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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Vice President, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO of Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, And Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy, Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. >> So we're not in person >> It's great to be here. >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet Zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called (Susie laughs) and automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as, well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is, there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds about you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was at Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had >> Susie: Yeah. >> The massive cloud surge and scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, because the businesses need to stay alive. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person. Now we're six months in, scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and, you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you've bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you (chuckles) >> Yeah What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenge that's such a huge deal? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board-level conversation. So all of a sudden, CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the Heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, "How's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity?" So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation and, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working, but now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. >> (giggles)Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time and the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner, Virtual, unfortunately, won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving as Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers, that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role? >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed. And we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We are always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities, such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get onboard with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out' how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session in the DevNet Zone. Learning's going on, sometimes linearly and non linearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested, but what other learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice they want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert-led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called Automation Bootcamp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular self-driven hands-on learning through the DevNet Fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, "I just want to use the technology. "I like to experiment and then go, you know, "read the instructions, read the manual, "do the deeper learning." And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways. and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. >> Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up this Accelerating Automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, I only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. >> Mandy: Yeah >> Can you share the summary real quick on Accelerating Automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create. Mandy, we'll start with you. >> Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, you know, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio, and up and down the stack and Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transforms teams, And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about Accelerating Automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >> Eric, take us home here, Accelerating Automation with DevNet and DevNet Create, a lot of developer action going on in Cloud Native right now, your thoughts. >> Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year, for Cisco Live and we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the Start Now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance, we've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >> Awesome. Thanks so much. >> I would >> Go ahead, Mandy. >> Can I add one more thing? >> Add one more thing. >> Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions and you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and content and speakers and the regions stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. >> Yeah, that's it. I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during, with this virtual DevNet, virtual DevNet create virtual theCUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll ride the wave with you guys. >> So thank you so much (Susie laughs) for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome Accelerating Automation and DevNet Create Looking forward to it, thank you. >> Thank you so much, >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Happy to be here. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content and men, we stay virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro) >> Controller: Okay John, Here we go, John. Here we go. John, we're coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President GM and also CTO at Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, and Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. So we're not in person. >> It's great to be here >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of Accelerating Automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called. And automation plays (Susie laughs) a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as ,well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that because the businesses need >> Absolutely. >> to stay alive. I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability is super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers and he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home. How many people are you know, connected and able to work and what's their productivity? So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what Accelerating Automation with DevNet means. >> (laughs) Well, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual, unfortunately won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is, as senior director of DevNet Certifications is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. And this is why we created the DevNet certification. Several years ago, our DevNet community, who's been some of those engineers who have been coming into that software and infrastructure side and meeting. They ask us to help create a more defined pathway to create resources, training, all the things they would need to take all those steps to go after those new jobs. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we were able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in-person where you're bound by the parameters of you know, how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability, they're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> Yeah, I mean, it's awesome, and first of all, you guys done a great job. I'm always impressed when we were at physical events in the DevNet Zone, just the learning, the outreach. Again, very open, collaborative, inclusive, and also, you know, you had one-on-one classes and talks to full blown advanced, (sneezes)Had to sneeze there >> Yeah, and that's the point. >> (laughs)That was coming out, got to cut that out. I love prerecords. >> Absolutely. >> That's never happened to me to live by the way. I've never sneezed live on a thousand--. (Eric laughs) >> You're allergic to me. >> We'll pick up. >> It happens. >> So Eric, so I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been a leader in that, but as you move up the stack, as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick. And we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, used some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's huge and you know, you brought up this sharing concept. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is you've got more sharing going on. >> Controller: John, let's pause right here. Let's pause right here. I'm going to try and bring Eric and Mandy and everybody out. And then just start right from here to bring Eric and Mandy back in and close up. Stand by Eric just hold tight. >> All right, hold on >> Controller: just for one moment. Hold tight, we got Mandy back >> Controller: Standby. Standby. Standby. Standby, standby, standby. Hold hold hold.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with the cube. This is a special week it's Grace Hopper week, and Grace Hopper is the best name in tech conferences. The celebration of women in computing, and we've been going there for years we're not there this year, but one of the themes that comes up over and over at Grace Hopper is women and girls need to see women in positions that they can envision themselves being in someday. That is a really important piece of the whole diversity conversation is can I see people that I can role model after and I just want to bring up something from a couple years back from 2016 when we were there, we were there with Mimi Valdez, Christina Deoja and Dr. Jeanette Epps, Dr. Jeanette Epps is the astronaut on the right. They were there talking about "The Hidden Figures" movie. If you remember it came out 2016, it was about Katherine Johnson and all the black women working at NASA. They got no credit for doing all the math that basically keep all the astronauts safe and they made a terrific movie about it. And Janet is going up on the very first Blue Origin Space Mission Next year. This was announced a couple of months ago, so again, phenomenal leadership, black lady astronaut, going to go into space and really provide a face for a lot of young girls that want to get into that and its clearly a great STEM opportunity. So we're excited to have four terrific women today that well also are the leaders that the younger women can look up to and follow their career. So we're excited to have them so we're just going to go around. We got four terrific guests, our first one is Annabel Chang, She is the Head of State Policy and Government Regulations at Waymo. Annabel great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> from San Francisco >> Jeff: Awesome. Next up is Inamarie Johnson. She is the Chief People and Diversity Officer for Zendesk Inamarie, great to see you. Where are you calling in from today? >> Great to be here. I am calling in from Palos Verdes the state >> Jeff: awesome >> in Southern California. >> Jeff: Some of the benefits of a virtual sometimes we can, we couldn't do that without the power of the internet. And next up is Jennifer Cabalquinto she is the Chief Financial Officer of the Golden State Warriors. Jennifer, great to see you Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, I wish I was coming in from the Chase Center in San Francisco but I'm actually calling in from Santa Cruz California today. >> Jeff: Right, It's good to see you and you can surf a lot better down there. So that's probably not all bad. And finally to round out our panelists, Kate Hogan, she is the COO of North America for Accenture. Kate, great to see you as well. Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, it's good to see you too. I am coming in from the office actually in San Jose. >> Jeff: From the office in San Jose. All right, So let's get into it . You guys are all very senior, you've been doing this for a long time. We're in a kind of a crazy period of time in terms of diversity with all the kind of social unrest that's happening. So let's talk about some of your first your journeys and I want to start with you Annabel. You're a lawyer you got into lawyering. You did lawyering with Diane Feinstein, kind of some politics, and also the city of San Francisco. And then you made this move over to tech. Talk about that decision and what went into that decision and how did you get into tech? 'cause we know part of the problem with diversity is a pipeline problem. You came over from the law side of the house. >> Yes, and to be honest politics and the law are pretty homogenous. So when I made the move to tech, it was still a lot of the same, but what I knew is that I could be an attorney anywhere from Omaha Nebraska to Miami Florida. But what I couldn't do was work for a disruptive company, potentially a unicorn. And I seized that opportunity and (indistinct) Lyft early on before Ride Hailing and Ride Sharing was even a thing. So it was an exciting opportunity. And I joined right at the exact moment that made myself really meaningful in the organization. And I'm hoping that I'm doing the same thing right now at Waymo. >> Great, Inamarie you've come from one of my favorite stories I like to talk about from the old school Clorox great product management. I always like to joke that Silicon Valley needs a pipeline back to Cincinnati and Proctor and Gamble to get good product managers out here. You were in the classic, right? You were there, you were at Honeywell Plantronics, and then you jumped over to tech. Tell us a little bit about that move. Cause I'm sure selling Clorox is a lot different than selling the terrific service that you guys provide at Zendesk. I'm always happy when I see Zendesk in my customer service return email, I know I'm going to get taken care of. >> Oh wow, that's great. We love customers like you., so thank you for that. My journey is you're right from a fortune 50 sort of more portfolio type company into tech. And I think one of the reasons is because when tech is starting out and that's what Zendesk was a few five years back or so very much an early stage growth company, two things are top of mind, one, how do we become more global? And how do we make sure that we can go up market and attract enterprise grade customers? And so my experience having only been in those types of companies was very interesting for a startup. And what was interesting for me is I got to live in a world where there were great growth targets and numbers, things I had never seen. And the agility, the speed, the head plus heart really resonated with my background. So super glad to be in tech, but you're right. It's a little different than a consumer products. >> Right, and then Jennifer, you're in a completely different world, right? So you worked for the Golden State Warriors, which everybody knows is an NBA team, but I don't know that everyone knows really how progressive the Warriors are beyond just basketball in terms of the new Chase Center, all the different events that you guys put on it. And really the leadership there has decided we really want to be an entertainment company of which the Golden State Warrior basketball team has a very, very important piece, you've come from the entertainment industry. So that's probably how they found you, but you're in the financial role. You've always been in the financial role, not traditionally thought about as a lot of women in terms of a proportion of total people in that. So tell us a little bit about your experience being in finance, in entertainment, and then making this kind of hop over to, I guess Uber entertainment. I don't know even how you would classify the warriors. >> Sports entertainment, live entertainment. Yeah, it's interesting when the Warriors opportunity came up, I naturally said well no, I don't have any sports background. And it's something that we women tend to do, right? We self edit and we want to check every box before we think that we're qualified. And the reality is my background is in entertainment and the Warriors were looking to build their own venue, which has been a very large construction project. I was the CFO at Universal Studios Hollywood. And what do we do there? We build large attractions, which are just large construction projects and we're in the entertainment business. And so that sort of B to C was a natural sort of transition for me going from where I was with Universal Studios over to the Warriors. I think a finance career is such a great career for women. And I think we're finding more and more women entering it. It is one that you sort of understand your hills and valleys, you know when you're going to be busy and so you can kind of schedule around that. I think it's really... it provides that you have a seat at the table. And so I think it's a career choice that I think is becoming more and more available to women certainly more now than it was when I first started. >> Yeah, It's interesting cause I think a lot of people think of women naturally in human resources roles. My wife was a head of human resources back in the day, or a lot of marketing, but not necessarily on the finance side. And then Kate go over to you. You're one of the rare birds you've been at Accenture  for over 20 years. So you must like airplanes and travel to stay there that long. But doing a little homework for this, I saw a really interesting piece of you talking about your boss challenging you to ask for more work, to ask for a new opportunity. And I thought that was really insightful that you, you picked up on that like Oh, I guess it's incumbent on me to ask for more, not necessarily wait for that to be given to me, it sounds like a really seminal moment in your career. >> It was important but before I tell you that story, because it was an important moment of my career and probably something that a lot of the women here on the panel here can relate to as well. You mentioned airplanes and it made me think of my dad. My father was in the air force and I remember him telling stories when I was little about his career change from the air force into a career in telecommunications. So technology for me growing up Jeff was, it was kind of part of the dinner table. I mean it was just a conversation that was constantly ongoing in our house. And I also, as a young girl, I loved playing video games. We had a Tandy computer down in the basement and I remember spending too many hours playing video games down there. And so for me my history and my really at a young age, my experience and curiosity around tech was there. And so maybe that's, what's fueling my inspiration to stay at Accenture for as long as I have. And you're right It's been two decades, which feels tremendous, but I've had the chance to work across a bunch of different industries, but you're right. I mean, during that time and I relate with what Jennifer said in terms of self editing, right? Women do this and I'm no exception, I did this. And I do remember I'm a mentor and a sponsor of mine who called me up when I'm kind of I was at a pivotal moment in my career and he said you know Kate, I've been waiting for you to call me and tell me you want this job. And I never even thought about it. I mean I just never thought that I'd be a candidate for the job and let alone somebody waiting for me to kind of make the phone call. I haven't made that mistake again, (laughing) but I like to believe I learned from it, but it was an important lesson. >> It's such a great lesson and women are often accused of being a little bit too passive and not necessarily looking out for in salary negotiations or looking for that promotion or kind of stepping up to take the crappy job because that's another thing we hear over and over from successful people is that some point in their career, they took that job that nobody else wanted. They took that challenge that really enabled them to take a different path and really a different Ascension. And I'm just curious if there's any stories on that or in terms of a leader or a mentor, whether it was in the career, somebody that you either knew or didn't know that was someone that you got kind of strength from kind of climbing through your own, kind of career progression. Will go to you first Annabel. >> I actually would love to talk about the salary negotiations piece because I have a group of friends about that we've been to meeting together once a month for the last six years now. And one of the things that we committed to being very transparent with each other about was salary negotiations and signing bonuses and all of the hard topics that you kind of don't want to talk about as a manager and the women that I'm in this group with span all types of different industries. And I've learned so much from them, from my different job transitions about understanding the signing bonus, understanding equity, which is totally foreign to me coming from law and politics. And that was one of the most impactful tools that I've ever had was a group of people that I could be open with talking about salary negotiations and talking about how to really manage equity. Those are totally foreign to me up until this group of women really connected me to these topics and gave me some of that expertise. So that is something I strongly encourage is that if you haven't openly talked about salary negotiations before you should begin to do so. >> It begs the question, how was the sensitivity between the person that was making a lot of money and the person that wasn't? And how did you kind of work through that as a group for the greater good of everyone? >> Yeah, I think what's really eye opening is that for example, We had friends who were friends who were on tech, we had friends who were actually the entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or law firm, associates, law firm partners, people in PR, so we understood that there was going to be differences within industry and frankly in scale, but it was understanding even the tools, whether I think the most interesting one would be signing bonus, right? Because up until a few years ago, recruiters could ask you what you made and how do you avoid that question? How do you anchor yourself to a lower salary range or avoid that happening? I didn't know this, I didn't know how to do that. And a couple of women that had been in more senior negotiations shared ways to make sure that I was pinning myself to a higher salary range that I wanted to be in. >> That's great. That's a great story and really important to like say pin. it's a lot of logistical details, right? You just need to learn the techniques like any other skill. Inamarie, I wonder if you've got a story to share here. >> Sure. I just want to say, I love the example that you just gave because it's something I'm super passionate about, which is transparency and trust. Then I think that we're building that every day into all of our people processes. So sure, talk about sign on bonuses, talk about pay parody because that is the landscape. But a quick story for me, I would say is all about stepping into uncertainty. And when I coach younger professionals of course women, I often talk about, don't be afraid to step into the role where all of the answers are not vetted down because at the end of the day, you can influence what those answers are. I still remember when Honeywell asked me to leave the comfort of California and to come to the East coast to New Jersey and bring my family. And I was doing well in my career. I didn't feel like I needed to do that, but I was willing after some coaching to step into that uncertainty. And it was one of the best pivotal moment in my career. I didn't always know who I was going to work with. I didn't know the challenges and scope I would take on, but those were some of the biggest learning experiences and opportunities and it made me a better executive. So that's always my coaching, like go where the answers aren't quite vetted down because you can influence that as a leader. >> That's great, I mean, Beth Comstock former vice chair at GE, one of her keynotes I saw had a great line, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that its a really good kind of message, especially in the time we're living in with accelerated change. But I'm curious, Inamarie was the person that got you to take that commitment. Would you consider that a sponsor, a mentor, was it a boss? Was it maybe somebody not at work, your spouse or a friend that said go for it. What kind of pushed you over the edge to take that? >> It's a great question. It was actually the boss I was going to work for. He was the CHRO, and he said something that was so important to me that I've often said it to others. And he said trust me, he's like I know you don't have all the answers, I know we don't have this role all figured out, I know you're going to move your family, but if you trust me, there is a ton of learning on the other side of this. And sometimes that's the best thing a boss can do is say we will go on this journey together. I will help you figure it out. So it was a boss, but I think it was that trust and that willingness for him to stand and go alongside of me that made me pick up my family and be willing to move across the country. And we stayed five years and really, I am not the same executive because of that experience. >> Right, that's a great story, Jennifer, I want to go to you, you work for two owners that are so progressive and I remember when Joe Lacob came on the floor a few years back and was booed aggressively coming into a franchise that hadn't seen success in a very long time, making really aggressive moves in terms of personnel, both at the coaches and the players level, the GM level. But he had a vision and he stuck to it. And the net net was tremendous success. I wonder if you can share any of the stories, for you coming into that organization and being able to feel kind of that level of potential success and really kind of the vision and also really a focus on execution to make the vision real cause vision without execution doesn't really mean much. If you could share some stories of working for somebody like Joe Lacob, who's so visionary but also executes so very, very effectively. >> Yeah, Joe is, well I have the honor of working for Joe, for Rick Welts to who's our president. Who's living legend with the NBA with Peter Guber. Our leadership at the Warriors are truly visionary and they set audacious targets. And I would say from a story the most recent is, right now what we're living through today. And I will say Joe will not accept that we are not having games with fans. I agree he is so committed to trying to solve for this and he has really put the organization sort of on his back cause we're all like well, what do we do? And he has just refused to settle and is looking down every path as to how do we ensure the safety of our fans, the safety of our players, but how do we get back to live entertainment? And this is like a daily mantra and now the entire organization is so focused on this and it is because of his vision. And I think you need leaders like that who can set audacious