[Music] from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante top security pros indicate that the solar winds hack on top of the pandemic have further heightened a change in how they think about security not only musciso secure an increasingly distributed workforce and network infrastructure but they now must be wary of software code coming from reputable vendors including the very patches designed to protect them against cyber attacks hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll summarize cso sentiments from a recent etr venn session and provide our quarterly update of the cyber security sector now in an upcoming episode we'll be inviting eric bradley of etr to provide deeper analysis and insights on these trends but we wanted to give you a preliminary preview of what's happening in the sector as we start off 2021. now the solar winds attack was like nothing we've ever seen before it's been covered quite widely in the press but in case you don't know the details solarwinds is a company that provides software to monitor many aspects of largely on-prem infrastructure including things like network performance log files configuration data storage servers and the like now as with all software companies solarwinds sends out regular updates and patches hackers were able to infiltrate the update and trojanize the software meaning when customers installed the updates the malware just went along for the ride now the reason this is so insidious is that often hackers they're going to target installations that haven't installed patches or updates and identified vulnerabilities in the infrastructure that haven't been addressed doors that are open that haven't been closed if you will now here the very code designed to protect against the breach actually facilitated that breach now according to experts this was quite a sophisticated attack that most believe was perpetrated by the russian hacker group cozy bear an advanced persistent threat or apt as classified by the u.s government now it's suspected that somehow they fished their way into a github repo and stole username and password access to allow them to penetrate the supply chain of software that's delivered over the internet but public information on this attack it's still spotty people are still learning now what is known is that the attackers have been lurking since march of last year and they exfiltrated lots of information from the u.s government and many other high-profile companies now here's what the csos and the etr van had to say about it let me just read some of the quotes the impact of this breach is profound it really turned a lot of heads and conventions about cyber security i don't think this threat has been exaggerated in the media we're now in a situation where we have to monitor the monitors this attack didn't have any signatures of a previous attack so you got down to the code level 80 to 90 of that code is being downloaded from the internet it's bringing devops security processes and making us rethink how to reinvent security and i'll add my business friend val berkovici said to me on twitter last year that he thinks the government hack is going to have permanent implications on how organizations approach cyber security it seems these cisos agree now the one question is what can be done about this and when you talk to security pros they'll definitely tell you they're rethinking security practices but look there's only so much you can do here's a tag cloud summarizing some of what we hear in the cube community and in the venn from etr practitioners you hear a lot about xero trust many csos are really leaning into identity access management and pam and mandates around two-factor authentication we've talked a lot about firms like octa sale point cyber arc software and microsoft is coming up more and more in this conversation especially as octa is seen as setting a price umbrella there's definitely some frustration amongst csos about octa's pricing strategies and auth 0 which does authentication as a service that's hitting our radar as well now of course endpoint security is something we've talked a lot about as the work from home trend hit during the pandemic it's become much much more important and you can see in the growth of crowdstrike and as you see in a moment we're getting some traction with vmware and carbon black in the survey data and of course titanium is another company that we've talked about csos look they're not just going to rip out what they have so companies like cisco especially with umbrella and duo they come up in the conversation as does palo alto networks we've said many times palo alto is seen as a thought leader csos like them they also like fortinet especially those that may be more cost cost conscious we see that a lot in mid-market and so on with analytics micro-segmentation cloud security with z-scaler and even rpa to automate certain tasks uipath has come up in the conversation more and more in a security context so you look at this tag cloud and there's no one answer as is often the case case with cyber security lots of tools lots of disciplines and a very capable adversary who has learned to as they say live off the land using your own infrastructure and tooling against you now the common narrative is that security is a top priority with cios and csos and budgets are going to be up so let's take a look at that well kind of here's a chart that shows the net scores or spending momentum for various sectors of the etr tech taxonomy and we've highlighted the information security segment yes it's up relative to the october survey but it really doesn't stand out i mean everything's up as we've reported coming off a down year in tech spending minus four percent last year and we're forecasting a plus six to seven percent