(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Good afternoon, brilliant humans, and welcome back to the Cube. We're live in Detroit, Michigan at Cub Con, and I'm joined by John Furrier. John three exciting days buzzing. How you doing? >>That's great. I mean, we're coming down to the third day. We're keeping the energy going, but this segment's gonna be awesome. The CD foundation's doing amazing work. Developers are gonna be running businesses and workflows are changing. Productivity's the top conversation, and you're gonna start to see a coalescing of the communities who are continuous delivery, and it's gonna be awesome. >>And, and our next guess is an outstanding person to talk about this. We are joined by Stephen Chin, the chair of the CD Foundation. Steven, thanks so much for being here. >>No, no, my pleasure. I mean, this has been an amazing week quote that CubeCon with all of the announcements, all of the people who came out here to Detroit and, you know, fantastic. Like just walking around, you bump into all the right people here. Plus we held a CD summit zero day events, and had a lot of really exciting announcements this week. >>Gotta love the shirt. I gotta say, it's one of my favorites. Love the logos. Love the love the branding. That project got traction. What's the news in the CD foundation? I tried to sneak in the back. I got a little laid into your co-located event. It was packed. Everyone's engaged. It was really looked, look really cool. Give us the update. >>What's the news? Yeah, I know. So we, we had a really, really powerful event. All the key practitioners, the open source leads and folks were there. And one of, one of the things which I think we've done a really good job in the past six months with the CD foundation is getting back to the roots and focusing on technical innovation, right? This is what drives foundations, having strong projects, having people who are building innovation, and also bringing in a new innovation. So one of the projects which we added to the CD foundation this week is called Persia. So it's a, it's a decentralized package repository for getting open source libraries. And it solves a lot of the problems which you get when you have centralized infrastructure. You don't have the right security certificates, you don't have the right verification libraries. And these, these are all things which large companies provision and build out inside of their infrastructure. But the open source communities don't have the benefit of the same sort of really, really strong architecture. A lot of, a lot of the systems we depend upon. It's >>A good point, yeah. >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the systems that developers depend upon, we depend upon, you know, npm, ruby Gems, Mayn Central, and these systems been around for a while. Like they serve the community well, right? They're, they're well supported by the companies and it's, it's, it's really a great contribution that they give us. But every time there's an outage or there's a security issue, guess, guess how many security issues that our, our research team found at npm? Just ballpark. >>74. >>So there're >>It's gotta be thousands. I mean, it's gotta be a lot of tons >>Of Yeah, >>They, they're currently up to 60,000 >>Whoa. >>Vulnerable, malicious packages in NPM and >>Oh my gosh. So that's a super, that's a jar number even. I know it was gonna be huge, but Holy mo. >>Yeah. So that's a software supply chain in actually right there. So that's, that's open source. Everything's out there. What's, how do, how does, how do you guys fix that? >>Yeah, so per peria kind of shifts the whole model. So when, when you think about a system that can be sustained, it has to be something which, which is not just one company. It has to be a, a, a set of companies, be vendor neutral and be decentralized. So that's why we donated it to the Continuous Delivery Foundation. So that can be that governance body, which, which makes sure it's not a single company, it is to use modern technologies. So you, you, you just need something which is immutable, so it can't be changed. So you can rely on it. It has to have a strong transaction ledger so you can see all of the history of it. You can build up your software, build materials off of it, and it, it has to have a strong peer-to-peer architecture, so it can be sustained long term. >>Steven, you mentioned something I want to just get back to. You mentioned outages and disruption. I, you didn't, you didn't say just the outages, but this whole disruption angle is interesting if something happens. Talk about the impact of the developer. They stalled, inefficiencies create basically disruption. >>No, I mean, if, if, so, so if you think about most DevOps teams in big companies, they support hundreds or thousands of teams and an hour of outage. All those developers, they, they can't program, they can't work. And that's, that's a huge loss of productivity for the company. Now, if you, if you take that up a level when MPM goes down for an hour, how many millions of man hours are wasted by not being able to get your builds working by not being able to get your codes to compile. Like it's, it's >>Like, yeah, I mean, it's almost hard to fathom. I mean, everyone's, It's stopped. Exactly. It's literally like having the plug pulled >>Exactly on whenever you're working on, That's, that's the fundamental problem we're trying to solve. Is it, it needs to be on a, like a well supported, well architected peer to peer network with some strong backing from big companies. So the company is working on Persia, include J Frog, which who I work for, Docker, Oracle. We have Deploy hub, Huawei, a whole bunch of other folks who are also helping out. And when you look at all of those folks, they all have different interests, but it's designed in a way where no single party has control over the network. So really it's, it's a system system. You, you're not relying upon one company or one logo. You're relying upon a well-architected open source implementation that everyone can rely >>On. That's shared software, but it's kind of a fault tolerant feature too. It's like, okay, if something happens here, you have a distributed piece of it, decentralized, you're not gonna go down. You can remediate. All right, so where's this go next? I mean, cuz we've been talking about the role of developer. This needs to be a modern, I won't say modern upgrade, but like a modern workflow or value chain. What's your vision? How do you see that? Cuz you're the center of the CD foundation coming together. People are gonna be coalescing multiple groups. Yeah. >>What's the, No, I think this is a good point. So there, there's a, a lot of different continuous delivery, continuous integration technologies. We're actually, from a Linux Foundation standpoint, we're coalescing all the continued delivery events into one big conference >>Next. You just made an announcement about this earlier this week. Tell us about CD events. What's going on, what's in, what's in the cooker? >>Yeah, and I think one of the big announcements we had was the 0.1 release of CD events. And CD events allows you to take all these systems and connect them in an event scalable, event oriented architecture. The first integration is between Tecton and Capin. So now you can get CD events flowing cleanly between your, your continuous delivery and your observability. And this extends through your entire DevOps pipeline. We all, we all need a standards based framework Yep. For how we get all the disparate continuous integration, continuous delivery, observability systems to, to work together. That's also high performance. It scales with our needs and it, it kind of gives you a future architecture to build on top of. So a lot of the companies I was talking with at the CD summit Yeah. They were very excited about not only using this with the projects we announced, but using this internally as an architecture to build their own DevOps pipelines on. >>I bet that feels good to hear. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. >>Yeah. You mentioned Teton, they just graduated. I saw how many projects have graduated? >>So we have two graduated projects right now. We have Jenkins, which is the first graduated project. Now Tecton is also graduated. And I think this shows that for Tecton it was, it was time, the very mature project, great support, getting a lot of users and having them join the set of graduated projects. And the continuous delivery foundation is a really strong portfolio. And we have a bunch of other projects which also are on their way towards graduation. >>Feels like a moment of social proof I bet. >>For you all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it's really good. Yeah. >>How long has the CD Foundation been around? >>The CD foundation has been around for, i, I won't wanna say the exact number of years, a few years now. >>Okay. >>But I, I think that it, it was formed because what we wanted is we wanted a foundation which was purpose built. So CNCF is a great foundation. It has a very large umbrella of projects and it takes kind of that big umbrella approach where a lot of different efforts are joining it, a lot of things are happening and you can get good traction, but it produces its own bottlenecks in process. Having a foundation which is just about continuous delivery caters to more of a DevOps, professional DevOps audience. I think this, this gives a good platform for best practices. We're working on a new CDF best practices Yeah. Guide. We're working when use cases with all the member companies. And it, it gives that thought leadership platform for continuous delivery, which you need to be an expert in that area >>And the best practices too. And to identify the issues. Because at the end of the day, with the big thing that's coming out of this is velocity and more developers coming on board. I mean, this is the big thing. More people doing more. Yeah. Well yeah, I mean you take this open source continuous thunder away, you have more developers coming in, they be more productive and then people are gonna even either on the DevOps side or on the straight AP upside. And this is gonna be a huge issue. And the other thing that comes out that I wanna get your thoughts on is the supply chain issue you talked about is hot verifications and certifications of code is such big issue. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because Yeah, this is become, I won't say a business model for some companies, but it's also becoming critical for security that codes verified. >>Yeah. Okay. So I, I think one of, one of the things which we're specifically doing with the Peria project, which is unique, is rather than distributing, for example, libraries that you developed on your laptop and compiled there, or maybe they were built on, you know, a runner somewhere like Travis CI or GitHub actions, all the libraries being distributed on Persia are built by the authorized nodes in the network. And then they're, they're verified across all of the authorized nodes. So you nice, you have a, a gar, the basic guarantee we're giving you is when you download something from the Peria network, you'll get exactly the same binary as if you built it yourself from source. >>So there's a lot of trust >>And, and transparency. Yeah, exactly. And if you remember back to like kind of the seminal project, which kicked off this whole supply chain security like, like whirlwind it was SolarWinds. Yeah. Yeah. And the exact problem they hit was the build ran, it produced a result, they modified the code of the bill of the resulting binary and then they signed it. So if you built with the same source and then you went through that same process a second time, you would've gotten a different result, which was a malicious pre right. Yeah. And it's very hard to risk take, to take a binary file Yep. And determine if there's malicious code in it. Cuz it's not like source code. You can't inspect it, you can't do a code audit. It's totally different. So I think we're solving a key part of this with Persia, where you're freeing open source projects from the possibility of having their binaries, their packages, their end reduces, tampered with. And also upstream from this, you do want to have verification of prs, people doing code reviews, making sure that they're looking at the source code. And I think there's a lot of good efforts going on in the open source security foundation. So I'm also on the governing board of Open ssf >>To Do you sleep? You have three jobs you've said on camera? No, I can't even imagine. Yeah. Didn't >>You just spin that out from this open source security? Is that the new one they >>Spun out? Yeah, So the Open Source Security foundation is one of the new Linux Foundation projects. They, they have been around for a couple years, but they did a big reboot last year around this time. And I think what they really did a good job of now is bringing all the industry players to the table, having dialogue with government agencies, figuring out like, what do we need to do to support open source projects? Is it more investment in memory, safe languages? Do we need to have more investment in, in code audits or like security reviews of opensource projects. Lot of things. And all of those things require money investments. And that's what all the companies, including Jay Frogger doing to advance open source supply chain security. I >>Mean, it's, it's really kind of interesting to watch some different demographics of the developers and the vendors and the customers. On one hand, if you're a hardware person company, you have, you talk zero trust your software, your top trust, so your trusted code, and you got zero trust. It's interesting, depending on where you're coming from, they're all trying to achieve the same thing. It means zero trust. Makes sense. But then also I got code, I I want trust. Trust and verified. So security is in everything now. So code. So how do you see that traversing over? Is it just semantics or what's your view on that? >>The, the right way of looking at security is from the standpoint of the hacker, because they're always looking for >>Well said, very well said, New >>Loop, hope, new loopholes, new exploits. And they're, they're very, very smart people. And I think when you, when you look some >>Of the