goals, who can think beyond what's happening today and really energize the entire organization. And that's really what he's done. And when I talked to my peers and other teams in there they're talking about trying to close out their season or do these things. And they're like well, we're talking about, how do we open the building? And we're going to have fans, we're going to do this. And they look at me and they're like, what are you talking about? And I said, well we are so fortunate. We have leadership that just is not going to settle. Like they are just always looking to get out of whatever it is that's happening and fix it. So Joe is so committed His background, he's an epidemiologist major I think. Can you imagine how unique a background that is and how timely. And so his knowledge of just around the pandemic and how the virus is spread. And I mean it's phenomenal to watch him work and leverage sort of his business acumen, his science acumen and really think through how do we solve this. Its amazing. >> The other thing thing that you had said before is that you basically intentionally told people that they need to rethink their jobs, right? You didn't necessarily want to give them permission to get you told them we need to rethink their jobs. And it's a really interesting approach when the main business is just not happening, right? There's just no people coming through the door and paying for tickets and buying beers and hotdogs. It's a really interesting talk. And I'm curious, kind of what was the reception from the people like hey, you're the boss, you just figure it out or were they like hey, this is terrific that he pressed me to come up with some good ideas. >> Yeah, I think when all of this happened, we were resolved to make sure that our workforce is safe and that they had the tools that they needed to get through their day. But then we really challenged them with re imagining what the next normal is. Because when we come out of this, we want to be ahead of everybody else. And that comes again from the vision that Joe set, that we're going to use this time to make ourselves better internally because we have the time. I mean, we had been racing towards opening Chase Center and not having time to pause. Now let's use this time to really rethink how we're doing business. What can we do better? And I think it's really reinvigorated teams to really think and innovate in their own areas because you can innovate anything, right?. We're innovating how you pay payables, we're all innovating, we're rethinking the fan experience and queuing and lines and all of these things because now we have the time that it's really something that top down we want to come out of this stronger. >> Right, that's great. Kate I'll go to you, Julie Sweet, I'm a big fan of Julie Sweet. we went to the same school so go go Claremont. But she's been super aggressive lately on a lot of these things, there was a get to... I think it's called Getting to 50 50 by 25 initiative, a formal initiative with very specific goals and objectives. And then there was a recent thing in terms of doing some stuff in New York with retraining. And then as you said, military being close to your heart, a real specific military recruiting process, that's formal and in place. And when you see that type of leadership and formal programs put in place not just words, really encouraging, really inspirational, and that's how you actually get stuff done as you get even the consulting businesses, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. >> Yeah Jeff, you're exactly right. And as Jennifer was talking, Julie is exactly who I was thinking about in my mind as well, because I think it takes strong leadership and courage to set bold bold goals, right? And you talked about a few of those bold goals and Julie has certainly been at the forefront of that. One of the goals we set in 2018 actually was as you said to achieve essentially a gender balance workforce. So 50% men, 50% women by 2025, I mean, that's ambitious for any company, but for us at the time we were 400,000 people. They were 500, 6,000 globally. So when you set a goal like that, it's a bold goal and it's a bold vision. And we have over 40% today, We're well on our path to get to 50%, I think by 2025. And I was really proud to share that goal in front of a group of 200 clients the day that it came out, it's a proud moment. And I think it takes leaders like Julie and many others by the way that are also setting bold goals, not just in my company to turn the dial here on gender equality in the workforce, but it's not just about gender equality. You mentioned something I think it's probably at as, or more important right now. And that's the fact that at least our leadership has taken a Stand, a pretty bold stand against social injustice and racism, >> Right which is... >> And so through that we've made some very transparent goals in North America in terms of the recruitment and retention of our black African American, Hispanic American, Latinex communities. We've set a goal to increase those populations in our workforce by 60% by 2025. And we're requiring mandatory training for all of our people to be able to identify and speak up against racism. Again, it takes courage and it takes a voice. And I think it takes setting bold goals to make a change and these are changes we're committed to. >> Right, that's terrific. I mean, we started the conversation with Grace Hopper, they put out an index for companies that don't have their own kind of internal measure to do surveys again so you can get kind of longitudinal studies over time and see how you're improving Inamarie, I want to go to you on the social justice thing. I mean, you've talked a lot about values and culture. It's a huge part of what you say. And I think that the quote that you use, if I can steal it is " no culture eats strategy for breakfast" and with the social injustice. I mean, you came out with special values just about what Zendesk is doing on social injustice. And I thought I was actually looking up just your regular core mission and value statement. And this is what came up on my Google search. So I wanted to A, you published this in a blog in June, taking a really proactive stand. And I think you mentioned something before that, but then you're kind of stuck in this role as a mind reader. I wonder if you can share a little bit of your thoughts of taking a proactive stand and what Zendesk is doing both you personally, as well as a company in supporting this. And then what did you say as a binder Cause I think these are difficult kind of uncharted waters on one hand, on the other hand, a lot of people say, hello, this has been going on forever. You guys are just now seeing cellphone footage of madness. >> Yeah Wow, there's a lot in there. Let me go to the mind reader comments, cause people are probably like, what is that about? My point was last December, November timing. I've been the Chief People Officer for about two years And I decided that it really was time with support from my CEO that Zendesk have a Chief Diversity Officer sitting in at the top of the company, really putting a face to a lot of the efforts we were doing. And so the mind reader part comes in little did I know how important that stance would become, in the may June Timing? So I joked that, it almost felt like I could have been a mind reader, but as to what have we done, a couple of things I would call out that I think are really aligned with who we are as a company because our culture is highly threaded with the concept of empathy it's been there from our beginning. We have always tried to be a company that walks in the shoes of our customers. So in may with the death of George Floyd and the world kind of snapping and all of the racial injustice, what we said is we wanted to not stay silent. And so most of my postings and points of view were that as a company, we would take a stand both internally and externally and we would also partner with other companies and organizations that are doing the big work. And I think that is the humble part of it, we can't do it all at Zendesk, we can't write all the wrongs, but we can be in partnership and service with other organizations. So we used funding and we supported those organizations and partnerships. The other thing that I would say we did that was super important along that empathy is that we posted space for our employees to come together and talk about the hurt and the pain and the experiences that were going on during those times and we called those empathy circles. And what I loved is initially, it was through our mosaic community, which is what we call our Brown and black and persons of color employee resource group. But it grew into something bigger. We ended up doing five of these empathy circles around the globe and as leadership, what we were there to do is to listen and stand as an ally and support. And the stories were life changing. And the stories really talked about a number of injustice and racism aspects that are happening around the world. And so we are committed to that journey, we will continue to support our employees, we will continue to partner and we're doing a number of the things that have been mentioned. But those empathy circles, I think were definitely a turning point for us as an organization. >> That's great, and people need it right? They need a place to talk and they also need a place to listen if it's not their experience and to be empathetic, if you just have no data or no knowledge of something, you need to be educated So that is phenomenal. I want to go to you Jennifer. Cause obviously the NBA has been very, very progressive on this topic both as a league, and then of course the Warriors. We were joking before. I mean, I don't think Steph Curry has ever had a verbal misstep in the history of his time in the NBA, the guy so eloquent and so well-spoken, but I wonder if you can share kind of inside the inner circle in terms of the conversations, that the NBA enabled right. For everything from the jerseys and going out on marches and then also from the team level, how did that kind of come down and what's of the perception inside the building? >> Sure, obviously I'm so proud to be part of a league that is as progressive and has given voice and loud, all the teams, all the athletes to express how they feel, The Warriors have always been committed to creating a diverse and equitable workplace and being part of a diverse and equitable community. I mean that's something that we've always said, but I think the situation really allowed us, over the summer to come up with a real formal response, aligning ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in a really meaningful way, but also in a way that allows us to iterate because as you say, it's evolving and we're learning. So we created or discussed four pillars that we wanted to work around. And that was really around wallet, heart, beat, and then tongue or voice. And Wallet is really around putting our money where our mouth is, right? And supporting organizations and groups that aligned with the values that we were trying to move forward. Heart is around engaging our employees and our fan base really, right? And so during this time we actually launched our employee resource groups for the first time and really excited and energized about what that's doing for our workforce. This is about promoting real action, civic engagement, advocacy work in the community and what we've always been really focused in a community, but this really hones it around areas that we can all rally around, right? So registration and we're really focused on supporting the election day results in terms of like having our facilities open to all the electorate. So we're going to have our San Francisco arena be a ballot drop off, our Oakland facilities is a polling site, Santa Cruz site is also a polling location, So really promoting sort of that civic engagement and causing people to really take action. heart is all around being inclusive and developing that culture that we think is really reflective of the community. And voice is really amplifying and celebrating one, the ideas, the (indistinct) want to put forth in the community, but really understanding everybody's culture and really just providing and using the platform really to provide a basis in which as our players, like Steph Curry and the rest want to share their own experiences. we have a platform that can't be matched by any pedigree, right? I mean, it's the Warriors. So I think really getting focused and rallying around these pillars, and then we can iterate and continue to grow as we define the things that we want to get involved in. >> That's terrific. So I have like pages and pages and pages of notes and could probably do this for hours and hours, but unfortunately we don't have that much time we have to wrap. So what I want to do is give you each of you the last word again as we know from this problem, right? It's not necessarily a pipeline problem, it's really a retention problem. We hear that all the time from Girls in Code and Girls in Tech. So what I'd like you to do just to wrap is just a couple of two or three sentences to a 25 year old, a young woman sitting across from you having coffee socially distanced about what you would tell her early in the career, not in college but kind of early on, what would the be the two or three sentences that you would share with that person across the table and Annabel, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I will have to make a pitch for transportation. So in transportation only 15% of the workforce is made up of women. And so my advice would be that there are these fields, there are these opportunities where you can make a massive impact on the future of how people move or how they consume things or how they interact with the world around them. And my hope is that being at Waymo, with our self driving car technology, that we are going to change the world. And I am one of the initial people in this group to help make that happen. And one thing that I would add is women spend almost an hour a day, shuttling their kids around, and we will give you back that time one day with our self driving cars so that I'm a mom. And I know that that is going to be incredibly powerful on our daily lives. >> Jeff: That's great. Kate, I think I might know what you're already going to say, but well maybe you have something else you wanted to say too. >> I don't know, It'll be interesting. Like if I was sitting across the table from a 25 year old right now I would say a couple of things first I'd say look intentionally for a company that has an inclusive culture. Intentionally seek out the company that has an inclusive culture, because we know that companies that have inclusive cultures retain women in tech longer. And the companies that can build inclusive cultures will retain women in tech, double, double the amount that they are today in the next 10 years. That means we could put another 1.4 million women in tech and keep them in tech by 2030. So I'd really encourage them to look for that. I'd encouraged them to look for companies that have support network and reinforcements for their success, and to obviously find a Waymo car so that they can not have to worry where kids are on for an hour when you're parenting in a few years. >> Jeff: I love the intentional, it's such a great word. Inamarie, >> I'd like to imagine that I'm sitting across from a 25 year old woman of color. And what I would say is be authentically you and know that you belong in the organization that you are seeking and you were there because you have a unique perspective and a voice that needs to be heard. And don't try to be anything that you're not, be who you are and bring that voice and that perspective, because the company will be a better company, the management team will be a better management team, the workforce will be a better workforce when you belong, thrive and share that voice. >> I love that, I love that. That's why you're the Chief People Officer and not Human Resources Officer, cause people are not resources like steel and cars and this and that. All right, Jennifer, will go to you for the wrap. >> Oh my gosh, I can't follow that. But yes, I would say advocate for yourself and know your value. I think really understanding what you're worth and being willing to fight for that is critical. And I think it's something that women need to do more. >> Awesome, well again, I wish we could go all day, but I will let you get back to your very, very busy day jobs. Thank you for participating and sharing your insight. I think it's super helpful. And there and as we said at the beginning, there's no better example for young girls and young women than to see people like you in leadership roles and to hear your voices. So thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay thank you. >> Thank you >> All right, so that was our diversity panel. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did. I'm looking forward to chapter two. We'll get it scheduled as soon as we can. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, the COVID crisis continues. Luckily we've got the ability to interview guests from remote and so we're excited to have this next guest. There's a lot of activity going on around equality and gender diversity, Black Lives Matter, and it feels like it really does feel like there's kind of a step function in moving this along. And there's a lot of groups out there that are trying to take a very active role, and one of the things they're trying to do is help women get on more corporate board seats, more representation, and we're really excited to have our next guest. Who's really taking a slightly different approach, a new approach to this, and we're happy to be joined by Rita Scroggin. She is the founder of FirstBoard.io, and she's also the Practice Director, Executive Group at Triad Group. So Rita, great to see you. >> Thank you very much, Jeff, for having me, I'm super excited to be here and to share the story about FirstBoard.io, what we're doing and how hopefully that will change the world just a little bit. >> That's great. Well, the way that this came about is I was on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all the time, and all of a sudden this big picture hit my feed and a ton of familiar faces. I think that's what it is four by eight. And I see Abby Kearns, Dao Jensen, Eve Maler, Wendy Perilli, Jocelyn is in there Syamla in there. And I thought, wow, I know a bunch of these women, and I'm always happy to promote the women in theCUBE alumni. And I reached out and I think it was Wendy said, "Hey, this is... She said, "I'm a founding member of this thing called FirstBoard.io. And I (indistinct) and she said, we got to talk to Rita. So it was great to meet you. And this is a new organization. I think you said you started at the very beginning of this year. >> Yeah. >> Why? Let's get kind of to the origin story. >> Yeah. >> What gave you the idea? Why did you think that this was something that needed to be done? And what caused you to actually take the leap of faith and start FirstBoard? >> Yeah, very good question. So in the fall of 2019, I did an event in partnership with K&L Gates and it was about how to get on board, and it wasn't gender specific, but I invited a lot of women from my network, and through K&L Gates, there was a speaker on the panel, Cheryl Bolton, who is now a supporter of FirstBoard.io. And we spoke after the panel discussion, so I was the moderator, and she said, "Do you place people or women specifically, "on private company boards? I said, I do now let's have a conversation about that. So we talked some more and we kind of felt like there's really a need for companies to diversify their boards, particularly private tech companies. And so then I thought about more about the idea. I reached out to a few women in my network and I said, hey, I have this idea. I'm thinking about starting an initiative around this topic, would you be interested in being part of it? And a lot of the women who I reached out to said, I'd love the idea, I would love to get involved. So that was really the origin, then we met, we had a little sort of social get together in, I think it was early December in Palo Alto. And then we said, let's launch officially in January, which we did. So in January we had our first and only in-person meeting, the idea initially was that we would meet every quarter in person. So it would be very localized to Silicon Valley and then COVID happened and everything changed. And we are now meeting via Zoom every six to eight weeks. We have members who are in different locations, most of our members are on Silicon Valley, but we also have a member in New York, in Seattle, in Dallas, and I might forget a location, but we're a little bit more distributed right now. And so that is where we are today. >> So you've done it a little bit different. You've got this group of women, there's 32 women in that picture, the founding members. And so you're taking almost like a cohort approach, a group approach. Why that approach? What did you see that wanted you to go that way, versus doing individual searches for individual companies, looking for individual kind of board members. Why the group approach? What type of dynamic does that introduce? How do the women leverage one another inside of this structure? >> Yeah, that's a good question. That's really the idea. The idea is that we work together collaboratively and that we leverage each other's networks. We raise each other's platform. I might know 10 or 15 or whatever, decision makers let's say VCs, CEOs, but the next member might know an equal number or more or less. So what I was thinking is if we leverage each other's network, we exponentially grow our network and we exponentially grow our visibility. So our focus right now is to really raise the profile of FirstBoard.io and the profile of each member of the group. So it it's fundamentally different, 'cause we're working together, kind of almost like a company that can accelerate where if we have a success, it's everybody's success. Because it raises the profile of everybody else. >> Right. >> So that's the idea, which is different than a networking organization, where you are an unknown member. And we're trying to make this in a different way. >> Right, right. And is the goal, within all the women that have joined, the founding members for all of them to get on a board, I mean, is that all of them are >> That's the goal. qualified people to be on a proper board. >> Yeah, that is the goal, that's the idea, we may not accomplish that in the first round because this is a problem that's been going on for a long time, but we're getting close to our first board placement. So that's I think initial great success. And we're working on a number of initiatives right now to raise the profile. We're doing a video interview with all our supporters. We are creating a campaign, how to reach out to CEOs and VCs. So we're working on a number of things right now behind the background to really target our audience, and our audience is specific to the tech world. So we're focusing really on private tech companies and we're focusing on our decision makers within those organizations. So whether it's the investor, the private equity, growth equity, or venture capital community, or the CEO or other board members for that matter, who may be aware that there's an opening and we're trying to tap into those as well. >> Right, right. So you've mentioned Silicon Valley, VCs and private equity a couple of times. So is the focus more in kind of that ecosystem that we're familiar with here in Silicon Valley with more private, kind of private and growth opportunities, or are you also just fully looking for large, regular public companies as well? >> We wouldn't turn down a public company opportunity, but none of our members have been on a board so far. And I think it's probably more realistic that, the first board position might be at a private tech company where the operating experience is particularly valuable. So that's our primary focus in terms of reaching out of the old But if a public company would come our way and say, we absolutely would love to talk to some of your members, of course we wouldn't turn that down. >> Jeff: Right. >> But actively we are going after private tech companies, and they can be located anywhere, so it's not specific this to Silicon Valley, of course a lot of tech companies are clustered there or here, but it could also be company in New York, or Boston, or wherever, but the focus is really on tech versus a broader focus of any kind of company. >> Right, right. So when you're working with these women who've never been on a board, what do you find is kind of the biggest gap that they need to fill, whether that's a real gap or perceived gap in their either skillsets or experience or whatever, to kind of make the jump and get into one of these board seats. Is it in any particular skill, any particular kind of point of view, what are the types of things that you do as a group to help them be better received, I guess, for the opportunities? >> Yeah. What we don't do is we don't really a training program or prep here. There are other organizations who do that, I think we do a very, very good job. Some of our members are part of other organizations as well. So what we're thinking more is the company oftentimes has, in a certain growth stage, has a gap in some form. And in looking at board opportunities, I think it's important to identify where's that gap, maybe it's go to market, or maybe it is a certain technical expertise, and match them up with the experience of our founding members. So we don't have a program to prepare women, we're more focused on... Okay, we're assuming you're prepared, that might be various degrees, and we're just trying to match kind of the operating expertise to the gap on a fully independent board member at any given company. >> Right, right I think we talked before we turned on the cameras, the three things you said you focus on really is, is operational expertise, skill experience, as well as domain expertise. >> Yeah. >> And so you're really trying to kind of map against a gap that the company has against a skillset that one of the members has. >> Yeah. So far I've sort of facilitated three different board opportunities and two of them, what they had in common, that the company was looking for somebody who really had domain expertise with the audience they were looking at, and who understood the buyer, and who had deep expertise in what to market strategies, developing them. So that's one example, right. And the other company, the third one was looking for somebody who had connections in the space who really understood that particular domain. And so it all depends, and I think it also depends on what stage the company's in. And I think the further along the company is, the more it's about governance and regulations. And earlier on, it's really filling a certain gap on the leadership team. >> Right. >> In the private equity world is also very interesting to us because oftentimes there's a timeline and there are certain growth objectives the company wants to reach. And that's a great opportunity, I think, for FirstBoard to bring in a founding member with that particular operating expertise. >> Right, right. So I'm curious, that's a great segue into kind of the customer side, if you will, the people that are looking for board members. Have you seen over the last several months or years, I'll open it up, kind of a shift in terms of people a, just kind of accepting that there are going to be more women and people of color on the board, but also more of kind of an active search and a more kind of progressive goal to make sure that they do increase the diversity on their boards, whether that be for women or people of color or whatever, just to bring more diversity. Have you seen a shift in your customer base, in terms of they're really focused on prioritization on that? >> Well, I think it's certainly on people's mind and I think now more so than ever with the recent changes and sort of uprising of Black Lives Matter, but I wouldn't say that has really transferred over into real meaningful diversity on boards. I think we still have a long, long way to go, and there's an organization, Him For Her, and I think it was the Calyx Management Institute, they did a study last year and they found that privately, heavily funded companies, 60% of those don't have a single woman on the board. And I think women in general held about 7% of board seats at these companies. So I think there's still a long way to go, but I think it's very important that in the future, a larger proportion of the population is reflected in the boards. Right? So whether it's women, women of color, people of color, so everybody should be part of the leadership team on the board level and on the leadership level. And I think that has become certainly more of a topic, I think, especially for large companies. And I think startups are now recognizing that it's important for them too, especially if they want to be perceived as a company, which has fair and equal values. >> Right. Right. So given that kind of landscape, if you will, what are kind of the expectations that you have with this founding member group? And I presume there'll be other groups in the future once these people all find a great board seat and are doing their thing, kind of, is it a really tough road ahead? Do you see that it's really not that tough on maybe in the macro level, but on the micro level there are some real opportunities, how are you as a group of 32 founding members trying to take this Hill, if you will, against pretty tough odds actually. >> But I think we're going to take it one step at a time. We already did a press release, we have a website, we have some visibility on LinkedIn and we already have been able to curate three different board conversations. So I think step by step, I think we will become more visible. I think we will be more known. We will have more opportunities to introduce founding members, this current cohort and future cohorts. And through that, I think we will make progress. So I'm very optimistic that we can make a difference, that we can get more women on boards. And once the founding members have joined a board, the plan is to launch a group where basically we create a peer group, which will then mentor and support the next cohort. And we also have an amazing group of supporters and partners already. We have Steve Singh from Madrona Ventures. We have Rohini from NGP Capital, and we're always looking for more partners and supporters. I'm not going list everybody right now, but I'm very proud about that we have partners and supporters who bought into the mission and who are helping us accomplish the mission. So I feel very optimistic that we will be able to move the needle. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> It might be at slower pace, but it was still the making a difference. >> Right. Right. Well, the hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote is coming up here in a couple of weeks. Right. And that took a long time to get done, So this stuff it does not happen easily. It does not happen overnight. But I would think certainly too with the increasing number of women in VC roles, as partners, and are also getting on board seats that hopefully that the things are starting to fall in the right direction. And hopefully with each progressive placement is a little bit easier than the one before. So Rita it's great to meet you, everyone I talked to you about you is so excited about the work that you're doing and what you're doing with FirstBoard. >> Thank you. >> I want to give you kind of the last word before we sign off, how should people learn more? How can people support the cause? How should people get involved, so that they can move the needle. >> That's great. Thank you. Get in touch with us on, if you go to the website FirstBoard.io, there is a way to partner with us, there's a link to partner with us, there's a link if you are interested in joining the future cohort. Please contact me and I will respond. And we would love to talk to companies, who are thinking about diversifying their board, we would love to talk to VCs for whom this is important. So please get in touch, and we'll figure out how to change the world together. >> Right And, oh by the way, most studies show you get better business outcomes, right. With diversity of opinion, diversity of points of view. So it's not only the right thing to do, it's also very good business. >> And I think the next decade we are ready for change. I think the society, I think is ready for change. And I think how companies run and are operated, I think people are ready for a change too. So I think the timing is really, really right. And I think we can make it happen. >> Great. Well, Rita, thank you again for taking a few minutes >> Thank you >> and telling your story and joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It was pressure of Jeff and I look forward to talk again. >> Yeah. Maybe in person after we get through all this COVID madness. >> Maybe in person, yeah. >> All right. Well, thanks again, Rita. >> Rita: Thank you very much. >> All right She's Rita, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services public sector, partner awards program. It's a celebration of AWS, public sectors, partners and their end user customers, where there's been innovation. And we're pleased to have on the show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI, and ML artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial3D is the newest partner and the end user is Belfast hospital. We got Roger Johnson, the CEO of Axial3D, and Dr. Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon, at Belfast hospital, who has been doing amazing things, not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during COVID, making things happen, by solving the problem of the surgical gap and the number of surgeries that you're doing. Really high performance saving lives, congratulations. First of all, congratulations Roger and Dr.Tim Brown, thanks for joining me. >> We're pleasure. >> Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr. Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work, that you're doing. Before we get, into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap, between the number of surgeries, that could take place with COVID. Tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to explain. >> Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible roller coaster, for the last three months. And pretty much all of the transplant programs, across the world who have been affected, by COVID have shut down. But with some pretty innovative and real leadership and team working advances, we've managed to open a program up again and in Belfast, we have about 50 deceased donor transplants a year. Over the last three months, we've just done 90 kidney transplants and pretty much we've cleared, the whole waiting list in Northern Ireland pretty much, for people waiting for a kidney transplant in this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks. But really is a testament to the critical care community, the people that work in intensive care, as to how much they support organ donation. And of course, our donors who have given so selflessly, at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors, and to the amazing amount of people, who have been involved in the teamwork and Belfast at this time. >> That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause for a minute just capture, the number of orders of magnitude, you said it was six to 10 a year and you did nine zero, 90? >> Yeah, so we have done two years work in six weeks, all in the middle of the night as well. So it's been it's been a hard work, so you can see the screen (mumbles). I'm trying to catch up with a minute. But it's been really, really satisfying, and an incredible outcome for our patients. The legacy of this program, is going to last at Belfast for 40 years. >> Brown I want to say congratulations, I'll give you my CUBE award for not changing the world, but saving the world, one person at a time. 90 interviews in six weeks. That's amazing. That's like clearing the waiting list. You're really changing lives there, congratulations. >> That's great, thank you very much. >> Roger, what a great partner and customer you have here. Talk about this award that you guys have, talk about the company. What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >> So I think our motivation for our company, is driven by our partners such as Tim, what they're doing transforms care, and even in these horrific situation are scenarios, we have the moment with COVID think you're hearing the start of an amazing story. Our job is to give surgeons like Tim, the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries. For the last 20 years, surgeons have relied largely on 2D imaging, so CT and MRI scans for being able to plan their surgeries, when in fact modern technology, should apply them much greater insight, before they actually perform their surgery. So we've created a technology, that platforms on AWS that allows us, to turn those traditional, hard to understand 2D images, into micromillimeter precise models of the patient's exact anatomy. The value hopefully to amazing colleagues like Tim, is that instead of trying to interpret what a 2D image CT or MRI scan might mean, he can actually see for the first time before, he opens the patient up exactly what he's going, to find when he starts the surgery, So he can really start planning, and complete that planning before, the surgery actually takes place. So hopefully, that allows a number of benefits result, whether that be shorter operations time, less surgical equipment needing to be brought, into the surgery, hopefully faster surgeries means less risk of infection, for patients means shorter time, means better outcomes the healthcare system but most importantly the patient. >> Awesome, Dr. Brown, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because, you know, the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about, in the tech industry for many years. Now with COVID we were just talking about the successes, you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace, workforces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the Axial3D help you, in your workflows? Are you getting more done? Can you can you give specifics, around the impact to your job? >> Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey to date. And we're still learning our way. It's a journey. And we're trying to work out exactly where this lies. And the fact that COVID has not come along, which has changed our working practices means that, we have to look for different solutions. And this I think, is a very handy solution, to where it's come into my practice over the last three years has been, in terms of complex renal surgery and oncological surgery, where we have for example, a tumor in a kidney where we think my goodness, we're I have to take this kidney out and throw it in the bin because it's very badly diseased. So the index case that we were involved with, was involving a chap who wanted, to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. And but thanks to the imaging that Axial was able, to produce for us, we were able to plan well choose well cut well, and as a result, we took the kidney if we were able to plan, a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself, we were able to repair the kidney and then transplant into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives in one particular case. And it's really grown from there. And we've now been involved, in five or six different real complex cases, where the imaging has changed the outcomes for patients, who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to achieve them, as they comes, I think, the AI interface and the AI solution that we've, we've developed in our partnership with Axial. As I said, it's a journey, and we're still finding our way. But the two insights that I've really got are. The first is that what we want to do is reduce variability. And not just in our, in our observers from the way that we interpret imaging. Traditionally, as Roger said, we look at 2D images, we're now able to sit and look at this imaging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in our head. We can look at them and discuss the different images, with our colleagues in real time. As well as that, which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients, in a partnership, before we've had a bit of an unfair advantage, that we're able to interpret these images. Because we've been trying to get 30 years of getting used, to doing this as professionals, and but the patients are presented, with some incredibly difficult decisions, to make by their own health. And with very little understanding, but my I can hand them a model of their own disease, they're able to understand. And that gives my patient the autonomy, to make the decisions about their own bodies back again, I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys to have, but potential decisions that they have, to make that will affect them for the rest of their lives. >> So the problem you were solving was one, of the technical problems, so you're trying to figure out manually get more insight, into the imaging and to the customer, or the patient in this case, customer the patient can make a better decision. Those are two problem statements. That seemed to be the big ones. Did I miss anything? >> Absolutely, no, he got one, yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, so Axial3D. You guys have a great solution. How did you get here? Tell us about your story. What's the big trajectory for you guys, in terms of this value proposition just seems to be amazing. And again highlights the advantages, how technology really solves a problem, but the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >> So the chance for us is there, or the moment that we have made the leap we have made, is to be able to automatically turn these 2D images into 3D models. So we take each of the slices off of a MRI, or CT scan, using AWS machine learning, we construct 3D, micromillimeter precise representation of an anatomy. That's only possible, first of all, we train the algorithms that we created on the Amazon platform, using over a million pre labeled CT scans. So our system automatically detects a pixel level. What is bone, what is ligament, what is an artery or blood vessel? And with the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with these million images, we've been able to, in effect train our system, to automatically detect the different parts of them, through this micro precise level, that hasn't been previously possible. And this technology, or the ability to create 3D models has existed for maybe 10, or 15 years. But it's needed experts like Tim to during effect, manually code, the 2D image at a pixel level and codify it so some software to turn that into 3D image, typically to either an RS of an expert like Tim to do, and the problem is Tim could only do one at a time. We estimate there are about three million, of these complex surgeries each year in the world, that need benefit greatly from this Enhanced Imaging. And we couldn't get three million months, he's selected that. So we have this process. Now on AWS platform, we have these models in parallel. And each model will take maybe a few minutes, to turn from the CT into the 3D representation. So through the power of the Amazon public cloud, we've been able to provide this powerful machine learning, automated solution that can actually scale, to the demand that we hope to see in the world. >> Dr. Tim Brown talked about the impact because I mean, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS always talks about this, when I interview him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting. This sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved, you essentially have collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >> Yeah, well, I don't know why everyone is doing it. That's the key question it really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all. And what I do is I push a couple of buttons, I input a bit of data and I send it off. And from my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets, it's probably as easy as sending an email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so from my perspective, I'm delighted to say that there's no heavy lifting at all. I get a patient's data, I send the data through to Axial who will then fool me and say, listen, Tim, what is it exactly that you want? There's a great personal service from Axial, and a couple of days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size, 3D representation model, which I can then take to plan and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. As Roger alluded to, in the past, it was hugely time consuming at work, that required a huge amount of training. But now basically, that's been replaced with pushing the button and these supercomputers taken all of my heavy lifting away. And I think this is one of the true representations, of high technology really, really advances, real world solutions. And my patients are the benefactors from this. >> Roger, Dr. Brown lay out the architecture, because first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend, that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this what's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side, say to Belfast as you deploy this, what's kind of involved, can you just take us through high level, I'm actually cloud scale is amazing. No doubt about it. We just talked about that but, what's involved in the architecture side, am I standing up on EC2 is there SageMaker involved me? What's the architecture and then deployment, What does that look like? >> Sure, so can you slide slight step back, one of the challenges when we as the med tech community try and introduce innovation into healthcare into hospitals, the hospitals IT infrastructure network definition, is often pretty locked down. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it into the hospital data system is a huge, often lengthy process that has, to jump through lots of hoops, in terms of a key network compliance, lots of different steps along the journey. And that often was for very good reasons, is a significant barrier, to the timely adoption of innovative technologies like ours. What platforming activity on AWS allies, were just another website. As Dr. Tim has said, his own though his only existence, with Axial3D in terms of interface, is dragging and dropping, the CT scan into our website, into our portal exists locally on the AWS instance, in whichever region we are working with, for example, in the US never leaves the US, we use the public cloud version. In US East, we take advantage of many features within AWS. But SageMaker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced, you know, several years ago, that is the lightest to produce this, this machine learning trained set of algorithms, that allow us to give this disruption. >> And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter is that as well. >> Absolutely, so our journey as Tim said, we're in a journey not only in terms of the technology, and you're very perceptive in terms of, yes, the more we train it, the more we train it, on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trauma types, the better our system gets, at recognizing the specific characteristics of those. But more importantly, this is about journey pipe. Having made this disruption we make the change and transformation of new standards of care pathways, Nazi innovation that we just enable. It's amazing surgical teams like Tim's, that make transformation. >> Dr. Brown now on your side you're sitting there I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes, they want to live. I don't want to throw away kidneys. I don't have to you just solve that problem. Now when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house as a practitioner deploying it? You got two jobs going on. You're kind of doing IT integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other trying to make things happen. You know, what I see this is not a lot of it here. What's the deployment look like? >> Deployment to me is I don't know why ever as doing it, it's such a straightforward, easy situation. And it's, it's remarkable, really. It's such a good solution. I think, part of any sort of change management program, and this, again, is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. That's challenging people's comfort zones. And anytime we need to change, we've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators, we've got early adopters, we've got late adopters. And I think what we're going to see over the next five to 10 years is people recognizing that this technology, is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say, I want a 3D model. And I want to see what this actually looks like. Because basically, that black and white picture you're showing me, doesn't make any sense to me. And I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have consistency of care and the lack of variation in our care across all services. But as well as that the patience, I think, are going to drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's, that's when it becomes an acceptable and normal thing for people, to do when they come into hospital. There'll be shown printout of their 3D printed model of their of their pathology, and that will be used to inform their decision making, for the treatment processes. And that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon and the patient. And that's, that's where we need to be in 21st century it's got to be a collaborative decision making process. And you talked about patient journeys, and, this is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this, that's being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients by correction and variability of health care provision. >> Its a great example, of an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning 3D images saving lives. Congratulations, Tim, Roger, it's phenomenal. Final question as we end this out. What's the scar tissue, pun intended? Well, what did you learn? What are some of the things that you could share with folks, as people look at this and say, this is an example of cloud scale and technology for good? What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks, take a minute to explain each. But Roger, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, sure. So I think a number of lessons for us on this journey. As Tim says, this is a we're at the start of a journey, of understanding the power of what 3D imaging can bring to providing a consistent or less variable care, but also, as Tim also alluded to, in terms of the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding, is one of the huge leap forwards, that we didn't set out initially thinking, we're going to be able to help educate and better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly became apparent. So that was a great lesson. I think that incredible levels of adoption, that we're starting to see across the US across Europe. Because it's so easy to adopt, compared to traditional IT methods. Surgeons just register for a website, and they can start transacting and getting service from us, as opposed to having to have these huge IT programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not the HR system. It's not a finance system, or maybe healthcare was comfortable in using public cloud. This is core hardcore clinical service, clinical diagnosis, clinical education, and the Amazon cloud is enabling that, just wouldn't be possible with this technology, (mumbles) the lessons we're learning are just (mumbles). >> Dr. Tim Brown and take us home and the segment, with your take, lessons learned and advice to others. >> I think the lesson learned are that doctors and healthcare providers are all extremely wary of change of new innovations. Because they feel that already, they're overburdened, and probably my colleagues in the States and across Europe feel like, we're a bit overburdened by all the things that we have to do. And this may potentially have been a more difficult or odds to your workload and actually fact, this makes your workload a lot easier and convincing people and getting people to understand that, this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue it removes the difficulties that have been put in place by organizations. And once people realize that, that's what there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practice and your patients understanding of your practice. And once that, once up, people really realize that, then the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that date because this is going to be the new normal in the next five to 10 years. >> While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplants successfully over six weeks, dwarfs the full year last year, really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger, thank thank you for coming on. Congratulations on being the award winner, a diverse partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for part of this AWS partner awards program. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector partner awards, program put on by the CUBE and AWS public sector partners. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Welcome to the >>Special Cube program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Partner Awards program. It's a celebration of AWS public sectors partners and their end user customers where there's been innovation and we're pleased to have on this show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI and ML Artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial three D is the partner, and the end user is Belfast Hospital. He got Roger Johnson, the CEO of actual three D, and Dr Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon at Belfast Hospital, who has been doing amazing things not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during Covic making things happen by solving the problem of the surgical gap in the number of surgeries that you're doing really high performance saving lives. Congratulations. First of all, congratulations. Roger. Dr Kimberly. Thanks for joining me. >>Re pleasure. >>Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work that you're doing before we get into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap between the number of surgeries that could take place with Cove. It, um, tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to >>explain. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible rollercoaster for the last three months, pretty much all of the transplant programs across the world who have been affected by Coupet of shut down but with some pretty innovative on the grill leadership team Working advances with managed to open a program up again. And and Belfast, we have a bytes and 50 to 50 disease donor transplants year over the last three months, with just a 90 90 kidney transplants. Pretty much we've cleared the whole waiting list in Northern Ireland, pretty much for people waiting for a kidney transplant at this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks, but it really is a testament to the critical care community. People that work in intensive care is the high marks, a support organ donation. Of course, our donors who have given so selflessly at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors into the amazing people who have been involved in the team. Mark belt faster this time. >>That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause from and just captured the number of order of magnitude. You said it was 6 to 10 year and you didn't 90 90. >>Yeah, so six weeks basically Teoh, two years work in six weeks old in the middle of the night as well. So it's been It's been hard of hard work, so you can see the sleeplessness. I'm trying to catch up with a minute, but it's been really, really satisfying. An incredible I come for patients and legacy of this of this, the program is gonna last about faster. 40 years. >>Well, I want to say congratulations. I'll give you my Cube Award for not changing the world but saving the world. One person at a time. 90 interviews and six weeks. That's amazing. That's like thinking clearing the waiting list. You really changing lives there. Congratulations. >>That's very kind of you. Thank you very much. >>Roger. Good. A great partner and customer. You have here. Talk about this award. You guys have talked about the company? What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >>Yes, So I think our motivation for our company is driven by our partners, such such as? In what they're doing transforms care And even in these horrific situation, our scenarios. We have the moment with Kobe. Think you're hearing the start of the amazing story our job is to give Surgeons liked him the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries For the last 20 years, surgeons of relied largely on two D imaging, so C, t and memory scans or for being able to plan their surgeries when it's murdered, technology should apply them much greater insight or they actually perform the surgery. So we've created a technology that platforms on AWS that allows us to turn those traditional hard to understand to the images into micro millimeter precise models off the patients exact anatomy. The value hopefully, two amazing colleagues like Tim is that instead of trying to interpret what a two D image CD or memory scan might mean he can actually see for the first time before he opens the patient up exactly what he's going to find when when he when he starts the surgery. So he immediately start to complete that planning before the surgery actually takes. So hopefully that analyze a number of benefits to results without the shorter operations. Find less surgical meeting we brought into the surgery. Hopefully, faster Surgeries names last risk of infection For patients being shorter Time means most >>awesome. Dr. Brian, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because you know the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about in the tech industry for many years now, with code we were just talking about. The success is you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace work, forces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the actual three D help you and your work flows? Are you getting more done? Can you give specifics around the impact to your job? >>Yeah, it's a bit It's been a fantastic journey to date. We're still learning away. It's a journey. We're trying to work out exactly where this lies in. The fact that Kubla does not come along, which has changed, or working practices, that means that we have to look for different solutions on this, I think, is very 100 solution to amend. My practice over the last three years has been in terms of complex and real surgery on oncological surgery, where we have, for example, a tumor and kidney where we think, my goodness, we're gonna have to take this kidney I and throw it in the bin because it's very badly disease. So the index case that we were involved with that was building a child who wanted to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. But thanks to the imaging that Excel was able to produce for us, we were able to plan Well, geez, well cut well and as a result of kidney, I really plan a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself. We really repair kidney and then transplant it into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives on one particular case on, and it's really grown from there on. We've been involved in five or six different, really complex cases where the imaging has changed the outcomes for our patients who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to. Chief insight comes, I think, the AI interface on the AI solution we've developed in our partnership with the Excel. As I said, it's a journey and we're still finding our way. But to insights that I've really got our the first is that what we want to do is reduce variability, not just in our in our observers, from the way that we interpret imaging tradition is what you're saying is, look a two D images. We're now able to sit and look at this, emerging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in your head, we can look at them and discuss the different images with our colleagues in real time, a zealous that which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients and a partnership. Before we had a bit of an unfair advantage that we're able to interpret these images because 20 or 30 years of getting used to doing this as professionals. But the patients are presented with some incredibly difficult decisions to make by their own health and with very little understanding that. But now I can handle the model of their own disease very easy to understand, and that gives my patient autonomy to make the decisions about their own bodies back again. And I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys have about potential decisions that they have to make that more effective for the rest of their lives. >>So the problem you're solving was one of the technical problem. So you're trying to figure out manually, get more insight into the the imaging and to the customer or the patient. This case customer, the patient. I can make a better decision. Those are two problems, statements that seem to be the big ones that I missed. Anything? >>Absolutely, absolutely. >>Okay, so actual three d you guys have a great solution? How >>did you >>get here? Tell us about your story. What's what's What's the big trajectory for you guys? In terms of the value proposition, it seems to be amazing and again highlights. The advantages of technology really solves the problem. But the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >>Yes, so the chance for us is there or the development that we have made. The lately, we admit, is to be able to automatically turn these two D images into three D models. So we take each of the slices off of memory or cities. Using AWS is machine learning. We construct three D macro millimeter precise representation of For me. That's only possible. First of all, we treat the algorithms that we created on Amazon platform using over a 1,000,000 pre labeled CDs. Consume our system automatically detect. Yeah, it's a level. What is bone? What is ligament? What is on our earlier vessel? With the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with with these 1,000,000 images we've been able to in effect, tree and our system automatically detect the parts of me with this micro service level that hasn't been previously possible. This technology, or the ability to create three D models, has existed for maybe 10 or 15 years, but it's it's needed. Experts like him who were, in effect manually code the two D image pixel level and could affect so some software and turn it into a three D image. Typically, too, it's in ours, often expert like them to do. And the problem is, Tim could only do one of the time. We estimate there about three million of these complex surgeries each year in the world that need open effort from greatly from this enhanced imaging. And we couldn't get 33 million under these, especially. And that. So we have this process no on the AWS platform, with dozens of these models in parallel, and each more will take maybe a few minutes to turn from the CD into the into the three D representation. So through the park off the Amazon Public cloud, we've been able to provide this this powerful machine learning automated solution that can actually scale toe man >>Dr Brian talk about the impact because, I mean Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, always talks about this. When I interviewed him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting this sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved. You essentially have a collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >>Yeah, well, I don't know why. Every minute. That's that's That's the key question. It really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all, and what I do is I push a couple buttons. I put a bit of data, and I send it off. From my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets is probably a ZTE sending email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so, from from my perspective, I'm delighted to say there's no heavy lifting until I get a patient's data. I send data through to excel, who will then fool me and say, Listen to what is it exactly that we want to have a personal service from actual on? A couple days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size three D representation model, will check and then take to plan on and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. A Z Roger alluded to in the past. It was hugely time consuming work that required a huge amount of training. But basically that's being replaced with a push of a button on. These supercomputers have taken all of my heavy lifting away on, and I think this is one of the true representation. Zoff technology really, really advances real world solutions and my patients are benefactors. From this >>Roger Dr Brown. Lay out the architecture because, first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this. What's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side? Say it to Belfast as you deploy this. What's kind of involved in you? Just take us through high level. I must be cloud scales. Amazing, No doubt about it. We just talked about that. But what's involved in the architecture side of my standing? A bunch PC two's Is there sage maker involvement? What's the architecture and then deployment? What does that look like? >>Sure, So again, a slight step back. One of the challenges when, when we is the MedTech community try and introduce innovation into health and hospitals that the hospitals i t. Infrastructure network definition is often very locked on. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it in the hospital data system. That is a huge, often lengthy process that has to be done through lots of hoops in terms off Hey, network a compliance. Lots of different steps along the journey and that often wants from a good reasons, is a significant barrier to the timely adoption off innovative technologies in the cars. What a what a platform a selfie on AWS allies were just another website, as Tennis said, is, uh, only that, though his only existence with actual three D in terms of the interface is dragging and dropping the CT scan into our website into a portal portal exists quickly on the AWS instance. In one of our region, we are working with a little in the US. Never leave the US We use the the public client version in US East. We take advantage of many features within AWS, but a sage maker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced know several years ago that was like juice this this machine learning trained set of algorithms that allow us to give this disruption. >>And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter. Or is that as well? >>Absolutely. So our journey is, As Tim said, we're on a journey not only in terms off the technology and you're very receptive. In terms of yes, the more we train it, the more we treated on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trouble types, the better our system gets recognizing the specific characteristics of those. More importantly, this is about a journey I having made this disruption, we make the change and transformation off new standards of care pathways. That's the innovation that we just enable. It's amazing. Surgical teams like hymns. Let me transformation >>Dr Brown on your side. You're sitting there. I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes. They want to live. I don't want to throw away kitty, so I don't have to you to solve that problem that when when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house is a practitioner. Deploying it. You've got you've got two jobs going. You're kind of doing I t integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other, trying to make things happen. You know what I see? This is not a lot of I t here. What's the deployment? Looks like. >>Yeah, deployment means I don't know. Why ever announces doing that. Such a straightforward, easy situation. It's that's remarkable. Ready? It's such a good solution, and I think part of any sort of change management program, and this again is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. It's challenging people's comfort zones on any time we need to do change. We've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators go early, adopters will lead the doctors, and I think what we're going to see over the next 5 to 10 years is people are recognizing that this technology is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say I'm on the three D model and I want to see what this actually looks like because basically not black and white picture you're showing me doesn't make any sense to me and I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have a consistency of care on the lack of variation in our care across across old old services. But as well is that patients? I think we're gonna drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's that's when it becomes an acceptable normal thing for people to do. When they come in the hospital, they'll be sure print tight off their three d printed like moral off their pathology. I'm not a huge demand for their decision making for treatment processes, and that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon on the patient. That's that's where we need to be in the 21st century. It's it's going to be a collaborative decision making process. You talked about the pressures, journeys and this This is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients buying a correction and variability of healthcare provision. >>That's a great example is an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Three D images saving lives Congratulations, Tim Rogers. Phenomenal Final question As we end this out, what's the scar tissue pun intended? You know, What did you learn? What was some of the things that you could share with folks as people look at this and say This is an example of cloud scale and the technology for good. What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks? Take a minute to explain the split. Roger. We'll start with you. >>Yeah, sure. So I think a number off lessons for us on this journey Assistances, This is Ah, we're at the start of a journey of understanding the power off the what three d imaging can bring just to providing a consistent use variable care, but also as a stem also alluded to in terms of off the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding is one of the huge leap forwards that way. Didn't set out initially thinking we're going to be able to help educate on better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly part. So that was a great lesson. I think there is incredible levels of adoption that we're starting to see across the US across Europe because it's so easy to adopt. Compared to traditional methods, surgeons registered for Canadian start transacting and instead of us almost as opposed to having to have these huge I t programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not me. HR system. It's not a finance system. Or maybe a healthcare was comfortable. And using public like this is core hard core clinical services, clinical diagnosis. Clinical education on the Amazon cloud is enabling that it just wouldn't be possible with this technology we started. Actually, the lessons were learning or just just >>Dr Tim Brown and take us home and the segment with your take lessons learned and advice to others. >>I think the lessons learned are the doctors and health care providers are all extremely wary off change of new innovations because they feel that already they're overburdened. Probably my colleagues in the states and across Europe perfectly like they were a bit over, burdened by all the things that we have to do, and this may potentially have been more difficult or wants to your workloads. And actually, let's make your workload along each year convincing people and getting people to understand that this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue, removes the difficulties that have been put in place by by organizations on once. People realize that, that's what that there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practices, your patients understanding of your practice, and we'll stop so people really realize that the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that day because this this is going to be the new normal in the next 5 to 10 years. >>While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplant successfully over six weeks dwarfs the full year, last year really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger think Thank you for coming on Corrections on being the award winner. Eight of his partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for this 80 s partner awards program. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay, I'm John Furrier. We're covering the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program put on by the Cube and AWS Public Sector Partners. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Instructor: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Over welcome to the special CUBE program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services public sector, partner awards program. It's a celebration of AWS, public sectors, partners and their end user customers, where there's been innovation. And we're pleased to have on the show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI, and ML artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial3D is the newest partner and the end user is Belfast hospital. We got Roger Johnson, the CEO of Axial3D, and Dr. Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon, at Belfast hospital, who has been doing amazing things, not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during COVID, making things happen, by solving the problem of the surgical gap and the number of surgeries that you're doing. Really high performance saving lives, congratulations. First of all, congratulations Roger and Dr.Tim Brown, thanks for joining me. >> We're pleasure. >> Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr. Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work, that you're doing. Before we get, into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap, between the number of surgeries, that could take place with COVID. Tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to explain. >> Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible roller coaster, for the last three months. And pretty much all of the transplant programs, across the world who have been affected, by COVID have shut down. But with some pretty innovative and real leadership and team working advances, we've managed to open a program up again and in Belfast, we have about 50 deceased donor transplants a year. Over the last three months, we've just done 90 kidney transplants and pretty much with with care, the whole wedding list in Northern Ireland pretty much, for people waiting for kidney transplant in this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks. But really is a testament to the critical care community, the people that work in intensive care, as to how much they support organ donation. And of course, our donors who have given so selflessly, at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors, and to the amazing amount of people, who have been involved in the team mark and Belfast at this time. >> That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause for a minute just capture, the number of orders of magnitude, you said it was six to 10 a year and you did nine zero, 90? >> Yeah, so we have done two years work in six weeks, all in the middle of the night as well. So it's been it's been a hard work, so you can see the screen (mumbles). I'm trying to catch up with a minute. But it's been really, really satisfying, and an incredible outcome for our patients. The legacy of this program, is going to last at Belfast for 40 years. >> Brown I want to say congratulations, I'll give you my CUBE award for not changing the world, but saving the world, one person at a time. 90 interviews in six weeks. That's amazing. That's like clearing the waiting list. You're really changing lives there, congratulations. >> That's great, thank you very much. >> Roger, what a great partner and customer you have here. Talk about this award that you guys have, talk about the company. What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >> So I think our motivation for our company, is driven by our partners such as Tim, what they're doing transforms care, and even in these horrific situation are scenarios, we have the moment with COVID think you're hearing the start of an amazing story. Our job is to give surgeons like Tim, the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries. For the last 20 years, surgeons have relied largely on 2D imaging, so CT and MRI scans for being able to plan their surgeries, when in fact modern technology, should apply them much greater insight, before they actually perform their surgery. So we've created a technology, that platforms on AWS that allows us, to turn those traditional, hard to understand 2D images, into micromillimeter precise models of the patient's exact anatomy. The value hopefully to amazing colleagues like Tim, is that instead of trying to interpret what a 2D image CT or MRI scan might mean, he can actually see for the first time before, he opens the patient up exactly what he's going, to find when he starts the surgery, So he can really start planning, and complete that planning before, the surgery actually takes place. So hopefully, that allows a number of benefits result, whether that be shorter operations time, less surgical equipment meeting we brought, into the surgery, hopefully faster. surgeries means less risk of infection, for patients means shorter time, means the healthcare system (mumbles). >> Awesome, Dr. Brown, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because, you know, the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about, in the tech industry for many years. Now with COVID we were just talking about the successes, you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace, workforces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the Axial3D help you, in your workflows? Are you getting more done? Can you can you give specifics, around the impact to your job? >> Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey to date. And we're still learning our way. It's a journey. And we're trying to work out exactly where this lies. And the fact that COVID has not come along, which has changed our working practices means that, we have to look for different solutions. And this I think, is a very handy solution, to where it's come into my practice over the last three years has been, in terms of complex renal surgery and oncological surgery, where we have for example, a tumor in a kidney where we think my goodness, we're I have to take this kidney out and throw it in the bin because it's very badly diseased. So the index case that we were involved with, was involving a chap who wanted, to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. And but thanks to the imaging that Axial was able, to produce for us, we were able to plan well choose well cut well, and as a result, we took the kidney if we were able to plan, a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself, we were able to repair the kidney and then transplant into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives in one particular case. And it's really grown from there. And we've now been involved, in five or six different real complex cases, where the imaging has changed the outcomes for patients, who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to achieve them, as they comes, I think, the AI interface and the AI solution that we've, we've developed in our partnership with Axial. As I said, it's a journey, and we're still finding our way. But the two insights that I've really got are. The first is that what we want to do is reduce variability. And not just in our, in our observers from the way that we interpret imaging. Traditionally, as Roger said, we look at 2D images, we're now able to sit and look at this