increase this year really depending on on the pace of their recovery but the point is cyber is one of many budget organizations and organizations they're simply not going to open up a blank check to the cso now part of the reason is they're heavily invested in cyber this graphic shows several sectors in context and we've highlighted security in the red box the vertical axis that shows spending velocity and the horizontal axis is market share or presence in the data set and you can see the security it's got a big presence it's pervasive of course but it lags some of the top sectors in terms of spending velocity because look organizations they've got lots of priorities and as you'll see in a moment this space like most mature markets has some companies with off the charts spending patterns and others that lag so let's dig into that a little bit here you see that same xy graphic and we've plotted a number of security players so there's a couple of points here that we want to make first microsoft as usual is off the charts to the right and amazingly has a net score of 48 percent so highly elevated octa continues to lead this pack in net score as it has the last several surveys it's got a net score of 61.5 percent up from last quarter survey octa crowdstrike cyberark fortinet proof point and splunk are all up nicely from last quarter's survey we also really want to highlight carbon black the company's net score last quarter was 23.9 percent with 134 mentions in this quarter its net score shot up to nearly 38 so a very meaningful and noticeable move for vmware's 2.1 billion dollar acquisition that it made in the summer of 2019. so a number of companies that have momentum which stems from a rebound in tech spending but also a shift in security spend that we've highlighted and you can see a couple of legacy security firms that are also there in the chart losing momentum we've highlighted fireeye and rsa okay so now let's dig deeper into the data and the vendor performance here's a view of the data that we first showed you in 2019 it shows the net score and the shared n which identifies the number of mentions within the sector and it's an indicator of presence in the marketplace the leftmost chart is sorted by netscore and the right-hand chart is sorted by shared n so to make this chart you had to have at least an n of 50 in the survey again you can see octa sale and sale point lead in net score and microsoft has the biggest presence in the right hand side along with cisco and palo alto and something we started two years ago was if a vendor shows up in the top 10 for both net score and shared n we anointed them with four stars so these are the four star companies microsoft palo alto octa and crowdstrike which crouch by the way it fell off but it's back on and i think that was probably a survey anomaly because based on the company's financials there has been no loss of momentum for crowdstrike and we give two stars to those companies that make the top 20 in both categories so cisco because of umbrella and duo splunk proofpoint fortinet z z-scaler cyborg and carbon black vmware carbon black is new to the two-star list due to its rapid rise in net score that we just talked about now just a quick aside on carbon black at vmworld 2019 pat gelsinger told john furrier and me that he felt like he got a great deal picking up carbon black for 2.1 billion dollars now his logic was in part based on the valuation of crowdstrike at the time which is of course carbon black competitor crowdstrike as you can see on this chart had a valuation that was at nine times higher than that of carbon black and you can see from the trailing 12-month revenue that crowdstrike was a significantly larger company by more than 100 million dollars in revenue so the real story though was the company's growth crowdstrike at the time was growing much much faster than carbon black at more than a hundred percent compared to carbon blacks 22 roughly now in vmware's recent earnings call they said that carbon black had good bookings performance so who knows exactly what that means but if it were more than 22 my guess is that vmware vmware would have been more effusive in its commentary so let's assume that since the acquisition carbon black growth has been flattish you know maybe down maybe up but probably flat so vmware they're figuring out how to integrate the company and we think that as it does that it's going to use its channel of distribution and global presence to really drive carbon black sales now nonetheless we would still peg carbon black's valuation of having increased pretty substantially since the time of the acquisition perhaps in the three to five billion range we don't know for sure so but a nice pickup in our view for vmware and it'll likely grow from here based on the etr data then that's very encouraging for carbon black now let's look at how the valuations in this sector have changed since before covid here's an updated view of our valuation matrix since just before the pandemic hit in the u.s as you can see the s p is up 16 from that time frame the nas composite up 43 percent wow now look at the others only splunk really hasn't seen a huge uptick in valuation but the others have either risen noticeably like proof point cyber arc sail point they bounced up like palo alto or fortinet or exploded like crowd chat octa and z scalar you combine all these and you're talking about 114 billion dollar increase in market cap for these so one would think carbon black as a vmware asset has done pretty well along with these names and we would expect that the tech spending rebound this year combined with the heightened concerns over the solar winds hack and the tectonic shifts from the accelerated work from home and digital business transformations will continue to bode