smartest >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I work with, well former hackers now, security researchers, >>They converted, they're >>Recruited. But when you look at them, there's like two main classes of like, like types of exploits. So some, some attacker groups. What they're looking for is they're looking for pulse zero days, CVEs, like existing vulnerabilities that they can exploit to break into systems. But there's an increasing number of attackers who are now on the opposite end of the spectrum. And what they're doing is they're creating their own exploits. So, oh, they're for example, putting malicious code into open source projects. Little >>Trojan horse status. Yeah. >>They're they're getting their little Trojan horses in. Yeah. Or they're finding supply chain attacks by maybe uploading a malicious library to NPM or to pii. And by creating these attacks, especially ones that start at the top of the supply chain, you have such a large reach. >>I was just gonna say, it could be a whole, almost gives me chills as we're talking about it, the systemic, So this is this >>Gnarly nation state attackers, like people who wanted serious >>Damages. Engineered hack just said they're high, highly funded. Highly skilled. Exactly. Highly agile, highly focused. >>Yes. >>Teams, team. Not in the teams. >>Yeah. And so, so one, one example of this, which actually netted quite a lot of money for the, for the hacker who exposed it was, you guys probably heard about this, but it was a, an attack where they uploaded a malicious library to npm with the same exact namespace as a corporate library and clever, >>Creepy. >>It's called a dependency injection attack. And what happens is if you, if you don't have the right sort of security package management guidelines inside your company, and it's just looking for the latest version of merging multiple repositories as like a, like a single view. A lot of companies were accidentally picking up the latest version, which was out in npm uploaded by Alex Spearson was the one who did the, the attack. And he simultaneously reported bug bounties on like a dozen different companies and netted 130 k. Wow. So like these sort of attacks that they're real Yep. They're exploitable. And the, the hackers >>Complex >>Are finding these sort of attacks now in our supply chain are the ones who really are the most dangerous. That's the biggest threat to us. >>Yeah. And we have stacker ones out there. You got a bunch of other services, the white hat hackers get the bounties. That's really important. All right. What's next? What's your vision of this show as we end Coan? What's the most important story coming outta Coan in your opinion? And what are you guys doing next? >>Well, I, I actually think this is, this is probably not what most hooks would say is the most exciting story to con, but I find this personally the best is >>I can't wait for this now. >>So, on, on Sunday, the CNCF ran the first kids' day. >>Oh. >>And so they had a, a free kids workshop for, you know, underprivileged kids for >>About, That's >>Detroit area. It was, it was taught by some of the folks from the CNCF community. So Arro, Eric hen my, my older daughter, Cassandra's also an instructor. So she also was teaching a raspberry pie workshop. >>Amazing. And she's >>Here and Yeah, Yeah. She's also here at the show. And when you think about it, you know, there's always, there's, there's, you know, hundreds of announcements this week, A lot of exciting technologies, some of which we've talked about. Yeah. But it's, it's really what matters is the community. >>It this is a community first event >>And the people, and like, if we're giving back to the community and helping Detroit's kids to get better at technology, to get educated, I think that it's a worthwhile for all of us to be here. >>What a beautiful way to close it. That is such, I'm so glad you brought that up and brought that to our attention. I wasn't aware of that. Did you know that was >>Happening, John? No, I know about that. Yeah. No, that was, And that's next generation too. And what we need, we need to get down into the elementary schools. We gotta get to the kids. They're all doing robotics club anyway in high school. Computer science is now, now a >>Sport, in my opinion. Well, I think that if you're in a privileged community, though, I don't think that every school's doing robotics. And >>That's why Well, Cal Poly, Cal Poly and the universities are stepping up and I think CNCF leadership is amazing here. And we need more of it. I mean, I'm, I'm bullish on this. I love it. And I think that's a really great story. No, >>I, I am. Absolutely. And, and it just goes to show how committed CNF is to community, Putting community first and Detroit. There has been such a celebration of Detroit this whole week. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Best Wishes with the CD Foundation. John, thanks for the banter as always. And thank you for tuning in to us here live on the cube in Detroit, Michigan. I'm Savannah Peterson and we are having the best day. I hope you are too.

(calm music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here on the floor at Moscone south in San Francisco California for AWS summit, 2022. This is part of their summit conferences, not re:Invent it's kind of like becoming like regional satellite, mini re:Invents, but it's all part of education developers. Of course theCUBE's here. We're going to be at the AWS summit in New York city, only two this year. And this summer check us out. Of course, re:MARS is another event we're going to be going to so check us out there as well. And of course re:Invent at the end of the year and re:Inforce the security conference in Boston. So, Sarbjeet Johal, our next guest here. CUBE alumni, CUBE influencer, influencer in the cloud industry. Sarbjeet great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Oh, by the way, we'll be at Boston re:Inforce, re:Invent in December, re:MARS which is the robotics AI show, and of course the summit here in San Francisco and New York city, the hot areas. >> That's cool. >> Great to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Okay. I got a lot of data to report. You've been on the floor talking to people. What are you finding out? What's the report? >> The report is actually, I spoke to three people from AWS earlier. As said one higher up guy from the doctor, Casey Tan. He works on French SaaS chips and he gave me a low down on how that thing works. And there's a systolic arrays TPUs, and like a lot of insider stuff >> Like deep Silicon chip stuff. >> Yes. And that they're doing some great stuff there. And of course that works for us at scale and for cloud guys it's all about scale. If you're saving pennies at that scale, you're saving millions and maybe hundreds of millions at some point. Right? So that was one. And I also spoke to the analytics guys and they gave me some low-down on the Glue announcements. How the big data processing is happening at AWS and how they are now giving you the ability where your infrastructure hugs your demand. So you're not wasting any sources. So that was a number one complaint with the Glue from AWS. So that was one. And then I did the DeepRacing race and my timings were like number 78. So. >> You got some work to do. You download your machine learning module. >> No, I will do that and then play with it. Yes. I will train one. >> You like a simulation too? >> Yeah. Yeah. I will do that simulation, yes. >> What else? Anything jump off the page for you. What's the highlight if you could point at something? Did anything pop up at you in this event with AWS? Was there any aha moment or something that just jumps off the page? >> I think it was mainly sort of incremental to be honest with you. And the one thing-- >> Nothing earth shattering >> Nothing earth shattering and that at the summit it's like that, you know, like it but they are doing new announcements of like almost every day with new services. So I would go home and read on that but there are some patterns that we are seeing emerging and there are some folks very active on Twitter. Mark in recent just did very controversial kind of tweet couple of days back. That was, that was hard. >> Was he shit posting again? >> Shit posting. Yeah. He was shit posting actually, according to actually I saw Corey as well on the floor, Corey and Rodrigo. And, and-- >> Did you see Corey's interview with me? We were talking about shit posting 'cause he wrote in this newsletter. Mark and recently Elon Musk, they're all kind of like they're really kind of active on Twitter with a lot of highly intelligent snarkiness. >> They're super intelligent and they know the patterns, they know the economics and technology. Super smart guys and yeah. Who is in control, there was a move from the middle seat and social media kind of side of things where people are controlling the narratives and who controls the narrative. Is it billionaires? Is it government? We see that. >> Well I mean, it's interesting seeing the power. I mean, I call it the revenge of the nerds. You got the billionaires who are looking at the political screw-ups that Facebook and others have done. And by not being clear and it's hard, it's a hard problem to solve. I don't really want to be in their seat. Even Andy Jassy is the CEO of AWS. What is he? I mean, he's dealing with problems that for some people would be their worst part of like they could ever dream of scenario. He's dealing with that at breakfast. And then throughout his day, he's got all kinds of Amazon's so big and Apple and you got Google and you got the fan companies. So, you know, at some point tech is now so part of society, it's not just the nerds from California. It's tech is in everything now. So it's a societal impact. And so there's consequences for stuff. And so you're starting to see this force for good that's come from the sustainability angle. You're going to start to see force for good with technology as it relates to people's lives. And we had Mapbox on the CUBE and they provide all this navigation and Gareth the guy who runs that division, he talks about dark kitchens, dark stores. So just they're re-engineering the supply chain of delivery. So we all been to restaurants and seen people there from picking up food delivery. Why are they going to the retail? So dark kitchens are just basically depots for supplying the 10 menus that everyone orders from. That's a change of a structural change in the industry. So that's jumped out at me, Matt Wood spoke to me about serverless impact to the analytics team. And again, structural changes, technical and culture. Right? So, so you're starting to see to me more and more of the two themes of some technology change, architectural change, system change and culture thinking. And you know, we had a 20 year old guest on here who was first worked at Amazon web services when he was 16. >> Wow. >> Graduated high school early and went into Amazon. He's like, I love tools. So people love tools. Hardware is coming back. Right? So I mean Sarbjeet this is crazy. >> It's crazy. >> What's going on. >> It's crazy actually. Remember the nine year old kid at re:Invent 2019. Karthick was the name if I remember, but I spoke to him and he was crazy. He was AWS certified and kids are playing with this technology in their high schools. >> It's awesome. >> And even in their elementary schools now. >> They can get their hands on it quicker. They don't need to go in full class for a year. They can self-teach, they can do side projects they can launch a side hustle, they can stand up a headless retail outlet, who knows what they can do if you got the Lego blocks. This is what I love about the cloud, you can really show something fast and then abandon it. >> Actually, I think it is all enabled through cloud. Like the accessibility of technology has gone like exponentially, like wildfire. Like once you have access to the cloud just all you need is connection to the internet. After that you have the VMs. and you have the serverless, there's zero cost to you. And things are thrown at you. Somebody who was saying that earlier here like we have said that many times it's like that's how the drug dealer, you know, sell the drug. Like sniff it, it's free, >> First is free. >> So they're doing it. Yes. >> We say that about theCUBE. >> And from the, I see cloud from two different angles, like we all do. And like, I try to sort of force myself to look at it from the both angles. There's the supplier side and the buyer side or the consumer side on the other side. Right? So from the supplier side, it's a race for talent to build it, number one, then number two is race for talent to train them. So we saw the numbers and millions being shown today at the keynote again. And Google is showing those numbers as well. Like how many millions they are training like 25 to 30 million people within next two, three years. It's crazy numbers. >> Sarbjeet I got to say so if I have to look at what jumped off the page for me on this event, was couple things and this is kind of weird nuanced stuff but I'll just try to explain it as best I can. Number one, we're going to see more managed services like DevOps managed services. As DevOps teams grow, talent is a problem. And Kubernetes obviously is growing and got to get that right. It's not easy to be a Kubernetes, you know slinging clusters around with Kubernetes. It's hard. I think that's got to get easier. So I think the path to easy is going to be some sort of abstraction service layer. And I think the smart people are going to have this layer will manage it and then provide that as a service, number one. Number two is this notion of a systems design thinking around elements, whether it's storage or maps for like Mapbox and around these elements they have to have a systematic effect of other things. You can't just, if it changes, it's going to have consequences that's what systems do. So, tooling being built around these elements and they have to have hardened APIs that is clear. People who are trying to be "cloud native" need to get this right. And you have to have the tooling in and around the the element and then have APIs to connect and then glue up. So it's interesting. Clearly those things are happening and multiple conversations, people were teasing that out. And then