital age, is another key thing for us to make sure that as we, as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, you know, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace we'd make sure that we have a modern looking workspace, we have, you know, open seating areas, we have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And then, of course, with the technologies, we're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have, you know, the Pivotal methodology we use, but we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the Cloud. We actually have all of the the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in, if we're trying to recruit people like, you know, the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to track, that we're in this, this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the, that's the one big difference. >> South of the playbook then is the playbook to get this right as core team. Get that core fabric of the, whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then put tuning people through. And cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little Cloud, I need a little bit of hyper convergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combined workout. It's kind of like sports. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously, on some the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be, you know, really game for the change and really want to, you know, shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious, and then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really as we go through those, those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in? And who do we want to help you to move forward from a skills perspective? >> So a couple of challenges that I, that I see, I wonder if you could help us understand how you address, you've got the business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, makes sense. But you've got, I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across, how big is Dallas? Like hundreds of thousands of people? Lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, Okay 60%, you know, nail it, and the others, you know, maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burned some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? >> So the good news is, the frameworks that we're building, and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up Cloud native, they're a green field, they've started in the Cloud, they started on PCF. And they are perfectly, really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And, and everything in between. We found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way, the building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. >> Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company, you got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, Okay, this part of the portfolio, we're going to leave alone, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old, (laughing) Oracle database, and we're not going to touch that. But, but how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, the way we've looked at it is really, where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected speeds of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so dell.com, or our b2b site for customers, or anything that's service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the order management system per se. So the order management system, you know, it's, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we we look at it from a portfolio standpoint, and again, from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact with the customers or the employees will feel most immediately? And so that's how we prioritize things in the question. >> Another question, John, I like to ask guys like you, you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but, well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps, champagnes not quite ready yet. (laughing) >> That's want to be champagne, you know. >> So you, I'm sure, have a lot of people trying to hey, try this out, you guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard? In terms of beta testing? You know, do people love you, do they hate you? You like, you tell on them? How does that all work? >> We should be our first and best customer, and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us. But we did put it into a non production environment and started working on okay, how can we utilize this, for maybe non production workloads, some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B, so we can start flexing it, and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what, it's not going to really handle some of our production workloads. But here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. >> Yeah, I was going to say it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we discovered things that either it couldn't do, or other issues with, and the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. >> I presume there's such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product, okay. And so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? >> Yeah, so when we went and did this, we built a business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the Agile pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test driven development, then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused, then say program management focused, so we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors key performance indicator changes, and then actually business metric outcomes. >> You guys make it sound so easy. >> Right, Greg and Garry, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stop. But I want to get you know, one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, that part of the whole Dell transformation, a lot of glue layer in the past, lot of SI like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been? And what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys, for the end users? >> So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been at the company for the last couple years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from, from either business before, but from what I've observed, and from what I've seen so far, integration is actually going very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at scale. We have a North Star. So we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems we want to end up with, with a single system. We're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure. We have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations, from both the entities as they came together, that we're continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell technology. So, from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple years ago, it's very impressive at how well-- >> That, that's where the efficiencies are going to be right there too, right? >> Yes, it's amazing the same of the same, the sales tools as we're integrating those, and making sure that we have tools where the salespeople can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies is another great thing. >> IT guy told me one time, he says "we're in business when we're out of business". >> Correct. Meaning, you've got that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value, you know, capabilities with AI, machine learning, do much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way. Not that you're out of business, but you know what I'm saying, when you're invisible, it's good, right? >> Our job is to enable the business ultimately, and if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. >> Alright guys, thanks so much real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell technology? What's the big takeaway? What's the most important stories? >> Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities and Dell digital. So for us, it's just that, that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis, and using technology to do something with it. And I think, you know, you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. >> Garry. >> I would simply say that, you know, the dream, I'll be able to run workloads in, whether it's your own infrastructure, or multiple Clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've, we've released that with the, the Dell Cloud. >> Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps in every industry that's unique. Tailor is horizontally scalable, but vertically specialized, very, it's like a whole new world. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> Guys, Congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more seems like more. You can see some visibility out there, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here with Dave Vallante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage, two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell technology. We'll be right back.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019 I'm John Furrier. With Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jeff Allen, Senior Director Product Marketing, Adobe. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> So day one is kind of winding down, big, great keynote, laid out the platform product's working together, lot of data, lots of data conversations. >> Yeah, exciting day. Excited to have Adobe Analytics in the mix with that, you saw the four clouds we talked about, Analytics Cloud is one of them and really kind of core to everything we do at Adobe, right? In fact, even in the Creative Cloud side, Document Cloud side, our customers have to be able to measure what they're doing and so, data is obviously key to that. >> Tapping the data across the different applications and now clouds - It's interesting - it's a whole new grail, people have been trying to do for how many years? >> Forever, from the beginning. >> And it's always been that holy grail, where is it? Now some visibility is starting to get to see into the benefits of horizontal scale, diverse data, contextual workloads, >> Absolutely, yeah. >> This is a big deal. >> It is a big deal. >> Explain why it's impacting. >> It's funny. Our culture now expects data right? We measure everything. Our kids are taught to measure things, even something as simple as likes on, my kids, they argue about whether the picture mom posted of them or the other one got more likes, right? So we kind of have hardwired our society around measurement, and now of course, marketing has always been a measurement-heavy discipline, and so, it's just absolutely core to what we're doing. >> And we had a historic moment, we've been doing theCUBE, it's our 10th season, a lot of events. >> Congratulations. >> And we had a guest come on here, that we've never had before, the title was Marketing CIO, it was one of your customers at MetLife >> Interesting, yeah. >> But this brings the question of, of the confluence of you know, the factions coming together. IT, creative, marketing, where the tech, measurement, data. >> Yeah, totally. >> Data processing, information systems, kind of an IT concept now being driven and married in with the business side. >> Absolutely. >> This is really the fundamental thing. >> I started my career marketing to CIOs, in fact, I've spent most of my career marketing to the CIO organization, right, and about 7 years ago, I came over to Adobe to market to marketing, right? And I used to say, "You know I kind of like marketing to this guy, I understand him better," right? Because I know how marketers think a lot better than CIOs, I had to go learn how they thought. But it's amazing how the tech explosion has happened in MarTech and AdTech, all of these vendors here at this event, this is just a piece of our industry, right? There's thousands of companies serving marketing organizations, and so, all of a sudden, the tech stack looks more crazy than even what many CIOs manage, and so it doesn't surprise me at all that organizations, you're talking to organizations that have a CIO/CMO hybrid role. >> Jeff, I'm curious how the landscape is changing, because all the talk here is about experiences, right? And the transaction is part of the experience, but it's not the end game, in fact, it's just a marker on a journey that hopefully lasts a long time. How does that change kind of the way that you look at data, the way customers are looking at data, you know, how the KPIs are changing, and what they're measuring, and the value of the different buckets of data as it's no longer about getting to that transaction, boom, ship the product, and we're done. >> Yeah, so I look after Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Analytics was the first component we acquired in this business, right? Experience Cloud, started with the acquisition of a company called Omniture back in 2009, was an analytics company, primarily web and mobile app analytics, and it has grown since then, to measure many more things. And we've seen our category with analytics that we've addressed move from web analytics to a broader view of digital analytics, right? The digital parts of marketing to all of marketing, the rest of marketing said, "Hey, we need measurements too. We need tools." And then it clicked out another broader click to this idea of experience, right? Because everybody has a stake in experience, and experience is all wrapped around people and how people move through experiences with your brand, so that's where we sit today, is really helping organizations measure experiences, and that spans every person in the organization. >> Talk about the dynamic between how the old way of