well for many of these names for quite some time all right let's wrap it up with some of the things we're watching in this space as we exit the pandemic and experience a new digital reality cyber threats have never been greater look each january if you look back on the prior year you'd be able to say the same thing for the last couple of decades and the reality is the budgets and spending on cyber they're asymmetric to the economic risks we just don't spend enough and probably can't spend enough to solve this problem csos they have to balance their legacy legacy install base security infrastructure with the shift to zero trust accelerated endpoint new access management challenges the ever expanding cloud and dot dot dot lack of talent remains the single biggest challenge for organizations which are stretch thin making investments in automation a trend that is not going to abate anytime soon in cyber all the cliches apply there is no silver bullet there is no rest for the weary the adversary they are well funded and extremely capable and they only have to succeed once to create a business disaster for an organization that has to succeed every day 24 hours a day so expect more of the same with no end in sight in terms of complexity fragmentation and whack-a-mole approaches to fighting cyber crime i hate to say this but it just means the fundamentals for the sector just keep getting better and better sorry okay that's it for this week remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe i publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data and the analytics i appreciate the comments on my linkedin post you can dm me at [Music] you

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. And we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're at the NetApp booth and we are now talking with Gerald Pfeiffer V SUSE, VP of Products and Technology Programs. Gerald, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So thank you for bringing the SUSE Chameleon here So let's talk about open-source. What is an open-source company? What are the key hallmarks that define an open-source company? >> So when you think of open-source technically it's about the license. It's about the open-source license that the software is under. But if you want to be a real open source company there is actually, it goes beyond that. And that's where many we see many of the classic companies fail as in you take a piece of software that you've written in house you open-source it which means you put an open-source license on it. And then you throw it over the fence. You put it on an FTP server or a NetApp Server or github or somewhere and say this is an open-source project. Technically true but what open-source really is about also is how you develop the software. It's a development model. It's about the community or communities you have. And so as an open-opensource company or a true open-source company what that means is you need to change how you develop the software. And how you go about it and it involves, you need to, You need to, let go. You need to, you need to lose. Lose in a way you lose control and you need to help, if it's something that you initiated you need to make this attractive for others and easy to contribute. And so the development model the transparency collaboration, communications all that is really important for a successful open-source project. But I would argue also for a successful open-source company. >> So let's talk about the community for a little bit when it comes to open-source and especially with SUSE. SUSE's one the most successful open source companies in the world. However, your key product, SUSE Enterprise Linux you guys don't control the kernel you have to work with a community of organizations and personalities and conflicting agendas. How does SUSE organize their self that over a 25 year period you guys have consistently grown become more prominent in the industry. How have you had that when you don't even own you don't, rather, control the key technology, the kernel to your product. >> Ya, so, there is actually a trick behind it and the short answer is you cannot control but you can influence. And so how do you influence? And it's really about becoming part of the community or I usually actually when we get new employees that come from a proprietary background one of the first things I teach them is there is no such thing as the open-source community. It's actually open-source communities. There is actually many of them and even your example, the kernel there is the Linux kernel community, but inside, everyone, the group of everyone who contributes there're actually subgroups. People focusing on different aspects. And so if you want to influence that the easiest way and the hard way is you start contributing. And so you start building up rapport, you start building up credibility and that's usually not something you do overnight It's not like you can come and say Oh, I've been doing operating systems for 30 years. I'm a distinguished engineer and now I'm telling you this is how you need to do it. You start by contributing code. You start by being part of the conversations. By critiquing, constructively hopefully, other people's contributions. usually in a certain area. And then people start getting to know your name. And they start trusting you. And I've, I'm not a kernel engineer but there're a couple of open-source projects I've contributed since writing my PHD thesis And I'm still doing that usually on my weekends or evenings when I have a little time. And so there're people I've been working together for 15 years or more, who I've never met in person. And some I've met and then I realized Wait a minute, I know he's going to be at the conference and I don't know how old he is. He wrote about