imaging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in our head. We can look at them and discuss the different images, with our colleagues in real time. As well as that, which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients, in a partnership, before we've had a bit of an unfair advantage, that we're able to interpret these images. Because we've been trying to get 30 years of getting used, to doing this as professionals, and but the patients are presented, with some incredibly difficult decisions, to make by their own health. And with very little understanding, but my I can hand them a model of their own disease, they're able to understand. And that gives my patient the autonomy, to make the decisions about their own bodies back again, I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys to have, but potential decisions that they have, to make that will affect them for the rest of their lives. >> So the problem you were solving was one, of the technical problems, so you're trying to figure out manually get more insight, into the imaging and to the customer, or the patient in this case, customer the patient can make a better decision. Those are two problem statements. That seemed to be the big ones. Did I miss anything? >> Absolutely, no, he got one, yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, so Axial3D. You guys have a great solution. How did you get here? Tell us about your story. What's the big trajectory for you guys, in terms of this value proposition just seems to be amazing. And again highlights the advantages, how technology really solves a problem, but the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >> So the chance for us is there, or the moment that we have made the leap we have made, is to be able to automatically turn these 2D images into 3D models. So we take each of the slices off of a MRI, or CT scan, using AWS machine learning, we construct 3D, micromillimeter precise representation of an anatomy. That's only possible, first of all, we train the algorithms that we created on the Amazon platform, using over a million pre labeled CT scans. So our system automatically detects a pixel level. What is bone, what is ligament, what is an artery or blood vessel? And with the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with these million images, we've been able to, in effect train our system, to automatically detect the different parts of them, through this micro precise level, that hasn't been previously possible. And this technology, or the ability to create 3D models has existed for maybe 10, or 15 years. But it's needed experts like Tim to during effect, manually code, the 2D image at a pixel level and codify it so some software to turn that into 3D image, typically to either an RS of an expert like Tim to do, and the problem is Tim could only do one at a time. We estimate there are about three million, of these complex surgeries each year in the world, that need benefit greatly from this Enhanced Imaging. And we couldn't get three million months, he's selected that. So we have this process. Now on AWS platform, we have these models in parallel. And each model will take maybe a few minutes, to turn from the CT into the 3D representation. So through the power of the Amazon public cloud, we've been able to provide this powerful machine learning, automated solution that can actually scale, to the demand that we hope to see in the world. >> Dr. Tim Brown talked about the impact because I mean, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS always talks about this, when I interview him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting. This sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved, you essentially have collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >> Yeah, well, I don't know why everyone is doing it. That's the key question it really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all. And what I do is I push a couple of buttons, I input a bit of data and I send it off. And from my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets, it's probably as easy as sending an email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so from my perspective, I'm delighted to say that there's no heavy lifting at all. I get a patient's data, I send the data through to Axial who will then fool me and say, listen, Tim, what is it exactly that you want? There's a great personal service from Axial, and a couple of days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size, 3D representation model, which I can then take to plan and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. As Roger alluded to, in the past, it was hugely time consuming at work, that required a huge amount of training. But now basically, that's been replaced with pushing the button and these supercomputers taken all of my heavy lifting away. And I think this is one of the true representations, of high technology really, really advances, real world solutions. And my patients are the benefactors from this. >> Roger, Dr. Brown lay out the architecture, because first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend, that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this what's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side, say to Belfast as you deploy this, what's kind of involved, can you just take us through high level, I'm actually cloud scale is amazing. No doubt about it. We just talked about that but, what's involved in the architecture side, am I standing up on EC2 is there SageMaker involved me? What's the architecture and then deployment, What does that look like? >> Sure, so can you slide slight step back, one of the challenges when we as the med tech community try and introduce innovation into healthcare into hospitals, the hospitals IT infrastructure network definition, is often pretty locked down. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it into the hospital data system is a huge, often lengthy process that has, to jump through lots of hoops, in terms of a key network compliance, lots of different steps along the journey. And that often was for very good reasons, is a significant barrier, to the timely adoption of innovative technologies like ours. What platforming activity on AWS allies, were just another website. As Dr. Tim has said, his own though his only existence, with Axial3D in terms of interface, is dragging and dropping, the CT scan into our website, into our portal exists locally on the AWS instance, in whichever region we are working with, for example, in the US never leaves the US, we use the public cloud version. In US East, we take advantage of many features within AWS. But SageMaker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced, you know, several years ago, that is the lightest to produce this, this machine learning trained set of algorithms, that allow us to give this disruption. >> And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter is that as well. >> Absolutely, so our journey as Tim said, we're in a journey not only in terms of the technology, and you're very perceptive in terms of, yes, the more we train it, the more we train it, on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trauma types, the better our system gets, at recognizing the specific characteristics of those. But more importantly, this is about journey pipe. Having made this disruption we make the change and transformation of new standards of care pathways, Nazi innovation that we just enable. It's amazing surgical teams like Tim's, that make transformation. >> Dr. Brown now on your side you're sitting there I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes, they want to live. I don't want to throw away kidneys. I don't have to you just solve that problem. Now when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house as a practitioner deploying it? You got two jobs going on. You're kind of doing IT integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other trying to make things happen. You know, what I see this is not a lot of it here. What's the deployment look like? >> Deployment to me is I don't know why ever as doing it, it's such a straightforward, easy situation. And it's, it's remarkable, really. It's such a good solution. I think, part of any sort of change management program, and this, again, is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. That's challenging people's comfort zones. And anytime we need to change, we've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators, we've got early adopters, we've got late adopters. And I think what we're going to see over the next five to 10 years is people recognizing that this technology, is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say, I want a 3D model. And I want to see what this actually looks like. Because basically, that black and white picture you're showing me, doesn't make any sense to me. And I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have consistency of care and the lack of variation in our care across all services. But as well as that the patience, I think, are going to drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's, that's when it becomes an acceptable and normal thing for people, to do when they come into hospital. There'll be shown printout of their 3D printed model of their of their pathology, and that will be used to inform their decision making, for the treatment processes. And that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon and the patient. And that's, that's where we need to be in 21st century it's got to be a collaborative decision making process. And you talked about patient journeys, and, this is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this, that's being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients by correction and variability of health care provision. >> Its a great example, of an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning 3D images saving lives. Congratulations, Tim, Roger, it's phenomenal. Final question as we end this out. What's the scar tissue, pun intended? Well, what did you learn? What are some of the things that you could share with folks, as people look at this and say, this is an example of cloud scale and technology for good? What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks, take a minute to explain each. But Roger, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, sure. So I think a number of lessons for us on this journey. As Tim says, this is a we're at the start of a journey, of understanding the power of what 3D imaging can bring to providing a consistent or less variable care, but also, as Tim also alluded to, in terms of the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding, is one of the huge leap forwards, that we didn't set out initially thinking, we're going to be able to help educate and better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly became apparent. So that was a great lesson. I think that incredible levels of adoption, that we're starting to see across the US across Europe. Because it's so easy to adopt, compared to traditional IT methods. Surgeons just register for a website, and they can start transacting and getting service from us, as opposed to having to have these huge IT programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not the HR system. It's not a finance system, or maybe healthcare was comfortable in using public cloud. This is core hardcore clinical service, clinical diagnosis, clinical education, and the Amazon cloud is enabling that, just wouldn't be possible with this technology, (mumbles) the lessons we're learning are just (mumbles). >> Dr. Tim Brown and take us home and the segment, with your take, lessons learned and advice to others. >> I think the lesson learned are that doctors and healthcare providers are all extremely wary of change of new innovations. Because they feel that already, they're overburdened, and probably my colleagues in the States and across Europe feel like, we're a bit overburdened by all the things that we have to do. And this may potentially have been a more difficult or odds to your workload and actually fact, this makes your workload a lot easier and convincing people and getting people to understand that, this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue it removes the difficulties that have been put in place by organizations. And once people realize that, that's what there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practice and your patients understanding of your practice. And once that, once up, people really realize that, then the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that date because this is going to be the new normal in the next five to 10 years. >> While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplants successfully over six weeks, dwarfs the full year last year, really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger, thank thank you for coming on. Congratulations on being the award winner, a diverse partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for part of this AWS partner awards program. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector partner awards, program put on by the CUBE and AWS public sector partners. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special live stream here in The Cube Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great panel discussion here for one hour, sponsored by Lumina PR, not sponsored but organized by Lumina PR. An authentic conversation around professionals in the news media, and communication professionals, how they can work together. As we know, pitching stories to national media takes place in the backdrop in today's market, which is on full display. The Coronavirus, racial unrest in our country and a lot of new tech challenges from companies, their role in society with their technology and of course, an election all make for important stories to be developed and reported. And we got a great panel here and the purpose is to bridge the two worlds. People trying to get news out for their companies in a way that's relevant and important for audiences. I've got a great panelists here, Gerard Baker Editor at Large with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Savitz, Associate Editor with Barron's and Brenna Goth who's a Southwest Staff Correspondent with Bloomberg Publications. Thanks for joining me today, guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to break this down, we got about an hour, we're going to probably do about 40 minutes. I'd love to get your thoughts in this power panel. And you guys are on the front lines decades of experience, seeing these waves of media evolve. And now more than ever, you can't believe what's happening. You're seeing the funding of journalism really challenging at an all time high. You have stories that are super important to audiences and society really changing and we need this more than ever to have more important stories to be told. So this is really a challenge. And so I want to get your thoughts on this first segment. The challenge is around collecting the data, doing the analysis, getting the stories out, prioritizing stories in this time. So I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll start with you, Brenna, what's your thoughts on this as you're out there in Arizona. Coronavirus on the worst is one of the states there. What are your challenges? >> I would say for me, one of the challenges of the past couple months is just the the sheer influx of different types of stories we've had and the amount of news coming out. So I think one of the challenging things is a lot of times we'll get into a bit of a routine covering one story. So early on maybe the Coronavirus, and then something else will come up. So I personally have been covering some of the Coronavirus news here in Arizona and in the Southwest, as well as some of the protests we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement. And prioritizing that is pretty difficult. And so one thing that I I've been doing is I've noticed that a lot of my routine projects or things I've been working on earlier in the year are off the table, and I'll get back to them when I have time. But for now, I feel like I'm a little bit more on breaking news almost every day in a way that I wasn't before. >> Gerard, I want to get your thoughts on this. Wall Street Journal has been since I could remember when the web hit the scene early on very digital savvy. Reporting, it's obviously, awesome as well. As you have people in sheltering in place, both journalists and the people themselves and the companies, there's an important part of the digital component. How do you see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because you want to get data out there, you want to be collecting and reporting those stories? How do you see that opportunity, given the challenge that people can't meet face to face? >> First of all, thank you very much for having me. I think as we've all discovered in all fields of endeavor in the last three months, it's been quite a revelation, how much we can do without using without access to the traditional office environment. I think one of the things that Coronavirus, this crisis will have done we all agree I think is that it will have fundamentally changed the way people work. There'll be a lot more people quite a bit more working from home. They'll be a lot more remote working. Generally, there'll be a lot less travel. So on the one hand, it's been eye opening. actually how relatively easy, I use that word carefully. But how we've managed, and I think it's true of all news organizations, how we've managed surprisingly well, I think, without actually being at work. At the Wall Street Journal, we have a big office, obviously in midtown Manhattan, as well as dozens of bureaus around the world. Nobody has really been in that office since the middle of March. And yet we've put out a complete Wall Street Journal product, everything from the print edition, obviously, through every aspect of digital media, the website, all of the apps, video, everything, audio, podcasts. We've been able to do pretty well everything that we could do when we were all working in the office. So I think that will be an important lesson and that will clearly induce some change, some long term changes, I think about the way we work. That said, I'd point to two particular challenges that I think we have not properly overcome. Or if you like that we have, the two impediments, that the crisis has produced for us. One is, as you said, the absence of face to face activity, the hive process, which I think is really important. I think that a lot of the best ideas, a lot of the best, the best stories are developed through conversations between people in an office which don't necessarily we can't necessarily replicate through the online experience through this kind of event or through the Zoom meetings that we've all been doing. I think that has inhibited to some extent, some of the more creative activity that we could have done. I think the second larger problem which we all must face with this is that being essentially locked up in our homes for more than three months, which most of us has been I think accentuates a problem that is already that has been a problem in journalism for a long time, which is that journalists tend to cluster in the major metropolitan areas. I think, a couple of years ago, I read a study which said, I think that more than three quarters of journalists work for major news organizations, print, digital TV, radio, whatever, live and work in one of four major metropolises in the US. That's the New York area, the Washington DC area, the San Francisco area and the LA area. And that tends to create a very narrow worldview, unfortunately, because not enough people either come from those areas, but from outside those areas or spend enough time talking to people from outside those areas. And I think the Coronavirus has accentuated that. And I think in terms of coverage, I'm here in New York. I've been in New York continuously for three and a half months now which is quite unusual, I usually travel a lot. And so my reporting, I write columns now, mainly, but obviously I talk to people too. But the reporting, the editing that we're doing here is inevitably influenced by the experience that we've had in New York, which has obviously been, frankly, devastating. New York has been devastated by Coronavirus in a way that no where else in the country has. And I think to some extent, that does, perhaps have undue influence on the coverage. We're all locked up. We're all mindful of our own health. We're all mindful of people that we know who've gone to hospital or have been very, very sick or where we are, we are heavily influenced by our own immediate environment. And I think that has been a problem if we had been, imagine if the journalists in the country, instead of being clustered in New York and LA and San Francisco had been sort of spread over Texas and Missouri and Florida, things like that. I think you'd have a very different overall accounting of this story over the last three months. So I think it's just, it's accentuated that phenomenon in journalism, which I think we're mindful of, and which we all need to do a better job of addressing. >> It's really interesting. And I want to come back to that point around, who you're collaborating with to get this, now we have virtual ground truth, I guess, how you collaborate. But decision making around stories is, you need an open mind. And if you have this, I guess, I'll call it groupthink or clustering is interesting, now we have digital and we have virtual, it opens up the aperture but we still have the groupthink. But I want to get Eric's take first on his work environment, 'cause I know you've lived on both sides of New York and San Francisco area, as well as you've worked out in the field for agencies, as well on the other side, on the storytelling side. How has this current news environment, journalism environment impacted your view and challenges and your opportunities that you're going after the news? >> Well, so there's there's a few elements here. So one, Barron's Of course, covers the world, looks at the world through a financial lens. We cover the stock market every day. The stock market is not the center of story, but it is an important element of what's been unfolding over the last few months and the markets have been incredibly volatile, we change the way that we approach the markets. Because everything, the big stories are macro stories, huge swings in stock prices, huge swings in the price of oil, dramatic moves in almost every financial security that you can imagine. And so there's a little bit of a struggle for us as we try and shift our daily coverage to be a little more focused on the macro stories as we're still trying to tell what's happening with individual stocks and companies, but these bigger stories have changed our approach. So even if you look at say the covers of our magazine over the last few months, typically, we would do a cover on a company or an investor, that sort of thing. And now they're all big, thematic stories, because the world has changed. And world is changing how it looks at the financial markets. I think one thing that that Gerard touched on is the inability to really leave your house. I'm sitting in my little home office here, where I've been working since March, and my inability to get out and talk to people in person to have some, some interface with the companies and people that I cover, makes it tougher. You get story ideas from those interactions. I think Gerard said some of it comes from your interactions with your colleagues. But some of that also just comes from your ability to interact with sources and that is really tougher to do. It's more formalistic if you do it online. It's just not the same to be on a Zoom call as to be sitting in a Starbucks with somebody and talking about what's going on. I think the other elements of this is that there's, we have a lot of attempts, trying new things trying to reach our readers. We'll do video sessions, we'll do all sorts of other things. And it's one more layer on top of everything else is that there's a lot of demands on the time for the people who are working in journalism right now. I would say one other thing I'll touch on, John, which is, you mentioned, I did use, I worked for public communications for a while, and I do feel their pain because the ability to do any normal PR pitching for new products, new services, the kinds of things that PR people do every day is really tough. It's just really hard to get anybody's attention for those things right now. And the world is focused on these very large problems. >> Well, we'll unpack the PR comms opportunities in the next section. But I want to to just come back to this topic teased out from Gerard and Brenna when you guys were getting out as well. This virtual ground truth, ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to get the stories, you got to report them, they got to be distributed. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is operating well, by the way, I love the Q&A video chats and what they got going on over there. So the format's are evolving and doing a good job, people are running their business. But as journalists and reporters out there, you got to get the truth and the ground truth comes from interaction. So as you have an aperture with digital, there's also groupthink on, say, Twitter and these channels. So getting in touch with the audience to have those stories. How are you collecting the data? How are you reporting? Has anything changed or shifted that you can point to because ultimately, it's virtual. You still got to get the ground truth, you still got to get the stories. Any thoughts on this point? >> I think in a way what we're seeing is in writ large actually is a problem again, another problem that I think digital journalism or the digital product digital content, if you like, actually presents for us today, which is that it's often said, I think rightly, that one of the, as successful as a lot of digital journalism has been and thank you for what you said about the Wall Street Journal. And we have done a tremendous job and by the way, one of the things that's been a striking feature of this crisis has been the rapid growth in subscriptions that we've had at the Journal. I know other news organizations have too. But we've benefited particularly from a hunger for the quality news. And we've put on an enormous number subscriptions in the last three months. So we've been very fortunate in that respect. But one of the challenges that people always say, one of the one of the drawbacks that people always draw attention to about digital content is that there's a lack of, for want of a better words, serendipity about the experience. When you used to read a newspaper, print newspapers, when may be some of us are old enough to remember, we'd get a newspaper, we'd open it up, we'd look at the front page, we look inside, we'd look at what other sections they were. And we would find things, very large number of things that we weren't particularly, we weren't looking for, we weren't expecting to, we're looking for a story about such. With the digital experience, as we know, that's a much it's a much less serendipitous experience. So you tend to a lot of search, you're looking, you find things that you tend to be looking for, and you find fewer things that, you follow particular people on social media that you have a particular interest in, you follow particular topics and have RSS feeds or whatever else you're doing. And you follow things that, you tend to find things that you were looking for. You don't find many things you weren't. What I think that the virus, the being locked up at home, again, has had a similar effect. That we, again, some of the best stories that I think anybody comes across in life, but news organizations are able to do are those stories that you know that you come across when you might have been looking for something else. You might have been working on a story about a particular company with a particular view to doing one thing and you came across somebody else. And he or she may have told you something actually really quite different and quite interesting and it took you in a different direction. That is easier to do when you're talking to people face to face, when you're actually there, when you're calling, when you're tasked with looking at a topic in the realm. When you are again, sitting at home with your phone on your computer, you tend to be more narrowly so you tend to sort of operate in lanes. And I think that we haven't had the breadth probably of journalism that I think you would get. So that's a very important you talk about data. The data that we have is obviously, we've got access broadly to the same data that we would have, the same electronically delivered data that we would have if we'd been sitting in our office. The data that I think in some ways is more interesting is the non electronically delivered data that is again, the casual conversation, the observation that you might get from being in a particular place or being with someone. The stimuli that arise from being physically in a place that you just aren't getting. And I think that is an important driver of a lot of stories. And we're missing that. >> Well, Gerard, I just want to ask real quick before I go to Brenna on her her take on this. You mentioned the serendipity and taking the stories in certain directions from the interactions. But also there's trust involved. As you build that relationship, there's trust between the parties, and that takes you down that road. How do you develop trust as you are online now? Is there a methodology or technique? Because you want to get the stories out fast, it's a speed game. But there's also the development side of it where a trust equation needs to build. What's your thoughts on that piece? Because that's where the real deeper stories come from. >> So I wasn't sure if you're asking me or Gerard. >> Gerard if he wants can answer that is the trust piece. >> I'll let the others speak to that too. Yeah, it is probably harder to... Again, most probably most people, most stories, most investigative stories, most scoops, most exclusives tend to come from people you already trust, right? So you've developed a trust with them, and they've developed a trust with you. Perhaps more importantly, they know you're going to treat the story fairly and properly. And that tends to develop over time. And I don't think that's been particularly impaired by this process. You don't need to have a physical proximity with someone in order to be able to develop that trust. My sources, I generally speak to them on the phone 99% of the time anyway, and you can still do that from home. So I don't think that's quite... Obviously, again, there are many more benefits from being able to actually physically interact with someone. But I think the level of, trust takes a long time to develop, let's be honest, too, as well. And I think you develop that trust both by developing good sources. and again, as I said, with the sources understanding that you're going to do the story well. >> Brenna, speed game is out there, you got to get stories fast. How do you balance speed and getting the stories and doing some digging into it? What's your thoughts on all this? >> I would say, every week is looking different for me these days. A lot of times there are government announcements coming out, or there are numbers coming out or something that really does require a really quick story. And so what I've been trying to do is get those stories out as quick as possible with maybe sources I already have, or really just the facts on the ground I can get quickly. And then I think in these days, too, there is a ton of room for following up on things. And some news event will come out but it sparks another idea. And that's the time to that when I'm hearing from PR people or I'm hearing from people who care about the issue, right after that first event is really useful for me to hear who else is thinking about these things and maybe ways I can go beyond the first story for something that more in depth and adds more context and provides more value to our readers. >> Awesome. Well, guys, great commentary and insight there on the current situation. The next section is with the role of PR, because it's changing. I've heard the term earned media is a term that's been kicked around. Now we're all virtual, and we're all connected. The media is all virtual. It's all earned at this point. And that's not just a journalistic thing, there's storytelling. There's new voices emerging. You got these newsletter services, audiences are moving very quickly around trying to figure out what's real. So comms folks are trying to get out there and do their job and tell a story. And sometimes that story doesn't meet the cadence of say, news and/or reporting. So let's talk about that. Eric, you brought this up. You have been on both sides. You said you feel for the folks out there who are trying to do their job. How is the job changing? And what can they do now? >> The news cycle is so ferocious at the moment that it's very difficult to insert your weigh in on something that doesn't touch on the virus or the economy or social unrest or the volatility of the financial markets. So I think there's certain kinds of things that are probably best saved for another moment in time, If you're trying to launch new products or trying to announce new services, or those things are just tougher to do right now. I think that the most interesting questions right now are, If I'm a comms person, how can I make myself and my clients a resource to media who are trying to tell stories about these things, do it in a timely way, not overreach, not try insert myself into a story that really isn't a good fit? Now, every time one of these things happen, we got inboxes full of pitches for things that are only tangentially relevant and are probably not really that helpful, either to the reporter generally or to the client of the firm that is trying to pitch an idea. But I will say on the on this at the same time that I rely on my connections to people in corporate comms every single day to make connections with companies that I cover and need to talk to. And it's a moment when almost more than ever, I need immediacy of response, accurate information access to the right people at the companies who I'm trying to cover. But it does mean you need to be I think sharper or a little more pointed a little more your thinking about why am I pitching this person this story? Because the there's no time to waste. We are working 24 hours a day is what it feels like. You don't want to be wasting people's time. >> Well, you guys you guys represent big brands in media which is phenomenal. And anyone would love to have their company mentioned obviously, in a good way, that's their goal. But the word media relations means you relate to the media. If there's no media to relate to, the roles change, and there's not enough seats at the table, so to speak. So getting a clip on in the clip book that gets sent to management, look, "We're on Bloomberg." "Great, check." But is at it? So people, this is a department that needs to do more. Is there things that they can do, that isn't just chasing, getting on your franchises stories? Because it obviously would be great if we were all on Barron's Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, but they can't always get that. They still got to do more. They got to develop the relationships. >> John, one thing I would be conscious of here is that many of our publications, it's certainly true for journalists, true for us at Barron's and it's certainly true for Bloomberg. We're all multimedia publishers. We're doing lots of things. Barron's has television show on Fox. We have a video series. We have podcasts and newsletters, and daily live audio chats and all sorts of other stuff in addition to the magazine and the website. And so part of that is trying to figure out not just the right publication, but maybe there's an opportunity to do a very particular, maybe you'd be great fit for this thing, but not that thing. And having a real understanding of what are the moving parts. And then the other part, which is always the hardest part, in a way, is truly understanding not just I want to pitch to Bloomberg, but who do I want to pitch at Bloomberg. So I might have a great story for the Wall Street Journal and maybe Gerard would care but maybe it's really somebody you heard on the street who cares or somebody who's covering a particular company. So you have to navigate that, I think effectively. And even, more so now, because we're not sitting in a newsroom. I can't go yell over to somebody who's a few desks away and suggest they take a look at something. >> Do you think that the comm-- (talk over each other) Do you think the comms teams are savvy and literate in multimedia? Are they still stuck in the print ways or the group swing is they're used to what they're doing and haven't evolved? Is that something that you're seeing here? >> I think it varies. Some people will really get it. I think one of the things that that this comes back to in a sense is it's relationship driven. To Gerard's point, it's not so much about trusting people that I don't know, it's about I've been at this a long time, I know what people I know, who I trust, and they know the things I'm interested in and so that relationship is really important. It's a lot harder to try that with somebody new. And the other thing is, I think relevant here is something that we touched on earlier, which is the idiosyncratic element. The ability for me to go out and see new things is tougher. In the technology business, you could spend half your time just going to events, You could go to the conferences and trade shows and dinners and lunches and coffees all day long. And you would get a lot of good story ideas that way. And now you can't do any of that. >> There's no digital hallway. There are out there. It's called Twitter, I guess or-- >> Well, you're doing it from sitting in this very I'm still doing it from sitting in the same chair, having conversations, in some ways like that. But it's not nearly the same. >> Gerard, Brenna, what do you guys think about the comms opportunity, challenges, either whether it's directly or indirectly, things that they could do differently? Share your thoughts. Gerard, we'll start with you? >> Well, I would echo Eric's point as far as knowing who you're pitching to. And I would say that in, at least for the people I'm working with, some of our beats have changed because there are new issues to cover. Someone's taking more of a role covering virus coverage, someone's taking more of a role covering protests. And so I think knowing instead of casting a really wide net, I'm normally happy to try to direct pitches in the right direction. But I do have less time to do that now. So I think if someone can come to me and say, "I know you've been covering this, "this is how my content fits in with that." It'd grab my attention more and makes it easier for me. So I would say that that is one thing that as beats are shifting and people are taking on a little bit of new roles in our coverage, that that's something PR and marketing teams could definitely keep an eye on. >> I agree with all of that. And all everything everybody said. I'd say two very quick things. One, exactly as everybody said, really know who you are pitching to. It's partly just, it's going to be much more effective if you're pitching to the right person, the right story. But when I say that also make the extra effort to familiarize yourself with the work that that reporter or that editor has done. You cannot, I'm sorry to say, overestimate the vanity of reporters or editors or anybody. And so if you're pitching a story to a particular reporter, in a field, make sure you're familiar with what that person may have done and say to her, "I really thought you did a great job "on the reporting that you did on this." Or, "I read your really interesting piece about that," or "I listened to your podcast." It's a relatively easy thing to do that yields extraordinarily well. A, because it appeals to anybody's fantasy and we all have a little bit of that. But, B, it also suggests to the reporter or the editor or the person involved the PR person communications person pitching them, really knows this, has really done their work and has really actually takes this seriously. And instead of just calling, the number of emails I get, and I'm sure it's the same for the others too, or occasional calls out of the blue or LinkedIn messages. >> I love your work. I love your work. >> (voice cuts out) was technology. Well, I have a technology story for you. It's absolutely valueless. So that's the first thing, I would really emphasize that. The second thing I'd say is, especially on the specific relation to this crisis, this Coronavirus issue is it's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, make sure that what you're doing what you're pitching is not completely irrelevant right now. The last three months has not been a very good time to pitch a story about going out with a bunch of people to a crowded restaurant or whatever or something like that to do something. Clearly, we know that. At the same time, don't go to the other extreme and try and make every little thing you have seen every story you may have every product or service or idea that you're pitching don't make it the thing that suddenly is really important because of Coronavirus. I've seen too many of those too. People trying too hard to say, "In this time of crisis, "in this challenging time, what people really want to hear "about is "I don't know, "some new diaper "baby's diaper product that I'm developing or whatever." That's trying too hard. So there is something in the middle, which is, don't pitch the obviously irrelevant story that is just not going to get any attention through this process. >> So you're saying don't-- >> And at the same time, don't go too far in the other direction. And essentially, underestimate the reporter's intelligence 'cause that reporter can tell you, "I can see that you're trying too hard." >> So no shotgun approach, obviously, "Hey, I love your work." Okay, yeah. And then be sensitive to what you're working on not try to force an angle on you, if you're doing a story. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on the evolution of some of the prominent journalists that I've known and/or communication professionals that are taking roles in the big companies to be storytellers, or editors of large companies. I interviewed Andy Cunningham last year, who used to be With Cunningham Communications, and formerly of Apple, better in the tech space and NPR. She said, "Companies have to own their own story "and tell it and put it out there." I've seen journalists say on Facebook, "I'm working on a story of x." And then crowdsource a little inbound. Thoughts on this new role of corporations telling their own story, going direct to the consumers. >> I think to a certain extent, that's valuable. And in some ways, it's a little overrated. There are a lot of companies creating content on their websites, or they're creating their own podcasts or they're creating their own newsletter and those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure how much of that, what the consumption level is for some of those things. I think, to me, the more valuable element of telling your story is less about the form and function and it's more about being able to really tell people, explain to them why what they do matters and to whom it matters, understanding the audience that's going to want to hear your story. There are, to your point, there are quite a few journalists who have migrated to either corporate communications or being in house storytellers of one kind or another for large businesses. And there's certainly a need to figure out the right way to tell your story. I think in a funny way, this is a tougher moment for those things. Because the world is being driven by external events, by these huge global forces are what we're all focused on right now. And it makes it a lot tougher to try and steer your own story at this particular moment in time. And I think you do see it Gerard was talking about don't try and... You want to know what other people are doing. You do want to be aware of what others are writing about. But there's this tendency to want to say, "I saw you wrote a story about Peloton "and we too have a exercise story that you can, "something that's similar." >> (chuckles) A story similar to it. We have a dance video or something. People are trying to glam on to things and taking a few steps too far. But in terms of your original question, it's just tougher at the moment to control your story in that particular fashion, I think. >> Well, this brings up a good point. I want to get to Gerard's take on this because the Wall Street Journal obviously has been around for many, many decades. and it's institution in journalism. In the old days, if you weren't relevant enough to make the news, if you weren't the most important story that people cared about, the editors make that choice and you're on the front page or in a story editorially. And companies would say, "No, but I should be in there." And you'd say, "That's what advertising is for." And that's the way it seemed to work in the past. If you weren't relevant in the spirit of the decision making of important story or it needs to be communicated to the audience, there's ads for that. You can get a full page ad in the old days. Now with the new world, what's an ad, what's a story? You now have multiple omni-channels out there. So traditionally, you want to get the best, most important story that's about relevance. So companies might not have a relevant story and they're telling a boring story. There's no there, there, or they miss the story. How do you see this? 'Cause this is the blend, this is the gray area that I see. It's certainly a good story, depending on who you're talking to, the 10 people who like it. >> I think there's no question. We're in the news business, topicality matters. You're going to have a much better chance of getting your story, getting your product or service, whatever covered by the Wall Street Journal, Barron's or anywhere else for that matter, if it seems somehow news related, whether it's the virus or the unrest that we've been seeing, or it's to do with the economy. Clearly, you can have an effect. Newspapers, news organizations of all the three news organizations we represent don't just, are not just obviously completely obsessed with what happened this morning and what's going on right now. We are all digging into deeper stories, especially in the business field. Part of what we all do is actually try to get beyond the daily headlines. And so what's happening with the fortunes of a particular company. Obviously, they may be impacted by they're going to be impacted by the lockdown and Coronavirus. But they actually were doing some interesting things that they were developing over the long term, and we would like to look into that too. So again, there is a balance there. And I'm not going to pretend that if you have a really topical story about some new medical device or some new technology for dealing with this new world that we're all operating in, you're probably going to get more attention than you would if you don't have that. But I wouldn't also underestimate, the other thing is, as well as topicality, everybody's looking at the same time to be different, and every journalist wants to do something original and exclusive. And so they are looking for a good story that may be completely unrelated. In fact, I would also underestimate, I wouldn't underestimate either the desire of readers and viewers and listeners to actually have some deeper reported stories on subjects that are not directly in the news right now. So again, it's about striking the balance right. But I wouldn't say that, that there is not at all, I wouldn't say there is not a strong role for interesting stories that may not have anything to do what's going on with the news right now. >> Brenna, you want to add on your thoughts, you're in the front lines as well, Bloomberg, everyone wants to be on Bloomberg. There's Bloomberg radio. You guys got tons of media too, there's tons of stuff to do. How do they navigate? And how do you view the interactions with comms folks? >> It looks we're having a little bit of challenge with... Eric, your thoughts on comm professionals. The questions in the chats are everything's so fast paced, do you think it's less likely for reporters to respond to PR comms people who don't have interacted with you before? Or with people you haven't met before? >> It's an internal problem. I've seen data that talks about the ratio of comms people to reporters, and it's, I don't know, six or seven to one or something like that, and there are days when it feels like it's 70 to one. And so it is challenging to break through. And I think it's particularly challenging now because some of the tools you might have had, you might have said, "Can we grab coffee one day or something like that," trying to find ways to get in front of that person when you don't need them. It's a relationship business. I know this is a frustrating answer, but I think it's the right answer which is those relationships between media and comms people are most successful when they've been established over time. And so you're not getting... The spray and pray strategy doesn't really work. It's about, "Eric, I have a story that's perfect for you. "And here's why I think you you should talk to this guy." And if they really know me, there's a reasonable chance that I'll not only listen to them, but I'll at least take the call. You need to have that high degree of targeting. It is really hard to break through and people try everything. They try, the insincere version of the, "I read your story, it was great. "but here's another great story." Which maybe they read your story, maybe they didn't at least it was an attempt. Or, "if you like this company, you'll love that one." People try all these tricks to try and get get to you. I think the highest level of highest probability of success comes from the more information you have about not just what I covered yesterday, but what do I cover over time? What kinds of stories am I writing? What kinds of stories does the publication write? And also to keep the pitching tight, I was big believer when I was doing comms, you should be able to pitch stories in two sentences. And you'll know from that whether there's going to be connection or not, don't send me five or more pitches. Time is of the essence, keep it short and as targeted as possible. >> That's a good answer to Paul Bernardo's question in the chat, which is how do you do the pitch. Brenna, you're back. Can you hear us? No. Okay. We'll get back to her when she gets logged back in. Gerard, your thoughts on how to reach you. I've never met you before, if I'm a CEO or I'm a comms person, a company never heard of, how do I get your attention? If I can't have a coffee with you with COVID, how do I connect with you virtually? (talk over each other) >> Exactly as Eric said, it is about targeting, it's really about making sure you are. And again, it's, I hate to say this, but it's not that hard. If you are the comms person for a large or medium sized company or even a small company, and you've got a particular pitch you want to make, you're probably dealing in a particular field, a particular sector, business sector or whatever. Let's say it says not technology for change, let's say it's fast moving consumer goods or something like that. Bloomberg, Brenna is in an enormous organization with a huge number of journalist you deal and a great deal of specialism and quality with all kinds of sectors. The Wall Street Journal is a very large organization, we have 13, 1400 reporters, 13 to 1400 hundred journalist and staff, I should say. Barron's is a very large organization with especially a particularly strong field coverage, especially in certain sectors of business and finance. It's not that hard to find out A, who is the right person, actually the right person in those organizations who's been dealing with the story that you're trying to sell. Secondly, it's absolutely not hard to find out what they have written or broadcast or produced on in that general field in the course of the last, and again, as Eric says, going back not just over the last week or two, but over the last year or two, you can get a sense of their specialism and understand them. It's really not that hard. It's the work of an hour to go back and see who the right person is and to find out what they've done. And then to tailor the pitch that you're making to that person. And again, I say that partly, it's not purely about the vanity of the reporter, it's that the reporter will just be much more favorably inclined to deal with someone who clearly knows, frankly, not just what they're pitching, but what the journalist is doing and what he or she, in his or her daily activity is actually doing. Target it as narrowly as you can. And again, I would just echo what Eric and I think what Brenna was also saying earlier too that I'm really genuinely surprised at how many very broad pitches, again, I'm not directly in a relative role now. But I was the editor in chief of the Journal for almost six years. And even in that position, the number of extraordinarily broad pitches I get from people who clearly didn't really know who I was, who didn't know what I did, and in some cases, didn't even really know what Wall Street Journal was. If you can find that, if you actually believe that. It's not hard. It's not that hard to