thinking was shifting to this new way, and specifically, the old way was "I'm a database guy. I've got operational databases and analytical databases," you know, and that was it. You know, relational, unstructured, you know, kind of quadrants. Now, it's kind of, you have (laughs) it's not about databases, it's about data. So you have operational data, which is the analytical data now >> Yeah. >> So you have now, this new dynamic, it's not about the databases anymore >> Absolutely. >> It's about the data itself. >> It's not about, I would say, it's not about the stores of data, right? It's about really getting the insights out of the data, and you know, for the longest time, in my career, uh, you went to CIO, the CIO organization and there was a BI team there, and you would ask them for data, and they could go to the main frame, they could go to these big IT systems, and you know, in 30 days, they could email you back a .csv file, or even before that meeting, give you a .zip file or something with the .csv file on it. And then you got to go see if you could even get it to open on your laptop and get it into Excel and start to manipulate it. And those days don't work. >> And then you go get your root canal right after. It's a painful process. >> What if the data - today that data is trying to understand, "Hey I got a guy that just checked into the hotel. He's standing in front of me, I need to know if he had a bad experience the last time he checked in with us, so I know if I need to give him an upgrade. And you can't go down to I.T. real quick and ask them to take 30 days to get that data and then crunch the data all to find out. Customers need to know, and in the experience business, immediately this person just walked into the hotel and we need to give them a good experience, we blew it last time for them. That's what the experience business wants out of data. >> One of the questions we had with Anjul, who runs engineering on the platform side, was around the rise of prominence of streaming data, how is that impacting the analytics piece, because, you know, if you want the flow, this is a key part of probably your side of the business. Can you comment, what's your reaction to that - streaming trend? >> We've been talking about streaming for a while. CIO, this isn't a new thing, we were streaming applications, right, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but really in the story I just shared, right? The idea of going down and waiting in this asynchronous process with data, the experience business can't handle that, so streaming data is really implying that, as it's coming in, we're processing it, and learning from it, and getting that out into the systems and the people that can take action, instantaneously. >> Talk about the dynamic that customers have around, traditional silos within their organization, you know, that guy runs the database and data for that department, that person runs the data over there, and if this vision is to be, is to be, is to come true, you have to address all the data, you got to know what's out there you got to have data about the data, you got to know in real time, and these are important concepts. How does a company get through that struggle, to break down those kind of existing organizational structures? >> It's a cultural shift, I mean, who has a desktop publishing team anymore in their organization, right? Everyone does desktop publishing, that is how data is too. Everyone's got to be comfortable with data, they have to be conversing around data, and everyone needs access to data. So, that's, you know, that's what is happening in our industry, the analytics industry, is that we're democratizing that data, and getting it everybody's hands, but it's not enough to give them charts and graphs, they have to be able to manipulate that and make it apply to their part of the business, so they can make a decision, and go, and so, that shift in how people think about data, as it's not part of your - it's part of everyone's job, as opposed to being a specialized, siloed job. >> I'm just curious to get your take, a lot of conversations here about you know, Adobe, using their own products, eating your own dog food, drinking your own champagne, whatever analogy (laughs) you like to use. And when you see the DDOM, right, the Data-Driven Operating Model, on the screen, in the keynote, with the CEO, and he says, "Basically everyone at this company is running their business off of these dashboards, that's got to be pretty, pretty, uh, profound for a guy like you who is helping feed those things. >> It's cool. I like to talk about what I call the modern measurement team. The modern measurement team is no longer that centralized data team, right, or that centralized BI team, but every single function, right, under CIO. Every one of the CEO's directs, has their own data team. You go look around and you see that in every single function, there is a sophisticated data team. They have the best tools in the industry, they have the smartest people they can find, they have PhDs on staff, and that's not enough. So, these teams now have to get that out to every constituent in their organization. And that's what we're trying to do at Adobe, that's what we're seeing our best customers do as well, is trying to inform every decision anybody makes. >> And that's where machine learning really shines. You get high quality data on the front end, with the semantic data pipeline capability, get that into the machine learning, help advance, automate, that seems to be the trend. >> Yeah. Yeah, look the insights that you can get from the data, the ability to predict with rich data, it sounds - prediction sounds like - invention used to sound like this novel thing, right, and then you realize, we're inventing things all the time, that's not so - that's just creativity. Well, the same thing is happening with AI and ML, is we're able to predict things with good statistical modeling, with pretty strong, uh, reliability around those models. >> The keynote had great content, I liked how you guys did a lot things really well, you had the architectural slides, platform was a home run, how you guys evolved as a business, see you laid that out nicely, but one of the things I liked, not that obvious, unless you go to a lot of events like we do, everyone says "The journey of the customer", I mean, it's a, it's become a cliche, you guys actually mapped specific things to the journey piece that fit directly into the Adobe set of products and technologies, and the platform. It's interesting, so the word journey has become, actually something you can look at, see some product, see some - a pathway to get some value. >> There's definitely a risk if the word journey, becomes like "Big Data" and all these cliche terms, you know, that means everything, so it comes to mean nothing. But for