his children so that gives a certain or his young baby children so that may give an, an idea. But I don't know how old he is. I don't know what color of hair. What color of skin. But then you meet and because you have this relationship you actually, you know, you get together. And there is trust and once you have this trust on a personal level but also, at least as importantly or I would break both the same on a technical side. I trust your, your judgment. Then you start influencing. >> Is that what makes SUSE an open open-source company? >> Ya that's definitely one of the aspects where, when we want to we want to drive something. And I'll give you an example that's actually especially in SAP context this is really relevant is something we call live kernel patching. So you know you have this HANA system so it's lots of memories and you have all those security issues that keep popping up, now and then. And so one of the challenges is you want to apply the security update if you're an IT person but, when you do so, you need to, and it's a kernel thing, then you need to restart the server. Because other sub-systems like a web server you just restart the web server and you're down for one millisecond and nobody really notices unless you're CNN.com or whatever. But if you restart the kernel the whole machine reboots. And then you know you scan the memory and you have a HANA machine with 12 terabyte of memory or 16. So the start up takes and then why is HANA so fast? Because all it did is in memory. Now, doing that isn't, isn't fast. >> So that's really interesting as you look through, I love the integration between SAP and SUSE the in-memory, the continuous kernel, patching, the ability to integrate the two solutions. It's interesting, you guys have a partnership you have outside of SAP with these companies that not necessarily, from a licensing perspective the application is close-sourced. So there is a myth I think, in the industry that close-sourced software versus open-sourced software one is more secure, the other one's more stable Random religious arguments. What are we seeing in the... Wow, what are... How are customers embracing the SUSE relationship along with the SAP relationship. >> You know in a way (laughs) and that's a, nhat's a tricky statement to make but in a way at first approximations customers don't care whether it's open-sourced or proprietary? As a customer, I care that it works. And if I'm a SAP customer my (mumbles) workload needs to stay up. And so what I'm looking for is performance is security, is scalability, is availability, high availability. And so whatever platform gives that to me is the platform that I choose or in the case of HANA for, actually, SAP choose. So if you look at HANA, it's an interesting sample the only operating system it's available on the only platform it's available on is Linux. So SAP actually has done their research and they looked into it and said okay, we need certain characteristics what's... Where do we get the best solution? And it turns out Linux offered that. And so I don't see, when it comes to applications in particular our workloads I don't see it as much as being open-sourced or proprietary It's really what's the best technical solution and then there obviously is the question behind the question is how do you actually get to the best solution? And that's where the open-source model where it's not just one company doing that we have lots of engineers contributing to the kernel and other parts. But it's only one part. Many of our partners contribute Our competitors contribute And so in this open-source arena Things move. Just to improve, for example, the linux kernel and you get a better outcome than any proprietary vendor would actually be been able to deliver with a classic Unix system for example. >> You talked about, you know, customers not caring about the technology. It just needs to work. And it's kinda the same thing I think of when you look at a technology like ERP software that's largely invisible. Right? So is SUSE. And SAP wants to be one of the top ten most valuable global brands. And this morning during the keynote Bill McDermott said that they're now number 17. So they're getting up there to the big brands Like Apple, Coca Cola, Google who all have products that we can kinda see and touch. So when you're in a partnership with SAP how do you articulate the value of what you guys can deliver to help the customer not care about what's under the hood here but also ensure that they're actually able to deliver what they need to to their customers. What are some of those unique maybe customer examples that you have where customers with SAP on SUSE are transforming their businesses or their industries. >> Yeah so, much... Much of this transformation really comes from the SAP stack. What we contribute is really the stability of the platform. And so, Obviously, obviously at the technical level people do care do care actually about open-source because the one thing open-source provides you is the transparency. You can see an SAP engineer actually developing HANA for example. But also other things we do together They have been looking at the source code trying to understand what's going on and then optimize HANA. So when I said customers don't care that's in a first approximation because it needs to work. If it doesn't work, everything else doesn't matter. But if, so there are people who care about the technical more details. Often these days or usually when When it's like at the CLO level or an IT director level what they care more about is things like high-availability scenarios or blueprints. So it's not just one bit of technology or even how HANA runs on SUSE but they know a server is going to fail at one point. How do you-- >> When I ran a SAP environment