obviously the super cloud was coming in. >> Is there. >> Mapbox is basically a super cloud. They're like what snowflake is for data analytics. They are for-- >> MongoDB is another one. >> MongoDB's got Atlas. I mean, MongoDB was criticized for years. Doesn't scale. Remember the old lamp stack days, they were preferred. They're document, they nailed it with document. The document aspects of data, but they were always getting criticized. They can't scale. And they just keep scaling. But now with Atlas, they're on AWS. It's just, auto scale. So that's killer for MongoDB. So I think their stock price is undervalued my opinion but you know, I don't give legal advice. >> I think that the whole notion of-- >> Or financial advice. >> The multicloud, right? So for a multicloud to kill that complexity of multicloud, we have to go to the what Dave Vellante and you guys say super cloud, right? Another level of abstraction on top of infrastructure provider by AWS, Google cloud, Azure. So that's where we're going. >> Well, Dave and I debate this right, he bundles multi-cloud in there and most people think that's what he's saying but I'm saying multi-cloud is a reality. I mean, multi-cloud means you're going to have multiple clouds. They're just not you're not sharing workloads across those clouds. It's like not the same workload. That's not going to yet happen. I run Azure because I have 365, that's it. I run Amazon for everything else. That's kind of the use case. But to me, super cloud is building on top of AWS or Azure where you leverage their CapEx and create differentiated value. It's your own cloud without all the CapEx but it's got to be like super integrated and the benefit's got to be so good that it seems like pennies to your point earlier. >> Yeah. >> And the economics to the applications in it are just so obvious and they got to be they got to be so big for the application developer. So that's to me is super cloud. And then of course having the connected tissue to manage the transit around multiple clouds. >> Yeah. I think they have it too. I totally agree with you. But another thing is from having the developer background I think the backward compatibility is a huge issue in cloud. >> Yeah. I agree. >> It's a lot of technical debt being built and I hear that, I'm hearing that more and more. I think that we have to solve as industry as like these three main players have to solve that problem. So that's one big thing, actually. I'm very like after, you know, like to talk about it and all that stuff. So yeah. It's another thing is another pattern actually to all the cloud naysayers out there, right? Is that those are the people who come from the hardware background. So I've seen another pattern out there. So I'm trying to synthesize, who are these people who bash cloud all the time? I'm pro-cloud of course everybody knows that. >> We know you're pro, we're all pro cloud. We're totally biased. We love cloud >> Actually. No, I've seen both sides. I've seen both sides. I've worked at EMC, VMware, I worked at Oracle cloud as well. And then, and before that I have written a lot of software. A software developer is pro-cloud. A typical hardware ops guy or girl, they are pro on-prem or pro hybrid and all that. Like they try to keep it there. >> I think first of all, I have opinion on this. I think, I think you're right. But how hardware is coming back, if you look at how cloud is enabling hardware, it's retro, it's designed for the cloud. So hardware's going to offload, either accelerate stuff and offload stuff from the software guide. So look at DeepRacer it's hardware. Now it's a car. You've got the silicon and the chips. So the chips you're talking about. Those aren't chips for service and the data center. They're just chips to make the software in the cloud run better. >> Sarbjeet: Well scale. >> So scaling. And so I think we're going to see a Renaissance in hardware. It's going to look different. It's going to act different. So we're watching this. I mean, you brought up the idea of having a CUBE hardware box. >> Yeah. It's a great idea. >> It's a good idea. DM me and tell me it's a bad idea or good idea. I'll blame Sarbjeet for that. But what else have you learned? >> What else have learnt actually it's basically boils down to economics at the end of the day. It's about moving fast. It's about having developer productivity, again going back the cloud naysayers. It's like, why did you build a bike? Remember Steve Job used to say that, "computer is the bicycle for the human minds." >> Yes. >> Right. So cloud is the bicycle for the enterprises. They makes them move faster. 'So I think that's-- >> All right. We're closing down. We're going to hold on until they pull the plug on theCUBE literally. Sarbjeet great to see you on there. Check 'em out on Twitter. Great event. Good to see you, great report. Thank for sharing. Sarbjeet Johal here on theCUBE, taking over our community site I hear, right? Now you going to work-- >> I'm there. I'm always there. >> Great to have you on. I'm going to work on some new things with theCUBE. Really appreciate working with us. Thanks a lot. >> I really appreciate you guys giving me this platform. It's an amazing platform. Thank you very much. >> That's all right. We'll be back. That's it for our coverage of AWS summit 2020 here live on the floor. Events are back. Hybrid's back. We get theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston. Re:invent at the end of the year but we're going to the summit in New York city. In the summer, we got re:Inforce in Boston the security conference. Re:MARS which is the robotics IML conference. And of course the big summit New York and San Francisco we're there of course. Share thecube.net for all the action. I'm John for your host with Sarbjeet here. Closing out the show. Thanks for watching. (Calm music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

(upbeat introductory music) >> Presenter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE CONVERSATION. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE CONVERSATION I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios, we have a remote guest here talking about cybersecurity and all the industry trends and the recent news and announcements around Fortinet with John Madison CMO and Executive Vice President of products at Fortinet John, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you back for some commentary around what's going on in the trends and your recent news. So thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, nice to see you again. >> So you guys had earnings, congratulations again another successful results, you guys are doing well. Cyber is super important and that's the top conversation, cloud computing, cloud native, we're living in a pandemic. New things are exposed. Clearly the environment has changed in the past four months in a major, major way. So a lot of demand, a lot of needs out there from customers. So you guys had some earnings and you also have an update on your Fortinet OS67.0 platform with major updates. Let's quickly hit the news real quick. What's the hot topic? >> Yeah, well you're right. Things have accelerated in some ways in this cybersecurity world and we had the recent solar winds incident that's also made people look really, really closely at their cyber security strategy and architecture. We announced our results yesterday for Q4. For Q4 we had over 20% product growth which is the key, of course, the future growth. We also, for the full year in 2020 past 3 billion in billings for the first time for the company. And we're really proud of that. We're proud for a lot of reasons with our people and our team, but also another company that goes and makes large acquisitions to boost revenue and billings growth. We've done it predominantly organically over the last 20 years. And so we're very proud of our achievement and obviously a big thank you to our partners, our employees, and our customers. >> We also have been covering you guys for many, many years. Congratulations, well deserved good products win the long game, as we say on theCUBE, and that's a great Testament, but now more than ever I really want to get your thoughts because everyone that I talked to is really kind of sitting back saying, "Wow, look what's happened in the past three, six months in particular, a lot of sea change in both on the technical landscape, the intersection with society obviously with cyber, you mentioned solar winds that's been kind of hanging around. More data's coming out about how pervasive that was and how native it was for many months. So what's out there, we don't even know what's next. So this is causing a lot of people to take pause and reevaluate their environment. Can you share your perspective and how Fortinet sees this playing out and how that you are advising your customers? >> Yeah, well, leaving compliance and regulatory to one side for now because that's also a driver cybersecurity and focus on the two main drivers. One is the threat landscape, and I hinted a bit around that supply chain attack which affects a lot of people in solar winds incident. They got hold or got onto a device that has privileged access across a lot of servers and applications. And that's exactly what they wanted to get to. So state-sponsored ABTs, there's still volume out there. We still see now ransomware doubling every six months but that's very scary. The threat landscape around state sponsored. Now, the other driver of cybersecurity is the infrastructure. And whether that be end point. So as you know people are working from home as I am for the last eight months. So there's a on and off network, end point kind of a zero trust architecture there that people are looking towards. On the network side, we've seen these edges develop. And so whether it be the WAN edge, LANedge, Cloud Edge, data center edge even OT edge, those need protecting. So that's a big challenge for customers. And then also on the cloud side where the applications have moved to cloud, but different types of cloud, multi-cloud I've even seen building cloud recently. So that's a very adaptive area. So challenging for the customer in the terms of the threats and weaponized threats as well as the ability to cover all the different parts of the attack surface going forward. >> It's interesting, we've been living in a generation in the technology business around, you just get a tool for that. Every hammer looks for a nail, that's the expression. Now more than ever when you have this no perimeter environment, which we've been talking about for many years, that's not new. What is new is that everyone's now thinking about architectural systems approach to this and thinking systematically around the platform of what their business is. So in your announcement that you guys just released for OS67.0, there's really some meat on the bone there. You have the secure access, edge SASE and then the endpoint protection which are defined categories by the analyst. But those are the areas that are super hot. Can you translate that into the architectural equation because you and I were talking before we came on camera around how it's not just one thing there's multiple layers to this. Could you break that out for us please? >> Yeah. If you look at historically and I'm now coming up to my 20th year in cybersecurity. Before Fortinet I worked for an end point company. If you go back a while and I can, between 2000, 2010, the Endpoint Vendors were the the big cybersecurity players because Endpoint was where the data was and everything else. And then over the last 10 years the network security vendors, the next gen firewalls have been the most important vendors out there. And it's also reflected in revenues and market cap and everything else. What we're going to see over the next 10 years is the platform. And that platform can't be just an endpoint platform. It can't be just a network security platform or just the cloud platform, because you only, you're only seeing and defending and protecting a part of the overall we call digital experience. Whether it be a device in the factory, whether it be a person dialing in from somewhere or connecting from somewhere through the network and through to the applications you've got to measure that digital experience. And so that's going to be very important to be able to provide a platform that sits across all your devices users, across your whole network including new networks like 5G and across the applications and in the cloud. So the platform to us extends across all those areas. We've been building that platform on what we call our FortiOS operating system. The latest release is 7.0, which released yesterday. It obviously upgrades and extends all parts of the platform but we did major parts of the release yesterday were around SASE, which of course is the CloudEdge. So we're adding that CloudEdge to our component. We did acquire a company Opaque Networks a few months ago that's now we've integrated that technology. And then just as importantly on the access side, a zero trust network access capability for giving access per application. In fact, again, with this, I've talked a bit about in the past about all these Gartner acronyms I don't think zero trust network access is the right wording for it. It should be application access, because that's all we are going to move to. Application specific access versus just getting on the network and getting access to everything. But something that gives you context. So those are the two big things, but there's 300 plus new features across networking end point in cloud across management, inside the resource. It's a major release for us. And it gives us our customers the capability to really protect that attack surface from the end point to the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a lot of meat in there, from that release, I've got to say. but it's basically you're saying devices and users have access. That's been around. There's been tools for that. You hire people, you get some tools. Network access, it's been around. It's getting evolving. Now apps in the cloud, cloud native is a hot area. And people that I talk to, I want to get your reaction to this comment that I hear from people and customers and CXOs and developers. "Hey, we bought a tool for that. We hired a bunch of