us, journey, and as marketers especially, journey is just naturally understanding where did I interact with this person, and what did that lead to along the way, right? And so, customer journey, is absolutely core to data analytics. >> All the hype markets, cloud washing, until Amazon shows them how it's done, everyone else kind of follows, you guys are doing it here with journey, one of the things that came out was a journey IQ. I didn't really catch that. Can you take a minute to explain? >> So we have a couple of things. We have something called Segment IQ, Attribution IQ, and now we have even introduced Journey IQ. And when you see that IQ moniker on one of our, kind of our super umbrella features - that means that we're applying AI and ML, right, and Sensei is involved. So we're using powerful data techniques, and we're also wrapping it with a really simple user experience. So Journey IQ starts to break down the customer journey in terms that a normal person, without a PhD, without knowing statistical methods, or advanced mathematics, can leverage those techniques to get really powerful insights. And that's specifically around the customer journey. >> So the IQ is a marker that you guys use to indicate some extra intelligence coming out of the Adobe, from the platform. >> Yeah, yeah, if we're going to democratize data, right, we have to democratize data science as well, right? And so, a big part of what we're doing at Adobe Analytics is really simplifying the user experience, right? So I don't say, Do you want to run a regression model against this to answer your question? We just say Click this button to analyze. Right? So it's a simple user experience, behind the scenes, we can run these powerful models for the customer, and give them back valuable insights. So, Journey IQ is specifically taking things like cohorts, and introducing cohort analysis into the experience, making it simple to do powerful things with cohorts. >> What's the pitch to a customer when you go to one and talk about all this complicated tech and kind of new, operationalized business models around the way you guys are rolling it out, when they just want to ask you, "Hey Jeff, I care about customer experiences." So, bottom line me. What's the pitch? >> How can you possibly address your customer's needs if you don't know what they think. Right? What they need? So, at the end of the day, the great thing about working with customers, like most businesses do, is customers are happy to tell you where you're getting it right, and where you're getting it wrong, right? And that's all over the data. So all you have to do is develop a culture of using data to make decisions, and 9 times out of 10, if you have the right data, and people are using the data to make decisions, they are going to make the right calls and get it right for your customer. And when they don't, they're using opinions and they're going to get it wrong all the time. >> Or, bad data, could be hearsay. >> Or you course correct, or that wasn't - you know, make an adjustment. Right? Again, based on the data. >> Exactly, yeah. >> You're in product marketing, which is a unique position, because you have to look back into the engineering organization, and look out to the customers, so you're, you're in a unique position. What's the customer trend look like right now? What are some of the things you're hearing from the market basket of customers that you talk to? Generally, their orientation towards data? Where are they on the progress bar? What is the state of the market on the landscape of the customer, what patterns are you seeing? >> Good question. So there's a lot of - there's a lot of, um, anxiety around where do I have pockets of data that I'm not able to leverage, and how do I bring that together, so when we tell a platform story, like you heard us tell today, customers are really excited about that, because they know, they've known forever. I mean, this isn't a new problem, like, data silos have been around as long as data has. So, the idea of being able to bring this data into a central place, and do powerful things with it, that's a big point of stress for our customers. And they know, like, "Hey, I have dark spots in my customer experience, that I lose the customer." For example, if I'm heavily oriented around digital, let's say, um, I'm a retailer, and I see a customer, I acquire them through advertising channels, they come through an experience on my website, and they buy the product. Success. I ship the product to them, and then they return it in the retail store. The digital team might not see that return. >> So they might think it was successful. >> They think it was successful. So what do they do? They go take more money and spend it in the ad channel, where that person originated. When in reality, if they could look at the data over time, and incorporate this other channel data, of in-store returns, the picture might look very different. >> So basically, basically. >> It's those dark spots that customers are really needing. >> So getting access to more diverse data, gives you better visibility into what's happening contextually, to open up those blind spots. >> Exactly. Yup. It's just that, adding resolution to a photo. >> Love this conversation, obviously we're data-driven as well on theCUBE, we're sharing the data out there. This interview is data as well. >> Fantastic. >> Jeff, final question for you - for the folks that couldn't make it here, what's the - how would you summarize the show this year, what's the vibe, what's the top story here, what's the big story that needs to be told from Adobe Summit? >> We're just a day in, there a lot, there's a lot to do still, right? We still have two more solid days of this show. But you know, the big themes are going to be around data, they are going to be optimizing the experience for your customers, and what's really amazing is how many customers are here, telling their stories. That's the thing, I wish everybody in your audience could experience by coming here, because there is 300 breakout sessions that feature our customers talking. All of our sessions on main stage, we bring customers out, and we learn from them. That's the best part of my job, is seeing how customers do that. >> Some of the best marketing, you let the customers do the talking, and they're doing innovative things. They're not just your standard, typical, testimonials, they're actually doing - I mean, Best Buy, what a great example that was. >> Cool brand - we work with some of the coolest brands in the world, so, fascinating, brilliant people. >> Marketing, at scale, with data. Good job, Jeff, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Jeff Allen, here inside theCUBE with Adobe. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay with us for more Day 1 coverage after this short break. Stay with us.