one of the things that we did, we did a bake-off of Linux distributions for our appliances and these are appliances! In theory you get an appliance you turn it on and you install your SAP app and life goes on, no one should care about the underlying appliance but for us it was about the OS and the availability. You know, we were coming from a non-stop XP, HP, titanium shop and we were very happy with the non-stop capability but going to X86 there's a lot of thought that goes into making that non-stop Can you talk to the relationship between NetApp, SAP and, and SUSE from a community perspective because this is related to the conversation around open-source and making that happen and to your point, how do you care why would an IT director care about SUSE verses some other distribution. >> So, you know, if you look at the conversations I'm having often it's then looking at it at the solutions level So if you can point out that you have the blueprints or reference architectures or whatever you want to call it. You have customer success stories etc. Where you can say, look this is, in a scenario like this in your, in your market or in your in your vertical this is what you can do and this is how it'll be supported. So that your guys don't have to start from zero but it's actually really easy to go high availability or in fact we have a dedicated team that sits in the... That sits in the Linux lab with all the other partners you named and many more where SAP, and that's actually a really clever thing they did, creating this Linux lab and they also have a partner board where talking about communities, they have created this level of community where different vendors come together you know and you have hallway conversations and you want to do something say okay, how do you do this with the SUSE side how do you do this on the NetApp side and then at an engineering level and at a solution level you build something that actually works technically and then obviously the support relationship is really important. So that's, that's one of the challenges open-source had in the beginning compared to proprietary because if you look at some of the old full stack companies or established ones. They used to deliver hardware and then the operating system and then middleware or database and application top. So you had one phone number to call when there's a problem. And originally with open-source you know, you got this piece here and then you got the storage from from NetApp say and .. And who do you call? And then the finger pointing starts. So what's made open-source also successful is the establishment of, of really, processes, agreements and just practical workflows so that our companies work together and the customer, they can pick up the phone in fact, if you look at, let's say SAP applications what we have set up in this SAP environment is you can call SAP and that's the only phone number you ever need to call. And everything behind that happens fully transparently. So all the vendors get together. >> So, to sum up it sounds like what you're talking about that's really key for SUSE is openness, transparency, trust, collaboration. >> Yes, and at the open-source level at Linux kernel, compiler and the individual pro checks but essentially the same. Exactly what you explained. Also at the business level, what we do with partners and what we do with customers. >> And we hear that in the keynote this morning Bill McDermott really kinda was talking about trust as the new currency. So Gerald you're right in line with that. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me today. >> Thank you for having me. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atalanta, Georgia. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It is late in the day here, the reception is about to start, the drinks are flowing, but we are still interviewing guests, and we've got a great panel right now. Joining us is Scott Helmer. He is the Senior Vice President at the Aviation and Business Defense Unit at IFS, and Henry Canaday, who is a contributing editor at Aviation Week. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I wonder if you could walk our viewers a little bit through the idea, where does aviation and defense sit within the IFS business strategy? >> I'm happy to answer that. I think our new CEO of IFS, Darren Roos, has been very clear that there are three things that IFS will be best at. Number one, we will be best at mid-market ERP in those vertical markets that we care about. We will be number one in field service management. And we will be number one in maintenance management solutions in aviation and defense. So aviation and defense is one of the pillars on which IFS's strategy is currently based, and we have formed a global business unit inside of IFS that is specifically responsible, it's a 300 person strong team that is responsible for distributing a comprehensive portfolio of A and D solutions to the A and D market globally. >> What are the some of the biggest challenges that you're setting out to solve for your customers? >> Also a good question. We address the full range of management solution capability across A and D. So whether you're an operator in commercial or defense sector, or whether you're an inservice support provider, we provide solutions and support, all of your MRO capabilities, some of your performance-based logistics requirements, some of your supply chain requirements. Basically leveraging the core processes that IFS is differentiated around. Those being manufacturing, asset and service management, supply chain and project management. >> What's special about aviation and defense that's not been marketed or service delivery, which captures a lot of industry verticals, but the fact that you guys got carved out as