people. They mainly left, or the environment changed. We bought another tool. And then we bought a tool for that. We bought a tool for that." And then you have this kind of tool shed mentality, where they have tools that don't even have people to run them. So you have this problem there kind of tools need to be upgraded. And then you have this hot trend of observability on the app side, where now you have new data coming in on the application side, those are new tools. You got all kinds of stuff and competing for that. How do you talk to that customer? Because this is what the customer hears all this noise, all this action. They need to have it. They got to have the staff, they got to be trained up. What's going on there? What's your reaction to that? And how do you talk to customers who have this problem? Well, it's a big problem for them. Because, and by the way when I speak to a lot of customers about cloud they don't go to cloud because it's cheaper. It's not, it's actually more expensive. But they go to cloud to give them more agility because they want flexibility in the way they deploy applications as they go forward. And again, this pandemic has made a lot of companies realize they need to be more flexible in the way they deploy IT resources and faster in the way they bring up new services and applications. And so, but there's quite a few elements I say of cybersecurity and networking, which to me and to us are just features. You shouldn't be buying 40 different networking and cybersecurity vendors. You just can't staff and maintain that. And so we do see some things consolidated and converging into a single platform. We're a leader in the magic quadrant for SD WAN or a leader for network security or a visionary in WIFI. And many of the times in each of those magic quadrants, it's a different vendor or if it's the same vendor it's a different platform. For us it's the same platform in each one. And we pride ourselves in building not only best of breed capabilities, but also it's the same platform same management system, same API. And that gives the customer some capabilities in trying to manage that. What we say to customers is not a question of going from 40 vendors down to one That's no good, but go from 40 vendors down to maybe seven or eight platforms but make sure those platforms can inter-operate. They can share policy, and they can share threat intelligence. And that's why customers are looking to more of an architectural approach to cybersecurity but also they feel cybersecurity and networking are starting to converge at the same time. >> One of the biggest stories we're covering these days in 2021 besides the pandemic and how people are going to come out with a growth strategy that's secure, trusted and scalable, is the rise of the new executive in business in the enterprise where they're more tech savvy, right? You see executives like Satya and Intel. Intel, rise with the CEO of Microsoft. Andy Jassy rise up to the CEO of Amazon and you're seeing lawmakers in DC become more techie, less lawyer-oriented. So you seeing the rise of a business techie person. And I think this speaks to this holistic fabric philosophy you guys have as you talk to customers, when they look at the business impact of cybersecurity, for instance you mentioned solar winds earlier. I mean, these are deadly company killing events. This is real. So it's not just an IT problem. It's a business problem. How do you guys talk to customers, obviously that you have the security fabric and you're stitching things together? What's the conversation when you talk to customers like that? >> One interesting thing I've noticed, and I do quite a lot of customer calls each week, executive briefings and pretty early on, I noticed that both the infrastructure networking with the CIO team and the cyber security the CSO teams run on the same video call and that's got more and more as we've gone on. And I think what companies have realized is that if they want to move fast, they can't have these silos or this layering of capabilities. Then when they build something they needed to build it securely from day one and have that as a joint team. And so I don't think the teams are not merged but they're definitely working more closely. And I think the responsibility of reporting back into the board level gain is not just, it's just an IT project. Oh, by the way, we've got a security project. It's the same project. And I think that's again, points to this convergence of networking and security. >> Yeah. The silos got to be broken down. That's been a theme that's been more highlighted more than ever the benefits and the consequences of doing it or not doing it are clear to people especially at all levels of the corporation and tech. That brings up my favorite conversation. I always ask you whenever you're back on theCUBE giving me an update on what's going on with Fortinet I got to ask you how it's going with data, because data again is the consistent theme we always talk about, how we're exposing that data, how we're protecting that data, the role of data as people continue to get more data and figure out how to use machine learning how to use AI, how to democratize it all kinds of things are happening around data. What's the latest in your opinion? >> Yeah, I think there's progress, but I always say there's progress on both sides. The cyber criminals, big AI networks and machine learning just to counter what the cyber security companies are doing. I think right now we're processing hundreds of billions of events on a weekly basis. We've got the largest install base of network security out there over 500,000 customers. And so processing that event, it's going well in that we're able to determine really quickly for specific threat vectors in specific geographies that this battle good. It's about a good file. It's about a good URL. It's a vulnerability that's associated with Stevia. So we're able to kind of do use machine learning and volume against a specific application to get a good result. The key going forward for us, and I think for the whole industry is using the AI to start to discover campaigns in the wild like the solar winds ones, which is going on without anybody knowing. And that takes a lot of compute, takes a lot of threat intelligence and the AI piece needs to understand the relationship between the different elements of threat vectors, the command and controls and everything else to get you that result. I do think a couple of things. One is the cybersecurity industry, and I've said this before on this broadcast is are not walking together as they should. And sharing this threat intelligence across the industry. As soon as they find something, I actually applaud Microsoft on the solar wind side, they got information out really quickly and did well. And so we did the same. I think the industry needs to do more of that more proactively. And then I do think that, again, that I see a lot of companies cybersecurity companies claim a lot of things without any evidence that it works whatsoever. >> The world's got to call them out the consequences of not having, things work as they're advertised and or sharing them, your point about sharing. There should be some recognition for folks that are actually being fast on the sharing side. It's not like... We need our own militia against the bad guys. That's what's kind of going on here. So great stuff. I got to get your thoughts on the edge real quick. I know we talked about it briefly. You broke it down to three categories device users, network, and then apps in the cloud. The hottest topic on our recent CUBE on cloud editorial virtual event we had was the edge. And edge being industrial edge. And also, just the edge of the network with humans and users and devices. How are you seeing the current situation out there? A lot of hype, obviously the reality of that, that we're in a distributed network, the internet and the web and the cloud cloud natives coming. What's Fortinet's thoughts? What's your thoughts on how the edge is evolving and what people should pay attention to when they look at as they're architecturally planning for building out and managing and securing the edge? >> Given this a zero trust conversation on users and devices and given that people are familiar with the cloud and how they're going to use cloud. I think the network is becoming a really important very important area. And some people say, "Oh, don't worry about the network, just go to the cloud." The network is very important in providing that digital experience, but what's happening with the network is it's being stretched. It's being extended into factories. It's opening up on the winning side. You've got people now working from home. You've got that edge that used to be just the data center edge is now CloudEdge and SAS edge. And so you have to pay close attention to those edges. Now what you can't do is say, "Oh, I know we've got all those edges there. Let me overlay some security on each edge," because it's going to be different the way you deploy that in on a wifi device versus a CloudEdge. And so what you need to look towards is convergence of a capability either of the CloudEdge or the WAN edge or the LTE edge, it's got to be converged networking, and security. Otherwise it's too operationally inefficient, too complex to do. And so I think this is a really important subject and area for customers because as I said at the beginning, it provides that digital, we acquired a company called (indistinct) a few months ago, which actually focuses on the digital experience monitoring marketplace. What are users actually going through in terms of availability and quality and performance all the way from their device, all the way back into the application? I think that's very important. And the network edges have to be secured, where you can only do it through a converged solution. >> Yeah, that's a great point Architecturally, you might have a good technology or product look on paper but the complexity is the vulnerability. That's a really, really great point. John always great to have you on. Thanks for coming on, sharing the update. Before we end, I'll give you a quick minute to plug the news you had. Quickly put a plug in for the release you guys just put out around the new FortiOS 7.0 the features. What's the most important point about that release? Share, take a minute to explain. >> Yeah. FortiOS 7.0 is our big release our operating system is big news because it allows us FortiOS to sit at any edge across the network, whether it would be the one edge CloudEdge, data center edge. We've extended it into the CloudEdge with SASE in this release. We're also bringing in zero trust network access capabilities but overall it includes 300 features across the network, Endpoint in cloud. So a very important release for us and our customers and partners. >> John, great to have you on theCUBE again and get the news. You guys doing a great job, congratulations on your earnings but more importantly, congratulations on the product success and how you guys are thinking about it as a platform. That's what customers want. And you guys are continuing to do a great job there and congratulations from the news. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Jim. >> Again, John Furrier here inside theCUBE for CUBE Conversation getting the update on Fortinet and cybersecurity. Look for our cybersecurity coverage on SiliconANGLE.com. And of course, theCUBE's coverage continuing to talk to the thought leaders and the people making things happen, securing our networks and our cloud and deploying cloud native applications. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Voice Over: Data is at the heart of transformation, and the change every company needs to succeed. But it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you, it's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. (soft upbeat music) >> Welcome to Thought.Leaders a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot, my name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not, ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics, by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology but leadership, a mindset and a culture, that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action? And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights, and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, chief data strategy officer of the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson, Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience, and the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics Magic Quadrant. In early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CEOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you Dave, nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I'm well, good to talk to you again. >> That's great to see you, thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course to our audience, and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with, invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one, that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time, we want to make sure that we value your time, then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people, that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know we are living through these difficult times we want this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents, because teens and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, changes sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping, and it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step today. Change requires a lot of courage, and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation most businesses, it is somewhat scary, change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage, courage to first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs, sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills, sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract, they know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap, this sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun, you will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump, all four of them are exceptional, but my owner is to introduce Michelle. And she's our first speaker, Michelle I am very