a separate vertical, what are some of those unique challenges? >> What is chiefly unique about aviation and defense is the overall complexity in the marketplace. You're talking about very very complex capital intense of mobile assets, where managing the maintenance obligations in order to maintain the availability of the aircraft is under the scrutiny of compliance and is required to be done efficiently, without compromising safety. >> Not to mention the fact, your assets are flying all over the world, so they might not necessarily be able just to roll into the maintenance yard at the end of a bad day. >> And they're large and expensive, that's for sure. >> (laughs) Large and expensive. >> Henry, you've been covering the aviation industry for more than 20 years now. What do you see as the biggest trends, biggest concerns that a company like IFS is trying to grapple with right now, in terms of servicing its clients? >> Well the interesting thing about the airline industry is that it technically in many areas it's extremely advanced and very fast moving industry. In selling tickets, the industry has been going through a continual IT revolution for the last 20 years. Things like giving you notices about when your planes arrive and stuff like that. Very fast moving, changing all the time. But this is stuff, it's just money. There's no safety involved, so they can take chances, if they get it 99% right, they make enough money, they can solve the one percent errors. The problem with maintenance is it's messy, it's complex as Scott says. It's also safety critical. They can't screw it up one tenth of one percent of the time. They've been very, very cautious and very, very slow, and they look sluggish and stagnant on the maintenance side. But fortunately, now, especially the U.S. airlines are making some good money, so there's actually an opportunity for companies like IFS to come in here and really reform the maintenance program. >> We cover a lot of autonomous vehicle shows. Autonomous vehicles are coming. Obviously, a big element of autonomous vehicles will ultimately be safety. One of the things that comes up over and over again, if you look at the number of accidents, the fatalities that happen on our streets, compared to what happens in aviation, if a week on the streets happened at a week in the aviation industry, the planes would be shut down. >> Scott: There'd be no aviation. >> The threshold that you guys have to achieve in terms of safety is second to none. I don't know if there's anything even close, especially in terms of volume of people, and then, oh by the way, everyone globally is getting richer, so the amount of passenger flow. I don't know if you can speak to that in terms of the growth of passenger miles, I imagine is the metric, continues to explode. >> You've had basically 18 straight years without a fatal crash by a major American airline. That's unheard of, that's unheard of. We used to have one crash a year up till around 2000. Every time somebody annoys me with customer service in an airline, I think of this, they're doing the important stuff right, so I don't care. (laughs) >> Very well. >> Right. >> And, then do you think the efficiency, right? At least here domestically, I always think of Southwest, 'cause they were the first ones that really had fast turns, and they raced to the gate, they raced back out of the gate, in terms of really trying to get the maximum efficiency out of those assets. The pressure there, in translating to the other airlines is pretty significant to make sure you're really getting a high ROI. >> That's absolutely right. Again one of the levels of complexity that we were discussing. Certainly airlines are being forced to finally introduce some change into their maintenance operations, as the increasingly complex assets are part of the re-fleeting, as that faster traffic continues to grow. It's about both achieving greater efficiency in maintenance operations, not only without compromising safety, but ensuring the availability of that asset. Because revenue dollars still matter greatly, and those assets are your revenue producing assets that an airline has. >> Can you describe your approach in terms of of how you work together with your clients, the airlines, in terms of developing new products and new features. >> One of the unique characteristics about aviation and defense is not only the size of the client, but the length and duration of the relationships. So, we have a long and rich history, both at IFS and through the acquired MXI technologies, of working with our partners in their programs over the very long term. As much as we have domain expertise and a sizable team of domain experts inside of our business, we're able to recognize our partners that are visionaries in the industry, and we have established multiple levels of collaboration to involve them in the shaping of solution capability to support their businesses going forward. We are just launching today two new planning applications that were not only being launched with American Airlines and LATAM Airlines respectively, but were co-developed with subject matter experts at each. So they're tremendously valuable inputs into shaping our vision of what solutions are going to best drive business value for our customers over a very long relationship horizon. >> So, what have you unpack at MXI acquisition, what did that give you that you didn't have before and what's the total solution now? >> Certainly, I joined IFS through the MXI acquisition. I was previously it's Chief Operating Officer. MXI was focused on best of breed MRO capability for both defense and service port providers, as well as commercial airlines. In combining with IFS, that had a rich history in A and D, we now have the most comprehensive solution portfolio available on the market today. We are the only vendor that can provide best of breed capability, integrated into an end to end enterprise landscape, and we've got the team of subject matter experts or domain experts that are capable of delivering that value, not just the product, but the solution to the customers across all the segments of A and D. >> Just to be clear, your defense is more than aviation. I saw a military truck over on the expo hall, so it's assets beyond just airplanes when it comes to defense. >> Correct, we support on the defense side of things. We support multiple platforms, whether they're fighter jets, whether they're cargo carriers, whether they tanks, whether they're ships, we support for the operators, the offset optimization, performance based logistics, security, et cetera. For the in-service port providers, we similarly support supply chain requirements, MRO requirements, et cetera. >> Henry, as you look forward, you've been covering this space for a while, what are some big, new things coming down the road in the aviation industry that we should be looking for, 'cause we haven't seen a lot of big things from the outside looking in. I guess we had the next generation fighter planes, and then we had obviously the A380 and the 787 on the commercial side. What's new and coming that you're excited about? >> Well, technology changes slowly in commercial aviation, because of the safety aspect. The big, new things are the new aircraft, the 787 and the A350. They are really new generation aircraft, lot more composites, plastics if you will. They're using that instead of aluminum. The other things that's happening is additive manufacturing, this whole printing parts. That's real big, and I've been telling everybody the new Boeing 787 has two printed parts, one made by GE, $120 billion a year. The other made by a company called Norsk Titanium, with 140 people coming out of Norway, which is not exactly the center of innovation in aerospace programs. >> Jeff: With a printed part, like a 3D printed part? >> Yeah a printed part. Those are the two big changes in the aircraft. I mean, customers aren't going to see it, but these planes are now made largely of plastics and the metal parts are going to be more and more printed. Much more efficient way, lighter aircraft, less fuel use, more efficient, less environmental effects, etc. That's a big deal. More important than a huge airplane. >> Right, well I can imagine, we hear about the impacts of 3D printing. I haven't really seen it yet, but this vision where your ability to print parts on demand will have significant impacts on supply chains and inventory and huge, huge impacts down the road. >> And the airline industry is the most demanding. They've go to go through really massive proofs of concept and proof of materials, and it's starting to happen. >> Henry, what would you say is the most important area that IFS should focus on. If they can solve one problem in the airline industry, what do you think it should be? >> Availability would be one. Just aircraft availability, that's what. The airlines are concerned about two things. Dollar cost per flight hour to maintain and what they call a technical dispatch reliability. They want to get that plane launched 99.99% of the time. Get rid of the unpredictive maintenance problems. Schedule everything, make it quick, I want to get the planes off on time. >> It's amazing that unscheduled maintenance, regardless of industry, still continues to be such a bug-a-boo to productivity and profitability. It's one of these things that just has huge impact. >> I would completely agree with Henry. I think asset availability is the number one focus for commercial operators. Our focus has certainly been around trying to remove the impacts of unscheduled maintenance. One of the applications that we launched today allows you to react very, very quickly to unplanned or unscheduled maintenance events, and to do some what-if modeling, so that you can implement the best plan for your fleet, in order to maximize the availability of that asset. Not just in terms of bolstering or producing a better plan. We're attempting to do that even with line planning, where we're adjusting the traditional planning perimeters away from what must be done to what should be done in order to maximize the availability of that aircraft. Of course, as Henry said, everybody's focused on faster, tighter turnaround times. All of our software is designed to try and drive tighter turnaround times and greater efficiency. >> What percentage is scheduled versus predictive versus prescriptive? Maintenance. >> I think it varies by airline. The great majority of maintenance is scheduled, I mean, there's no doubt about that. They put these aircraft down for a week or a month. It's a massive amount of money. It's not the amount of maintenance, it's when unscheduled maintenance happens, it really throws things off. It may only be one or two percent of the maintenance tasks are unscheduled, but that's what throws the aircraft off the schedule. That's what leaves passengers sitting in the departure lounges, ticked off. Not getting there till the next day or the next week, whenever, so it's a very, very small percentage, these unscheduled maintenance events, but it's crucial to the airlines' economics. >> Exactly. Crucial to our itineraries, as well, as the economics. Exactly. >> Making sure that the airlines continue to do what they do best, which is get us from place A to place B. >> Precisely. Well, Scott Henry, thank you so much, it's been a really fun conversation. >> I enjoyed being here, thank you. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> Thanks, Henry. >> Thanks. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference just after this. (digital music)