happy after watching our presentation and reading your bio that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool parents, because she will beat all of us. Because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL, what a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen this slides, a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it, I'm very thrilled to make that client so far, Michelle, I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one, and I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights data, and of course as you said, leadership. First a little bit about myself, a little background as I said, I always wanted to play football, and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child, but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines, and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football, I grew up in the South, you can tell from the accent and in the South is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the Athletic Department, so I'm testament to you can start the journey can be long it took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football you know, this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided, so it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands. Delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team, that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes, doing just that, assembling teams to execute these plans, and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels, is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data, so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world-class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney, in the 90s I was at Disney, leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project, it was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, just these magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around, and it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team, asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems, all of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems, and so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT, and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s I was at Universal Studios Theme Park as their CIO, preparing for and launching the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wine shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data, actually enabling your business without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform, and collaboration with video message and phone, all in one solution in the cloud. And Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at quotient is the result in knowing. I think that's really important, because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data. But we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about, as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change, how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company, and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate, and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it, and thankfully for the most part knock on wood we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved, all the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others, were suddenly called to the forefront. Because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 Draft. We went from planning, a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee dress jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable, because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky but it ended up being Oh, so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at this level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact, those with the best stats, usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats, since the beginning of time, here at the NFL a little this year as our 100 and first year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us, is both how much more we can measure, and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business, it's the same, the amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it, is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level, it's powered by Amazon Web Services, and we gathered this data real time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast, and of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns speed, matchups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that we'll gather more and more information about player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies or small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way, and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course, that is no longer just small teams the next big wave of change, and we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%, we made a decision, we implemented it, we were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it, and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture, our attractions and entertainment was licensed, our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top down decision making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to coexist. I mean the NFL is a great example of what we call coopertition, which is cooperation and competition. When in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough, you must be able to turn it to insights, partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data, and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave, and drive, don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive, driving can be high risk but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen, is how you become brave, get more and more comfortable with uncertainty be calm and let data be your map on your journey, thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data, and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback, I'm more an old wine person. (Michelle laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great, and I'm getting the feeling now you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My boat is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> You'll watch, okay, so Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices, you have the players, you have the owners you have the league, as you mentioned to the broadcasters your, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread ties them all together you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work, and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL, and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known, and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it, is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So I thank you for your metership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (soft upbeat music) >> So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl, Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone," which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure the additional thousands getting cancer, and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard, I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, isn't really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology, and recently a CDO said to me, "You know Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other, what do you think?" Let me walk you through this, so let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports, at best one enterprise data warehouse very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to. Or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency and sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy, it's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded, let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI-driven insights not on-premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data lake, and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust, there is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, oh, well, I didn't invent that, I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized, knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers. Or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools, the sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this, these are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises, and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual based data discovery vendors, disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics, at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI-driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses, and I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights, and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot I'll just show you what this looks like, instead of somebody's hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom getting to a visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard, because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years, and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI-driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift or Azure Synapse or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. The pace of change, it's acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI, and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven, as Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources. It's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes, and often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar, and in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is, as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is, and let's take an example of where you can have great data but if you don't have the right culture there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, that said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts, facing billions in fines, change in leadership, that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying that culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world, they may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes you know, this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients, they took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available, that is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization, looking at late payments of their customers, and even though the US federal government said "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIIFM, and organize for collaboration. So the CDO whatever your title is, chief analytics officer chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear, that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat takeout food delivery organization, coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt, it's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus, I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL they want to perform better, and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services this may be a wealth management advisor, okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true whether it's putting their children through college, or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers, you asked them about data, they'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better that is WIIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review Study, found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI Competency Center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model, centralized for economies of scale, that could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future, within every business unit, every functional domain, and as you see this top bar, all models are possible but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy lock in the customer loyalty, and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders, and next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent Thomas Mazzaferro, chief data officer of Western Union, and before joining Western Union, Tom made his mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (soft upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable, different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that, as part of that partnership, and it's how we've looked to integrated into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to Bing, or go to Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company, to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right? Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that action needed, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our (indistinct) environments, and as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So big portion of us though is culture, so how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked, and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does is be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward right into this new age, especially with COVID, with COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating, and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities, and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what our customers want, what do our customers need, and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services, to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines. But how do you actually use your information your data, to actually better support your customers better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon, thank you. >> Tom, that was great, thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second, as a change agent you've come in disrupted, and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, I just started this year, but there'd be some great opportunities and big changes, and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams, and our colleagues to support those customers forward. >> Tom, thank you so much that was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric, but even going back to Sam's Club, Gustavo welcome. (soft upbeat music) >> So hi everyone my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much Cindi for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is a you know, high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment in transformation and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today, is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is, you have to start for you, yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing, you know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part, like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business, and what the leaders are trying to do, what I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, you know workforce so the bigger good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication, so my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices, that are not well seeing politically speaking what are the right thing to do, and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past, and what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers, that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add, cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction, and in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was for about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand, and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set us deadline to say, "Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen, what do we need to do to empower and enable these search engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through, as I think the intro information most recently as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset, and what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We're working the past is not going to work now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset, and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people you know, three to five years for them to develop, because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me, because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went to an implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions, so the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like, in my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as your experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept, and so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools, and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with COVID a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less, and the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cost sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite, we have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function, if you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership, to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform is not just an incremental cost, it's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there, and you just to put it into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by organization, maturity there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with, and I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study what I think is interesting is, they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is a cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work, when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flow data, by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100, this just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CSRO, CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff, that's what I can do analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value, and in this case, for example for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value, you need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution, and finally you need to make it super simple for the you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know in some cases or Tableau to other tools like you know, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them, what is the difference, and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool, there are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally I feel that you need to have one portal going back to seeing these points that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to these stations. Like I said it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership and chasing culture, so people can understand why you truly need to invest what I meant analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot we were able to achieve five hours, per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five, and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications obviously the operations things and the users, in HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy, you are a change agent, you need to have a courage to make these decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization, and that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done, and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me it safe to say, thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know workforce or customers that are in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream you know, what would mentors what people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you, talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (soft upbeat music) >> I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners, and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community, and one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top, why? Because it directs the middle, and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard, is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations, and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that, and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. That was rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID's broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent, and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club Walmart retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is and that's what I tried to do is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations that make me, you know stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions organizations, and do these change management and decisions mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. >> Thank you for that is inspiring and Cindi, you love data, and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation. >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice, I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment. But why I think diversity matters more now than ever before, and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority, you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible >> Great perspectives thank you, Tom, I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually you know, in a digital business over the last 12 months really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers and today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, you know, we are very honored to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that celebration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did celebrate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in, and to support our customers going forward. Because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time, and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And in doing that, it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really are part of that our services come into play that, you know, I really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level, and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much and doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you pushing your people too hard, can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way, so to me it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster. But make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know debating points or making repetitive business cases onto people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal, the only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate transformation... >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier was Sudheesh had said about that bungee jumping moment, what can you share? >> Yeah you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right? That's what I tell my team is that you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support that the ever changing needs the marketplace and industry and our customers today and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for, and the competition the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as we look at what how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align, to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So as part of that, so we're putting in place here, right? Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> We're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now, but knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy how would you say that advice has changed, has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago, I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable, and now I think it's, you know what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud, have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's Sudheesh going to go on bungee jumping? (all chuckling) >> That's fantastic discussion really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before lip service. And sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today, is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you Dave, thank you theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it, she said it really well, that is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along, that is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen. But you wait for someone else to do it, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard and if it requires some force then apply that force, make sure your ideas are good. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the courtroom. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom instead of a single take away, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in, and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to thoughtspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond, our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere, we are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we would have been up to since the last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing, you'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas for engineers I've been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond, thank you, thank you so much.

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for Thought leaders. >> Welcome to "Thought Leaders" a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer at the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of "Successful Business Intelligence "Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data." Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello, Sudheesh how are you doing today? >> I'm well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks, Dave. I wish you were there to introduce me into every room and that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. Makes me feel all so good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, we are living through these difficult times. We want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like to do. The way I think of it sort of like a, if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation in most businesses, it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to first of all challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. There are people in the company who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping, for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading our bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patterns, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney. She was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom? I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides, tons of amazing pictures. I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle and looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. And I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking, our digital revolution using insights data. And of course, as you said, leadership, first a little bit about myself, a little background, as I said, I always wanted to play football. And this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child. But when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent. And in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn university working in the athletic department. So I'm Testament to you can start the journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little. He played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SCC football, you know this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL. He just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise, repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that assembling teams to execute these plans. And the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world casts experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next-generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute a little bit first about Disney in the 90s, I was at Disney leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up, but way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, Disney's magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT. And I haven't looked back since. In the early two thousands, I was at universal studios theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wan selects you at a wan shop. As today at the NFL? I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events with this year being the most challenging yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data, talk about data, actually enabling your business without it w wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone all in one solution in the cloud and Quotient technologies whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is the result in knowing I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how do you use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company? Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate. And finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it and thankfully for the most part, knock on what we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches GM's prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee jumping. This is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary. It was certainly very risky, but it ended up being all so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at it's level. Highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field. You can see points being scored in stats, and you immediately know that impact those with the best stats usually when the games. The NFL has always recorded stats since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little this year is our 101 year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys, to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level. It's powered by Amazon web services. And we gathered this data real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize route patterns, speed match-ups, et cetera. So much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive, and innovative way. And it proved to be transformational. However, today, of course, that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change. And we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture, but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you've got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem, we have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses. 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-op petition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be. Data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask it's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program. It's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, tank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an old line person. (Michelle and Cindi laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great. And I'm getting the feeling now, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware water gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices. You have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with, aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together, you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work. And I think that's very important. So for us, at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose, is so well known and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic. And I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder, even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So, thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (upbeat music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, "no, we're perfect, hide it. "Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology. Is it really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "Cindi, I actually think this is two sides "of the same coin. "One reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parametrized reports, on premises data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized. And democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. Everyone said that if our 87% said, they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality, only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture in technology. How did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first-generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual-based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale datasets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding, a report it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You use to be able to create an investment place a bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. the pace of change, its acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the money surety model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle, I spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people and the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for Thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven it's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, "hey, we're not doing good cross selling, "customers do not have both a checking account "and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the U.S federal government said, "well, you can't turn them off. They said, "we'll extend that even beyond "the mandated guidelines." And facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, they said, you know what? "We will spend the time up skilling our people, "giving them the time to learn more "about the future of work, the skills and data "and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIFM. What is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state-of-the-art. Now for the biggest impact what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JPMorgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As you look across, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive and over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future, that includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot, to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go on to Bing we go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find and answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability it's allowed us to actually, enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end-users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action need it to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, or our Eloqua environments. And as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So they portion of us though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities to really support the actual business into the future? That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon, industries based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are accelerating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times, as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what do our customers want? What do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data to actually put a better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from this investments into the future. But that being said, hope you enjoy the segment on how to become and how to drive it data driven organization. And, looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom that was great thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent you've come in disrupted and how long have you been at Western union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but, doing some great opportunities and great changes. And we have a lot more to go, but, we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent, most recently with Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs, Gustavo welcome. (upbeat music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is high effort, high reward situation. I have empowered many transformations and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be varying into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking wellbeing. The common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the one core value that I have is well-being, I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes when you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, workforce? for the bigger good. Despite this fact that this might have a perhaps implication on my own self-interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that I know we'll see in politically speaking, what are the right thing to do? And you have to push through it. And you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topics culture is actually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a state, deadline to say, "hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. "What do we need to do to empower and enable "this change engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I think transformation most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful what was working the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and there're up and coming leaders that are not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talent, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right, we went to implementation and a lot of the way is the IT team function of the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior all success criteria for the traditional Bi's. And that's not going to work. Again the opportunity here is that you need to really find what successful look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as user experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain the user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations, and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs, sometimes in cut budget, we have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have studies in the past about, how do we kind of measure the impact of data. And obviously this is going to vary by your organization maturity, is going to, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put attack line or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flawed data by using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This is just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CHRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell the price that goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and data and optimization theory and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline called free up your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the, the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, in this case, I was working with the HR teams in other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused in looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to IT get leadership support, find the budgeting, get everybody on board, make sure the safe criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you're going from Excel, in some cases or Tableau to other tools like, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them what is the difference and how these tools can truly replace, some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindi's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, and shaping culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest on (indistinct) analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, a tool to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved user experience and adoption. So for hours saved or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience, or ambition was 4.5. And adoption, 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. Our user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent. You need to have a courage to make the decision and understand that I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very source for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody who has believe in the word that we were trying to do and to make the life of four workforce or customers or in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort. There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. With the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream what would mentors, what would people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort, but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (air whooshing) >> Okay, now we're going to go into the panel and bring Cindi, Michelle, Tom, and Gustavo back and have an open discussion. And I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision-making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines. And of course the data. And as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. The old saying, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, how to move forward. So let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know I come from, Sam's club Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, businesses, and transformation that make me stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do so I can help transform the functions organizations and do the change management, change of mindset required for these kinds of efforts. >> Michelle, you're at the intersection of tech and sports and what a great combination, but they're both typically male oriented fields. I mean, we've talked a little bit about how that's changing, but two questions. Tell us how you found your voice and talk about why diversity matters so much more than ever now. >> No, I found my voice really as a young girl, and I think I had such amazing support from men in my life. And I think the support and sponsorship as well as sort of mentorship along the way, I've had amazing male mentors who have helped me understand that my voice is just as important as anyone else's. I mean, I have often heard, and I think it's been written about that a woman has to believe they'll 100% master topic before they'll talk about it where a man can feel much less mastery and go on and on. So I was that way as well. And I learned just by watching and being open, to have my voice. And honestly at times demand a seat at the table, which can be very uncomfortable. And you really do need those types of, support networks within an organization. And diversity of course is important and it has always been. But I think if anything, we're seeing in this country right now is that diversity among all types of categories is front and center. And we're realizing that we don't all think alike. We've always known this, but we're now talking about things that we never really talked about before. And we can't let this moment go unchecked and on, and not change how we operate. So having diverse voices within your company and in the field of tech and sports, I am often the first and only I'm was the first, CIO at the NFL, the first female senior executive. It was fun to be the first, but it's also, very challenging. And my responsibility is to just make sure that, I don't leave anyone behind and make sure that I leave it good for the next generation. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring. And Cindi, you love data and the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last, 12 months, really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers, today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, friends and support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very, honored to get to support those customers that we, across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, really our part of that our services come into play that we really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, hey, how fast you would like transform. And, based on the agreements from the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right. It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, "hey, the CEO is making a one two year, efficiency goal. "The only way for us to really do more with less "is for us to continue this path. "We cannot just stay with the status quo. "We need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi, about that bungee jumping moment. What could you share? >> Yeah, I think you hit upon it, right now, the pace of change with the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right, expand and support that the ever-changing needs in the marketplace and industry our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, as you look at what, how you're operating today in your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into a line into drive the agile transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right, is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. They're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know what you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish going to go bungee jumping. >> Guys fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the Cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just, as I said before, lip service. Sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, the Cube team, and thank goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Oftentimes, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I've picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the quorum. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in. And they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we've have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at the Thought Spot Beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual brought to you by Red Hat. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBEs coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon the Europe 2020 virtual edition. Of course, even before 2020 security was one of the top concerns out there, with everyone working from home, some of the ramifications what's happening. Security is even more heightened and something we've had great pleasure digging into in this cloud native ecosystem. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time we've had CyberArmor on theCUBE, so welcome Ben Hirschberg who's the co-founder and vice president of R&D. Ben thank you so much for joining us. >> (mumbles) Thank you for having me Stu. Thank you. >> All right so you know Ben 10 years ago when I became an analyst, security was one of those things that if you look at security and management overall, it's uh, these are the things we need to fix in IT. Unfortunately a decade later, it's still something that I can say. So if you could just frame for us a little bit as one of the co-founders of the company, what was the why for CyberArmor, what did you see out in the marketplace, what was some of the core competencies that you and your team had that made you form the company? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question because three years ago when we started look around, in the cyber industry and we're really looking into what's happening today because CyberArmor was founded by veterans of the industry. And we were looking into what part of the chain was missing in the security field. And we saw one of the key components which is even today is missing and we're coming in to solve it, is the component of the software itself. I mean we're really looked for many many years as just you said, we looked into the field and we so firewalls and segments and perimeters, and we saw authentication of users, and this is the most important aspects of cybersecurity. And we saw that there is a big change in the field because today the systems are so elastic, so changing, so much many new components went into the field and so much is changing that we've seen it. We cannot still build our security upon the old infrastructure we had before. And we went into the most common denominator you have in the field and it's the software. Because if you're looking into what you're trying to protect today, obviously you try to protect your data and your data is sitting behind some kind of software. And usually the software is running some kind of an infrastructure which is in the old world it was a data center, today we're advancing things into the cloud. And between two steps came into the new kind of containerization and cloud native infrastructure. Which really changes the whole way we are looking into how to run our software today. And we still did the... Most common denominator is the software itself. So what we call workloads. And we said that well, if I need to protect something, I need to protect the workload. And I run to protecting the way that I don't really care who is running it and where it's being run. But I am in our case we are also SAS provider for security solution. When I'm running my workloads, I want to be in control, and this is the thing we are targeting. We are targeting giving the one who's writing the software, the one who is deploying the software, the owner of service, giving him let's say the keys and only to him and no one else. >> All right, so Ben if I hear you right, is that then the application developer is the one that's interacting with your software and using it, obviously the DevOps movement really rallied around telling people that security can't be an afterthought it needs to be something baked into the process. Recently DevSecOps is a term that we hear used quite a bit so who are the people that are involved will help us understand a little bit really the organizational impact of what you're doing. >> So today we see our world really gravitating towards development and DevOps. I mean I see DevOps as an integral part of the development because we don't want to create a different organization to handle these kind of deployment things. If I have a group who's in charge of all the service, I want this group to handle the service from A to Z. And we are targeting not really the developers in sense that we are not integrating the software with APIs, but we are integrating our solution through the deployment tools. So in order to use our solution which is actually a software identity based control plane. You don't need to integrate it with your software you're developing. We can take any kind of software anyone wrote. And we can integrate it with the system using a cloud native techniques like Kubernetes integration, so it's really who is going to interface with our solution is more DevOps and set DevOps as you mentioned. >> All right, Ben when I look at your website, you talked quite a bit about the integration, you mentioned Kubernetes of course we're here at the cloud native conference, so what integrations, how much work is there to do to integrate with the various Kubernetes platforms, how do you tie into things like service meshes, are there any other of the dozens and dozens of projects that the CNCF has out there that your team needs to be involved in integrating with? >> So we took a really... It's interesting phrase but we took an Orthodox approach here where we said that we want to integrate with the core features of Kubernetes only. Because from our perspective we don't want to bring in other solutions into the service-based what our customers are having. So therefore we are integrating ourselves only with the Kubernetes core components and literally installation of our system takes a second, and which is virtual because Kubernetes itself is such a good solution that such a good project that literally installations and all setups are taking no time. And we are bringing our own service to service authentication control plane. We're on an early stage startup, and we are looking into developing our solutions to integrate with the service mesh also at a later phase, bring our security on board. Also they're the missing chain in the security which the service mesh was missing. Because we simply see that there're really great products and really great solutions there so we want to enable our customers to enjoy all they can, but without compromising their security. >> All right, your product itself, what's the relationship with open source? Many of the companies we've seen doing security, have open source projects, you when the event is in person, you walk around the show floor, and open source is a big piece of this community here, so what's your relationship when it comes to open source? >> It's really interesting question because I actually also offer... Many of our founders came from the direction not from the open source but from classical closed source companies. And personally this is due to simply the sensitivity of security field and there're historical reasons for that but I myself and some of our key people have always gave into our open source and took part in many open source projects in the past. As a company CyberArmor looks into open source as something very very valuable. We are really looking into how we can interact and how we can open source parts of our solution, which can interest other companies and other people because everyone of us knows that there are two main reasons to open source. One is it shows some kind of transparency, and the other is to let others enjoy also your project and take part in it. So right now at this stage we have only a few open source parts of our system, which are more... We have open sourced them for transparency reasons. But we're really looking into that criteria we're looking into how we could take some parts of our system and make it generally available because we think it's a good idea. >> All right, Ben what can you tell me about your customers, oftentimes if you've got an example even if it's anonymized, helps explain the value proposition of what your company is offering. >> Okay. Where to start? One of our first customers is a big service provider, BTC service provider, which is a well known company and this company really had high security expectations from the cloud native systems. And they tried many solutions they wanted to protect their services and their internal service to service communication. And they simply after a few trials they tried our solution and understood that our solution has also big benefits from the security side and outside from the performance side, therefore they decided to go with CyberArmor in order to protect their... Ease fast communications within their systems. Another company which is a B2C company Simply it's deploying it's system in a cloud infrastructure which they're less rely on and less feel secure because of legal reasons, and therefore they decided to use CyberArmor to completely protect their services and not just the communication between the services, but also the intellectual property that they have within their services in order to protect themselves. This is a very interesting use case because they're simply, I think one of the biggest beyond Google and Facebook and the big companies we know, customers we know. They are one of the biggest cloud users I know. So they really have a very interesting scale of going from way from 3000 notes in Kubernetes spanning up to within a few hours to 200 thousands notes scale, which was very interesting experience for us because as a new startup this is how you are trying your system out and prove that your solution is indeed made for the clouds. And we're really happy to say that we passed this phase. >> All right. Well, Ben, since you have the R&D component in your role, give us a little bit of an insight as to the things you're working on, what you see as some of the big challenges that security in this space need to be addressing a little bit further down the road. >> So there're two big things which we are working on and I think that's two interesting parts of the security question cause one part is that no one of us really like to pay more for security. We don't like to pay for it. Once just we have it, it's something you want to be there, but you don't want to know about it. And when we are talking about even hearing (mumbles) we are talking about simple things like moving from clear communications to TLS and right away understand that it costs us money. And one of our biggest goals here is to add security without having excessive costs toward the service provider. And we really are trying to improve our system and make them more performing in the sense that they should take as less toll on services they can in order to provide the security. And the other big part is runtime security because our solution is making sure that your workload which you're running in your system is being the same workload throughout the whole runtime process just as you wanted to be. And in order to do that, we're taking what we call code DNA in the CI/CD of our customers. And we understand how these workload should work. And in runtime, make sure that this workload is not changing maliciously and the same behavior stays as it shouldn't be. And this is something we are really improving because we're looking into the newest texts coming from many many directions, and we want to incorporate that in our solutions and make sure that you can throughout the whole runtime process of your workloads, we can keep you secure and safe. And this you know this is very interesting work, and as someone who is a veteran of cybersecurity and a white hat hacker of myself in my previous jobs, I see this as something really interesting and really evolving today. >> All right, well Ben Hirschberg thanks so much for introducing our community to CyberArmor, great catching up with you. >> Yeah I was glad to be here, thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you. Stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, I'm Stu Miniman thanks for watching. (soft music)