do that. And you will have so much more success, if you are identifying the organization, the people, the types of stories that they're interested in, it really is not that difficult to do. >> Okay, I really appreciate, first of all, great insight there. I want to get some questions from the crowd so if you're going to chat, there was a little bit of a chat hiccup in there. So it should be fixed. We're going to go to the chat for some questions for this distinguished panel. Talk about the new coffee. There's a good question here. Have you noticed news fatigue, or reader seeking out news other than COVID? If so, what news stories have you been seeing trending? In other words, are people sick and tired of COVID? Or is it still on the front pages? Is that relevant? And if not COVID, what stories are important, do you think? >> Well, I could take a brief stab at that. I think it's not just COVID per se, for us, the volatility of the stock market, the uncertainties in the current economic environment, the impact on on joblessness, these massive shifts of perceptions on urban lifestyles. There's a million elements of this that go beyond the core, what's happening with the virus story. I do think as a whole, all those things, and then you combine that with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter. And then on top of that, the pending election in the fall. There's just not a lot of room left for other stuff. And I think I would look at it a little bit differently. It's not finding stories that don't talk on those things, it's finding ways for coverage of other things whether it's entertainment. Obviously, there's a huge impact on the entertainment business. There's a huge impact on sports. There's obviously a huge impact on travel and retail and restaurants and even things like religious life and schooling. I have the done parents of a college, was about to be a college sophomore, prays every day that she can go back to school in the fall. There are lots of elements to this. And it's pretty hard to imagine I would say to Gerard's point earlier, people are looking for good stories, they're always looking for good stories on any, but trying to find topics that don't touch on any of these big trends, there's not a lot of reasons to look for those. >> I agree. Let me just give you an example. I think Eric's exactly right. It's hard to break through. I'll just give you an example, when you asked that question, I just went straight to my Wall Street Journal app on my phone. And of course, like every organization, you can look at stories by sections and by interest and by topic and by popularity. And what are the three most popular stories right now on the Wall Street Journal app? I can tell you the first one is how exactly do you catch COVID-19? I think that's been around since for about a month. The second story is cases accelerate across the United States. And the third story is New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tell travelers from areas with virus rates to self isolate. So look, I think anecdotally, there is a sense of COVID fatigue. Well, we're all slightly tired of it. And certainly, we were probably all getting tired, or rather distressed by those terrible cases and when we've seen them really accelerate back in March and April and these awful stories of people getting sick and dying. I was COVID fatigued. But I just have to say all of the evidence we have from our data, in terms of as I said earlier, the interest in the story, the demand for what we're doing, the growth in subscriptions that we've had, and just as I said, little things like that, that I can point you at any one time, I can guarantee you that our among our top 10 most read stories, at least half of them will be COVID-19. >> I think it's safe to say general interest in that outcome of progression of that is super critical. And I think this brings up the tech angle, which we can get into a minute. But just stick with some of these questions I just want to just keep these questions flowing while we have a couple more minutes left here. In these very challenging times for journalism, do byline articles have more power to grab the editors attention in the pitching process? >> Well, I think I assume what the questioner is asking when he said byline articles is contributed. >> Yes. >> Contributed content. Barron's doesn't run a lot of contributing content that way in a very limited way. When I worked at Forbes, we used to run tons of it. I'm not a big believer that that's necessarily a great way to generate a lot of attention. You might get published in some publication, if you can get yourself onto the op ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, more power to you. But I think in most cases-- >> It's the exception not the rule Exception not the rule so to speak, on the big one. >> Yeah. >> Well, this brings up the whole point about certainly on SiliconANGLE, our property, where I'm co founder and chief, we basically debate over and get so many pitches, "hey, I want to write for you, here's a contributed article." And it's essentially an advertisement. Come on, really, it's not really relevant. In some case we (talk over each other) analysts come in and and done that. But this brings up the question, we're seeing these newsletters like sub stack and these services really are funding direct journalism. So it's an interesting. if you're good enough to write Gerard, what's your take on this, you've seen this, you have a bit of experience in this. >> I think, fundamental problem here is that is people like the idea of doing by lines or contributed content, but often don't have enough to say. You can't just do, turn your marketing brochure into a piece of an 800 word with the content that that's going to be compelling or really attract any attention. I think there's a place for it, if you truly have something important to say, and if you really have something new to say, and it's not thinly disguised marketing material. Yeah, you can find a way to do that. I'm not sure I would over-rotate on that as an approach. >> No, I just briefly, again, I completely agree. At the Journal we just don't ever publish those pieces. As Eric says, you're always, everyone is always welcome to try and pitch to the op ed pages of the Journal. They're not generally going to I don't answer for them, I don't make those decisions. But I've never seen a marketing pitch run as an op ed effectively. I just think you have to know again, who you're aiming at. I'm sure it's true for Bloomberg, Barron's and the Journal, most other major news organizations are not really going to consider that. There might be organizations, there might be magazines, digital and print magazines. There might be certain trade publications that would consider that. Again, at the Journal and I'm sure most of the large news organizations, we have very strict rules about what we can publish. And how and who can get published. And it's essentially journal editorials, that journal news staff who can publish stories we don't really take byline, outside contribution. >> Given that your time is so valuable, guys, what's the biggest, best practice to get your attention? Eric, you mentioned keeping things tight and crisp. Are there certain techniques to get your attention? >> Well I'll mention just a couple of quick things. Email is better than most other channels, despite the volume. Patience is required as a result because of the volume. People do try and crawl over the transom, hit you up on LinkedIn, DM you on Twitter, there's a lot of things that people try and do. I think a very tightly crafted, highly personalized email with the right subject line is probably still the most effective way, unless it's somebody you actually, there are people who know me who know they have the right to pick up the phone and call me if they really think they have... That's a relationship that's built over time. The one thing on this I would add which I think came up a little bit before thinking about it is, you have to engage in retail PR, not not wholesale PR. The idea that you're going to spam a list of 100 people and think that that's really going to be a successful approach, it's not unless you're just making an announcement, and if you're issuing your earnings release, or you've announced a large acquisition or those things, fine, then I need to get the information. But simply sending around a very wide list is not a good strategy, in most cases, I would say probably for anyone. >> We got Brenna back, can you hear me? She's back, okay. >> I can hear you, I'm back. >> Well, let's go back to you, we missed you. Thanks for coming back in. We had a glitch on our end but appreciate it, bandwidth internet is for... Virtual is always a challenge to do live, but thank you. The trend we're just going through is how do I pitch to you? What's the best practice? How do I get your attention? Do bylines lines work? Actually, Bloomberg doesn't do that very often either as well as like the Journal. but your thoughts on folks out there who are really trying to figure out how to do a good job, how to get your attention, how to augment your role and responsibilities. What's your thoughts? >> I would say, going back to what we said a little bit before about really knowing who you're pitching to. If you know something that I've written recently that you can reference, that gets my attention. But I would also encourage people to try to think about different ways that they can be part of a story if they are looking to be mentioned in one of our articles. And what I mean by that is, maybe you are launching new products or you have a new initiative, but think about other ways that your companies relate to what's going on right now. So for instance, one thing that I'm really interested in is just the the changing nature of work in the office place itself. So maybe you know of something that's going on at a company, unlimited vacation for the first time or sabbaticals are being offered to working parents who have nowhere to send their children, or something that's unique about the current moment that we're living in. And I think that those make really good interviews. So it might not be us featuring your product or featuring exactly what your company does, but it still makes you part of the conversation. And I think it's still, it's probably valuable to the company as well to get that mention, and people may be looking into what you guys do. So I would say that something else we are really interested in right now is really looking at who we're quoting and the diversity of our sources. So that's something else I would put a plug in for PR people to be keeping an eye on, is if you're always putting up your same CEO who is maybe of a certain demographic, but you have other people in your company who you can give the opportunity to talk with the media. I'm really interested in making sure I'm using a diverse list of sources and I'm not just always calling the same person. So if you can identify people who maybe even aren't experienced with it, but they're willing to give it a try, I think that now's a really good moment to be able to get new voices in there. >> Rather than the speed dial person you go to for that vertical or that story, building out those sources. >> Exactly. >> Great, that's great insight, Everyone, great insights. And thank you for your time on this awesome panel. Love to do it again. This has been super informative. I love some of the engagement out there. And again, I think we can do more of these and get the word out. I'd like to end the panel on an uplifting note for young aspiring journalists coming out of school. Honestly, journalism programs are evolving. The landscape is changing. We're seeing a sea change. As younger generation comes out of college and master's programs in journalism, we need to tell the most important stories. Could you each take a minute to give your advice to folks either going in and coming out of school, what to be prepared for, how they can make an impact? Brenna, we'll start with you, Gerard and Eric. >> That's a big question. I would say one thing that has been been encouraging about everything going on right now as I have seen an increased hunger for information and an increased hunger for accurate information. So I do think it can obviously be disheartening to look at the furloughs and the layoffs and everything that is going on around the country. But at the same time, I think we have been able to see really big impacts from the people that are doing reporting on protests and police brutality and on responses to the virus. And so I think for young journalists, definitely take a look at the people who are doing work that you think is making a difference. And be inspired by that to keep pushing even though the market might be a little bit difficult for a while. >> I'd say two things. One, again, echoing what Brenna said, identify people that you follow or you admire or you think are making a real contribution in the field and maybe directly interact with them. I think all of us, whoever we are, always like to hear from young journalists and budding journalists. And again, similar advice to giving to the advice that we were giving about PR pitches. If you know what that person has been doing, and then contact them and follow them. And I know I've been contacted by a number of young journalists like that. The other thing I'd say is and this is more of a plea than a piece of advice. But I do think it will work in the long run, be prepared to go against the grain. I fear that too much journalism today is of the same piece. There is not a lot of intellectual diversity in what we're seeing There's a tendency to follow the herd. Goes back a little bit to what I was saying right at the opening about the fact that too many journalists, quite frankly, are clustered in the major metropolitan areas in this country and around the world. Have something distinctive and a bit different to say. I'm not suggesting you offer some crazy theory or a set of observations about the world but be prepared to... To me, the reason I went into journalism was because I was always a bit skeptical about whenever I saw something in any media, which especially one which seemed to have a huge amount of support and was repeated in all places, I always asked myself, "Is that really true? "Is that actually right? "Maybe there's an alternative to that." And that's going to make you stand out as a journalist, that's going to give you a distinctiveness. It's quite hard to do in some respects right now, because standing out from the crowd can get you into trouble. And I'm not suggesting that people should do that. Have a record of original storytelling, of reporting, of doing things perhaps that not, because look, candidly, there are probably right now in this country, 100,00 budding putative journalists who would like to go out and write about, report on Black Lives Matter and the reports on the problems of racial inequality in this country and the protests and all of that kind of stuff. The problem there is there are already 100,000 of those people who want to do that in addition to probably the 100,000 journalists who are already doing it. Find something else, find something different. have something distinctive to offer so that when attention moves on from these big stories, whether it's COVID or race or politics or the election or Donald Trump or whatever. Have something else to offer that is quite distinctive and where you have actually managed to carve out for yourself a real record as having an independent voice. >> Brenna and Gerard, great insight. Eric, take us home close us out. >> Sure. I'd say a couple things. So one is as a new, as a young journalist, I think first of all, having a variety of tools in your toolkit is super valuable. So be able to write long and write short, be able to do audio, blogs, podcast, video. If you can shoot photos and the more skills that you have, a following on social media. You want to have all of the tools in your toolkit because it is challenging to get a job and so you want to be able to be flexible enough to fill all those roles. And the truth is that a modern journalist is finding the need to do all of that. When I first started at Barron's many, many years ago, we did one thing, we did a weekly magazine. You'd have two weeks to write a story. It was very comfortable. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So that's one element. And the other thing, I think Gerard is right. You really want to have a certain expertise if possible that makes you stand out. And the contradiction is, but you also want to have the flexibility to do lots of different stories. You want to get (voice cuts out) hold. But if you have some expertise, that is hard to find, that's really valuable. When Barron's hires we're always looking for people who have, can write well but also really understand the financial markets. And it can be challenging for us sometimes to find those people. And so I think there's, you need to go short and long. It's a barbell strategy. Have expertise, but also be flexible in both your approach and the things you're willing to cover. >> Great insight. Folks, thanks for the great commentary, great chats for the folks watching, really appreciate your valuable time. Be original, go against the grain, be skeptical, and just do a good job. I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think the world's changing. Thanks for your time. And I hope the comms folks enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us, everyone. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here in the Cube for this Cube Talk was one hour power panel. Awesome conversation. Stay in chat if you want to ask more questions. We'll come back and look at those chats later. But thank you for watching. Have a nice day. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin at Coupa Inspire on the ground in Las Vegas, and I'm super super super excited to welcome Suze Orman to theCUBE! Suze, host of the Women and Money podcast. >> Suze: How much money have you lost? >> Lisa: Oprah's friends. Oh, I don't gamble. >> Oh yeah, girlfriend! >> Lisa: No way! >> Suze: I know. >> I do spend too much money on Starbucks every day and I felt I needed to confess that to you. >> Oh God! >> But I know-- >> Really? >> A million dollars in forty years, I'm going to curb my habits, Suze. >> All right, there we go, all right! >> Confessing it to you on camera. >> You have been forgiven (laughs). >> Oh thank you! So love listening to your podcast, watched your show on CNBC for a long time, Women and Money, is something that, obviously as a woman in technology, is really imperative to me and something that really captures my attention, because the pay gap is so obvious, has been for so long, but one of the things that always think when I hear you give advice, whether you're at a tech conference like we are now, or anywhere else, is so much of it is common sense that as humans, we just don't want to hear because it's easy to ignore it. >> It's, here's the thing, is that women in particular have so much on their plate, most of them have their parents they're taking care of, their husband or their spouse, their children, and they're bringing in an income. So they don't have a second to breathe. They can't, like (imitating garbled chaotic noise) all the way around. And the truth is, their husbands don't know anything more about money than they do. Men are financial fakers, I've always said that. So women are really, they want to know more, but they're really overloaded right now. So you got to give it to them in a way that they can digest it when they can. >> One of the things, being in software and tech now for 14 years, you know, when you're in a room, whatever meeting you're in, you think, "I didn't understand that." But you think, "I don't want to be the one to ask a stupid question," so you don't ask, and it's sort of the same thing in the financial situation. Somebody might be explaining something to you, and it's happened to me recently, and I'm like, "I don't understand it." But then I default, "Well, they're the expert." >> Suze: No. >> Lisa: And you're saying, >> "No, trust your guts." >> No, you have got to trust yourself more than you trust others. You know when I was seeing clients, you know what I used to do? First of all, it was mandatory that if you were married, you came in with your spouse. Now it was normally, back then, a male and a female, okay? Now, I'm like, greatest thing is it's a woman and a woman or a man and a man, but that's another thing. And the woman would go to the bathroom, because our meetings were long, and while she was at the bathroom, I would say the most complicated strategy to her husband that made no sense on any level. And I would say, "Do you understand this?" "I do." I go, "So you know, if you do this and then this, this will be the result?" "Got it." "Okay." His wife would come back and sit down, and I would then say to him, "All right, explain to your wife what I just explained to you." And he couldn't do it. So then the conversation was, "Why did you pretend to understand something that there was nothing to understand about?" What is that? So you really have to say, "I don't get it." And here's the thing: money is so easy. Money is not complicated. It really is not. Wall Street wants you to think it's complicated, so that you go ahead and hire a financial advisor, a bank-- You can do this. You can do this. But everybody is so afraid of it, they're they just, you know, and they don't want to deal with it because they're so afraid. >> Or even if we do take that step and start working with a financial planner, there's that, I call it 'conscious incompetence'. "They know what they're doing." >> Suze: They don't. >> "I'm going to let them handle it." >> Suze: They don't, they don't, they don't. I would not work with a financial advisor that wasn't at least 15 years into it. >> Lisa: Fifteen? Okay! >> Fifteen, because the past ten years the market's gone straight up. You could have been a monkey and made money in the stock market the past ten years. You want somebody who went through the recession, who's been through it all. And they've seen the ups, they've the downs, and now they can keep their calm. Don't give me a ten year track record. Give me a twenty year track record. Give me a 15 year. Start with the year that the markets crashed, and how did you do? So if you don't have an advisor that has been through all of that, danger! Number two, if they talk to you about an insurance product, universal life, whole life, variable life insurance, I'm here to tell you, that is-- don't ever ever mix insurance and investments. You want to buy life insurance policy, fine. Buy a term life insurance policy. Do not buy an insurance policy that's also an investment. Crazy out there! Crazy! >> I just heard your podcast on Women and Money, just the other day about mistakes to avoid, so of course I listened to it. I was shocked. You were saying nurses and teachers are too-- >> Suze: Are targeted. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Suze: Nurses. >> And there was this one woman who invested, I think it was like, seventy-five bucks a month, for-- >> Twenty years. >> And only made $4000! >> Yeah, and it's, I had one yesterday that wrote in, that has been doing $200 a month for twenty years, and they have no money. They have like, it's-- Anyway, just, here's the thing. If you don't know what to do, let me tell you what not to do. Do not buy a whole life, universal, or variable life insurance policy. Do not buy a variable annuity within a retirement account. Do not buy loaded mutual funds that have a letter A or B on it. Just those few things alone, great. >> So, getting back to women and money, women and technology, you know, like I mentioned a minute ago, the pay gap. We all know it. How do we, how do women, how do you advise us to to find that inner voice, to find that power to ask for the better job, the promotion, the better opportunities. How do we find that? >> You have to make those that you are dependent on a paycheck for dependent upon you. When I started the Suze Orman Show at CNBC, all right, so 2001, they offered me, it was like, "I'm not doing this show and signing for five years for whatever this little amount of money is." And since I didn't need money, it was like, "I'll do it for free." I did that show the very first year, and I did not make one penny. >> Lisa: Really? >> In one year, it became the number one show on CNBC of all CNBC-produced shows. Now, CNBC needed me. Now, CNBC paid me what I wanted. Not what I needed, what I wanted. And I got what I wanted because I came from a place of power. So women, we have to put ourselves in a position where you're powerful with your own money. And when you're powerful, and you don't need that pay raise, you don't need that job promotion, you want it, but you don't need it, you'll get it because they need you. So when you make somebody dependent upon you, you become valuable to them. And if they don't value you, then get out of there. >> That's great advice, because oftentimes people will think, "Well they can just replace me." Or we think, >> Suze: So then let them. >> "I'm not replaceable." So then, okay >> Suze: Then let them. >> What if that happens? What do I do? >> You have to be always prepared that that can happen. Because that can happen if there's a downsizing, if there's a downturn in the economy. That's why I always say, an eight month emergency fund, don't have any debt, put yourself in a situation that if anything were to happen, you get sick, you're in a car accident, and you can't work, that it's okay. It's okay! When you come from that place, then magic starts to happen. When you come from a place of, "Oh please, when was my paycheck? Is it in another two days? I need it. It's another two days!" So that-- Keep a car forever. You know, I have a car that's now going on eight years old. I keep my cars 10 to 13 years. I don't get a new car just because I can! I don't, what is that about? It's so, live below your means but within your needs. Only purchase needs, not wants, and get as much save pleasure out of saving as you do spending. Those three things alone will absolutely change your life. >> So, we're at a tech conference. Let's talk about tech and how do we, we're bombarded with ads all the time, we're on Instagram, and there's, "Oh, there's that cute dress I wanted." Click! And I don't have any accountability for it because all I did was tap something. I didn't see that transaction going to my bank account. How do you see technology, how do we utilize it for actually getting better control over our own financial freedom and not letting it-- >> I never ever, because I'm on the internet all the time. If an ad comes in, I immediately turn it off. I never click on an ad that has come to me. I only purchase things, and I can purchase anything I want, but I only purchase things that I go after and I look at it. Then I put it in the cart. And I don't buy it. >> Lisa: You think about it. >> And I think about, did I really want it, was it an impulse? Whatever. But you know what I found out, when I put it in the cart, a day later, I get something from them with a discount code. So if I just waited, I'm going to get it for cheaper. And so, I always thought because it's so easy, put it in your cart, and just wait a day or two before you push, yet you won't even remember it's there. >> Right, well it's a little bit of self-control. I think that's just that opening up to, and Oprah's other friend, I know you're friends with Oprah, Brene Brown taught me vulnerability is awesome! It's not weakness! It's the courage to say to your financial planner, "I don't get this." Or, to your point, if this person doesn't have fifteen years experience, and they haven't been through the tumults of the economy, "I'm sorry, I'm sure you're a great person. I need to go somewhere else because this is my money for the rest of my life!" >> You know there's a law that I live by, which is, "It's better to do nothing than something you do not understand." Now I apply it to other things in life, like I'm really into being a boat captain and fishing, but I don't go places in my boat that I don't understand how the waters work, where the ledges are. I don't venture out because I don't want to get in trouble. So it's better to do nothing than something you do not understand, and just do something else that you understand. >> And again, one of the things I love about your advice, Suze, is it's so simple. But I think as a society, we're so governed by technology. It's our alarm clock in the morning, the first thing we do is check email or Instagram, or something on .com, we're listening to podcasts. It's so easy to have a shoppable moment anywhere. Yes, it's probably just as easy-- >> And it's going to be a whole lot easier as time and artificial intelligence and everything takes over, it's going to be really easy. So the question is, "Do you want to have things, or do you want to have money? What do you want?" >> Yeah, because you say, what is it? >> People first-- >> Both: People first, then money, then things. >> Lisa: Tell me about that. >> The reason that I did that, it's a long story as to how that came about, but when I said, "People first," I always meant women. Meant you. Do not put everybody else in front of you. Don't go buying gifts for all your friends and everybody when you have absolutely no money. Put yourself first for once. Next is money. You want more money in your bank account than things that you have in your closet. So make your priorities. Those are your priorities. Put yourself first, then your money, and then if you have those things together, then if you want to buy things, okay. >> I love it. "People first, then money, then things." So you've been doing this for so long, and before we went live I was asking you, "How do you not clunk people's heads together because sometimes it's like, 'What!'" But you're saying these are the same problems that persist over and over because people don't know. >> Well, two things. It shows you that money's not that complicated. That people still ask the same questions over and over again. There aren't all these little gadgets and these little widgets and these things. It's usually Roth 401(k), traditional 401(k)? Roth IRA, 401(k)? Credit card debt first or student loans? Saving, they're the same over and over again. And but each question, to that person, is the most important question in the world to that person. And that one person is important to me. Because if I can save or help one person change their life, that one person can go on and change this whole world. Never know who that one person's going to turn out and be. And so, I mean, if I think back on it, Fred Hasbrook, who is the man who gave me money when I worked at the >> Both: Buttercup Bakery! >> Lisa: Which isn't there anymore. >> And that one man who gave me $2000 with all these other people that took-- He, those actions, to me, created me. And I've changed millions of lives with people, with the information that I've given people. They actually changed their own life. But, so one action can change a whole world >> I love that. >> You never know who that person will be. >> Lisa: You don't. You never know. Well Suze, when are we going to do our next show together? This has been so much fun! >> I don't know, we have to come back here! It seems I'm, have you, where are you out of? >> Palo Alto, California. >> Palo Alto, well we come back there. >> Lisa: All right! All right! >> Suze: We come back there. >> Well good, I'll say I'll look forward to our next show together, Suze. >> You got it, Lise. Thank you, sweetheart, bye bye. >> Been a pleasure, thank you. For Suze Orman, I am Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching theCUBE at Coupa Inspire 19! (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Well, welcome back here in Boston. We're at the BCEC as we are starting to wrap up our coverage here of day two of the Red Hat Summit, 2019. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by Ashesh Badani, who is the senior vice president of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Been a big day for you, hasn't it Mr. Badani? >> It sure has, thanks for having me back on! >> You bet! All right, so OpenShift 4, we saw the unveiling, your baby gets introduced to the world. What's the reaction been between this morning and this afternoon in terms of people, what they're asking you about, what they're most curious about, and maybe what their best reaction is. >> Yeah, so it's not necessarily a surprise for the folks who have been following OpenShift closely, we put the beta out for a little while, so that's the good news, but let me roll back just a little. >> John: Sure >> I think another part of the news that was really important for us is our announcement of a milestone that we crossed, which is a thousand customers, right? And it was at this very summit and theCUBE definitely knows this well, right, because they've been talking for a while. At this very Summit in 2015, four years ago, that we launched OpenShift Version 3. Right and so, you know you fast forward four years, right, and now the diversity of cases that we see, you know, spanning, established apps, cloud native apps, we heard Exxon talking about AIML data signs that they're putting on the platform, in a variety of different industries, is amazing. And I think the way OpenShift 4 has come along for us, is us having the opportunity to learn what have all these customers been doing well, and what else do we need to do on the platform to make that experience a better one. How do we reimagine enterprise kubernetes, to take it to the next level. And I think that's what we're introducing to the industry. >> Ashesh I think back four years ago, kubernetes was not something that was on the tip of the tongues of most people here. Congratulations on 1,000. >> Thank you. >> I hear what, 100, 150, new customers every quarter is the current rate there, but what I've really enjoyed, talked to a CIO and they're like okay, we're talking about digital transformation, we're talking about how we're modernizing all of our environments, and OpenShift is the platform that we do it. So, talk a little bit, from a customer's standpoint, the speeds, the feeds, the technical pieces, but that outcome, what is it an enabler of for your customers? >> Yeah, so excellent points Stu, we've seen whole sale complete digital transformations underway with our customers. So whether it's Deutsche Bank, who came and talked about running thousands of containers now, moving a whole bunch of workload onto the platform, which is incredible to see. Whether it's a customer like Volkswagen, who talking yesterday, if you caught that, about building an autonomous, self-driving, sets of technologies on the platform. What we're seeing is not just what we thought we would only see in the beginning which is one built, cloud native apps, and digital apps, and so on. Or, more nice existing apps, and bring them on the platform. But also, technologies that are making a fundamental difference, and I'll call one out. So I'm a judge for The Innovation Awards, we do this every year, I have been for many years, I love it, it's one of my favorite parts of the show. This year, we had one entry, which is one of the winners, which is HCA, which is a healthcare provider, talking about how they've been using the OpenShift platform as a means to make a fundamental difference in patients' lives. And when I say fundamental difference, actually saving lives. And you'll hear more about their story, but what they've done, is be able to say, look how can we detect early warning signals, faster than we have been, take some AI technology, and correlate against that, and see how we can reduce sepsis within patients. It's a very personal story for me, my mother died of sepsis. And the fact that they've been able to do this, and I think they're reporting they've already saved dozens of lives based on this. That's when you know, the things that you're doing are making a real difference, making a real transformation, not just in an actual customers' lives, but in users and people around the world. >> You were saying earlier too, Ashesh, about looking at what customers are doing and then trying to improve upon that experience, and give them a more effective experience, whatever the right adjective might be, in terms of what you're doing with 4. If you had to look at it, and say okay, these are the two or three pillars of this where I think we've made the biggest improvement or the biggest change, what would those be? >> Yes, so, one is to look at the world as it is in some sense, which is what a customer's doing. Customers weren't deployed to hybrid cloud, right? They want choice, they want independence with regard to which environments are rented on, whether it's physical, virtual, private, or any public cloud. Customers want one platform, to say I want to run these next generation, cloud native, market service based applications, along with my established stateful applications. Customers want a platform for innovation, right? So for example, we have customers that say, look, I really need a modern platform because I want to recruit the next generation of developers from colleges, if I don't give them the ability to play with Go, or Python, or new databases, they're gonna go to some Silicon Valley company, and I'm going to deplete my pool of talent that I need to compete, right? 'Cause digital transformation is about taking existing companies, and making them digitally enabled. Going forward, what we're also seeing is the ability for us to say well maybe the experience we've given existing customers can be improved. How do we for example, give them a platform, that's more autonomous in nature, more self-driving in nature, that can heal itself, based on for example, there's a critical update that's required that we can send over the air to them. How can we bring greater automation into the platform? It's all of those ideas that we've got based on how customers are using it today, is what we're bringing to bear, going forward. >> Ashesh, one of the errors we have trying to help customers parse through the language is, everybody's talking about platforms, if you look at the public clouds, everybody's all in on kubernetes, a few weeks ago, we were at the Google Cloud event, talked to Red Hat there, there's Anthos, there's OpenShift, look at Azure, we Satya Nadella up on stage, and you're like, okay they've got their own kubernetes platform, but I've got OpenShift fully integrated there. >> Ashesh: Yeah. >> Can you help is kinda understand how those fit together because it's an interesting and changing dynamic. >> Well it's a very Silicon Valley buzzword, right? Everyone wants a platform, everyone wants to build a platform, Facebook's a platform, Uber's a platform, Airbnb is, everything's seeming a platform, right? What I really want to focus on more is in regard to, we want to be able to give folks literally an abstraction level, an ability for companies to say I want to embrace digital transformation. Before we get there, someone's like what's digital transformation, I don't even understand what that means anymore. My simple definition is basically flipping the table. Typically companies spend 80% on maintenance, 20% innovation, how do we flip that? So they're spending 80% innovation, 20% maintenance. So if we're still thinking in those terms, let me give you a way to develop those applications, spend more time and energy on innovation, and then allow for you to take advantage of what I'll call a pool of resources. Compute, network, and storage. Across the environment that you have in place. Some of which you might own, some of which some third parties might provide for you, and some of which you get from public cloud. And take advantage of innovation that's being done outside. Innovative services that come from either public cloud providers, or ISPs, or separate providers, and then be able to do that innovated rapid fashion, you know, develop, deploy, iterate quickly. So to me that is really fundamentally what we're trying to provide customers, and it takes different forms, internal packaging. >> Maybe you can explain to me, the Azure OpenStack seems different than some of the other partnerships. Two years ago, when we were sitting in this building, we talked to you about AWS with OpenShift in that partnership, so what's differentiated and special about the Azure OpenStack integration. >> Yeah, so the Azure partnership, it's a good question because we've now taken our partnering with the public cloud providers to the next level, if you will. With Azure there's a few things in play, first it's a jointly offered managed service from Red Hat and Microsoft, where we're both supporting it together. So in the case of OpenShift and AWS, that's you know OpenShift directly to the ring of service, in this case, it's right out of Microsoft, working close together to make that happen. It's a native service to Azure, so if you saw in the keynote, you could use a command line to call OpenShift directly integrate into the Azure command line. It's available within the interface of Microsoft-Azure. So it feels like a native service, you can take advantages of other Azure services, and bring those to bear, so obviously increases developer experience from that perspective. We also inherit all the compliances, certifications, that Microsoft-Azure has, as well, for that service, as well as all the availability requirements that they put out there, so it's much more closely integrated together, much better developer experience, native to Azure, and then the ability for the Microsoft sales team to go out and sell it to their customers in conjunction. >> You talk a lot about different partnerships, and bringing this collaborative, open-mindset to each and every relationship, how hard is that to do? Because you have your of way of doing things and it's worked very well, and yet, you go out and you have these new partnerships or extensions of partnerships, and not everybody with whom you work does things the same way, and so, everybody's gotta be malleable to a certain extent, but just in terms of being that flexible all the time, what does that do for you? >> So, we take that for granted sometimes, the way we work. And I don't mean to say that to be boastful, or arrogant, in any fashion. I had an interview earlier today, and the reporter said why don't you put on your page, that you're 100% open source? And I said we never put that on our page because that's just how we work, we assume that, we assume everyone knows that about us, and we're going forward. And he says, well, I don't know, perhaps there's others that don't know. And he's right. The world's changing, we're expanding our opportunities in front of folks. In the same way we've only and always known, we used to collaborate with others in the community, before we fully embraced OpenStack, there were certain projects that Red Hat was investing in that were Red Hat driven, and we say maybe there wasn't as much community around it, we're gonna go down and embrace and fully parse an OpenStack community. Same's the case, for example, in kubernetes too. It's not necessarily a project that we created on our own, in conjunction with Google, and many others in the community. And so that's something that's part of our DNA, I'm not sure we're doing anything different, in engaging with communities, just how we work. >> So, Ashesh, I know your team's busy doing a lot of things. We've been hearing about what sessions are overflowing, down in the expo floor, so why don't you give us some visibility. But there was one specific one I wondered if you could start with. >> Ashesh: Sure. >> So down on the expo floor, it's a containerized environment and it has something to do with puppies, and therefor how does that connect with OpenShift 4 if we can start there. >> That's a tough one, you're gonna have to go and ask the puppies how to make a difference in the world. (laughing) >> John: So we go from kubernetes to canines, (laughing) that's what we're doing here. >> I do believe they're comfort dogs, but there was coding and some of the other stuff, so give us a little bit of the walk around, the expo flow, the breakouts and the like, in some of the hot areas, that your team's working on. >> Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe not puppies, but maybe we're trying to herd cats, close enough, right? >> John: Safer terrain. >> The amount of interest, the number of sessions, with OpenShift, or container based technologies, cloud based technologies, it's tremendous to see that. So regardless if whether you see the breakouts that are in place, the customer sessions, I think we've got over 100 customers, I think. Who are presenting on all aspects of their journey. So to me, that's remarkable. Lots of interest in our road map going forward, which is great to see, standing room only for OpenShift 4 and where we're taking that. Other technology that's interesting, the work, for example, we're doing in serverless. We announced an OpenSource collaboration with Mircrosoft, something called KEDA, the Kubernetes eventually. Our scaling project, so interesting how customers can kind of engage around that as well. And then the partner ecosystem, you can walk around and see just a plethora of ISVs, we're all looking to build operators, or have operators and are certifying operators within our ecosystem. And then it's ways for us to expose that to our joint customers. >> We're gonna cut you loose, and let you go, the floor's gonna be open for a few minutes, those puppies are just down behind Stu, we'll let you go check that out. >> Alright, thanks, I hear you can adopt them if you want to, as well. >> Before we let you go see the comfort dogs, 1,000 customers, where do you see, when we come back a year from now, where you are, where you wanna see it go, show us a little bit looking forward. >> So there's been some news around Red Hat that has probably happened over the last few months, the people are hearing this, I look at that as a great opportunity for us to expand our reach into markets, both in terms of industries perhaps we haven't necessarily gone into, that other companies have been. Perhaps we say it's manufacturing, perhaps this is the opportunity for us to cross the chasm, have a lot more trained consultants who can help get more customers on the journey, so I fully expect our reach increasing over a period time. And then you'll see, if you will, iterations of OpenShift 4 and the progress we've made against that, and hopefully many more success stories on the stage. >> Alright, looking forward to catching up next year, if not sooner. >> Ashesh: Okay, excellent. >> John: And congratulations on today, and best of luck down the road. >> Thanks again for having me. >> And good to see you! >> Ashesh: Yeah, likewise! >> Back with more on theCube, you are watching our coverage live, here from Red Hat Summit, 2019, in Boston, Massachusetts. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are so excited to welcome back to the program, Dheeraj Pandey, the co-founder/CEO and Chairman of Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you for pronouncing my name diligently. >> You are welcome. >> John: Gotta work on that. >> So, Dheeraj, it was a poignant moment in the keynote when you got up there with many of the people who were sort of employee number one, two, and three, four at Nutanix. They are the builders, the dreamers, the visionaries, the innovators, the disruptors of this company, a company that you started. So I'd love you to just start out by reflecting a little bit on your journey and sort of how Nutanix has evolved. >> Yeah, I mean it's a poignant 10 years, you know. The moment itself is poignant and it brought a lot of nostalgia, you know, for just looking at the early folks and how we had to huddle together in the smallest of technical blips that you'd find in our thesis, because our thesis was very bold. It was, like, hey, we can put a lot of hardware into your software. It's, like, the way Apple would say, we'll get rid of the camera and make it into an app. Like, what? There's no need for a camera anymore. So that's what we had to do with data center infrastructure. So, those moments are memorable, they're etched in history and my memory, and every time you get a tough moment now, we actually invoke a lot of those tough moments from the past and say, look, the more things change, the more they remain the same. >> The beautiful thing about theCUBE, is our 10th year as well, we've been following your journey as well. We actually have soundbites of the early interviews, and one of the things I was always impressed with you guys was you stayed the course, you didn't waver on what was fashionable at the time. HCI was an early category. You were misunderstood at the beginning and then the numbers started to show and you guys built a great business. But now, you're 10 years old, you're public. All the numbers are out there. You gotta go the next level. This is your challenge with the team. What's the focus? What's the strategy? What's the marching orders for the team now, as you go past 10 years old? You got competitive pressure. There's marketplace. The numbers are there. It's a big piece of the pie there. >> Yeah. You know, I go back to everything I just said in my last answer as well. The more things change, the more they remain the same. The friction hasn't changed. Five years ago we were a much smaller brand. We didn't have a customer base. We didn't have money in the bank and we still had to keep raising money to fund ourselves. Today, we are running this business, spending, you know, a billion dollars every year now. But it's a free cash flow neutral business, and we have told the Street that we gonna keep running it like that, but just go back to the basics. The basics of this company are what made it come to here. The same basics will need to take it from here to the next 10 years. 10 years is the new zero. I mean, I said, look, we've reset the clock and it's a very metaphorical thing to say, but it's the new zero for us, you know. So going back to the basics are the three Ds I talked about. Data, we are greater data. And we continue to be amazing at data. Reliable, highly available, high performance data management. A greater design. You know, just making things simple, and we're really really really good at delivery and when we suck at it, we go and improve and are very resilient in delivering things, you know, so whenever some things falter within our customer success, customer service, the way we delivering things with your software and subscription, I think nobody can touch us in these three Ds. >> As you guys have proven a great loyalty, customer basis, very loyal on the product. As you have to go multi-cloud, as the Enterprise gets modernized, this is a big part of your current business. What are some of the things that you're looking at, in terms of these new products? Because you don't want to open the door up for either a competitor or a misfire on you guys. You gotta continue to provide product leadership. >> Well, the most important thing is honesty and vulnerability. The fact that these things are not awesome big products yet, but they are awesome nonetheless. So how do you really have the small wins? You know, I go back in time to, Look, it took 10 years for Amazon Prime to become Primetime. It took six years for YouTube to even start to figure out who YouTube is really gonna be, and you know, Google bought Writely, which was the company that became Google Docs. Five years, they didn't know what they were doing with those things, so what's really important for the new products is this long-term greed. You know, the fact that you really have this 10 year view of a multi-product portfolio, but the most important thing is how they gell well together, how they really integrate well together, because if we don't integrate these products, and we just throw it out as things, as opposed to an experience. Customers are, like, I can buy things from Best of Breed. So how do you really make these multi-product look like an experience is where the real Nutanix design value is actually shown. >> One of the things that you guys have a good customer reaction to is the simplicity and how you can integrate well and reduce all these manual tasks, which is, people talk about automation and everything, but you guys have customers saying, "I went from 24 racks to six. "I now run everything with the push of a button. "Not there yet with the one-click but pretty close." That sounds like the multi-cloud game right now, where it is kinda hodge-podge. No one's actually figured out how to bring it all together and orchestrate it. >> That's the money statement, John. That's where the money is. Complexities where we go in and really figure out how to really save money for our customers, make money for our partners and make money for ourselves. >> And the partner-side, HPE, a big announcement that you guys have been part of. They're gonna be coming on today. How's that going? Give us the update on the HPE. >> You know, the energy levels are high, but there's a bell curve of people, you know. You can't have everybody really be an innovator, an early adopter. We're looking for innovators and early adopters. Some great discussions happening with HP account managers. They're our account managers of very large accounts, and the word-of-mouth has to basically play its powerful game actually. >> I wanna ask you about innovation. Earlier, on a CUBE conversation, you talked with our own John Furrier, and you said, we disrupt ourselves, but you also just talked about these products being these sort of long-term play and really thinking about what the, more of a holistic view of what the customers need. I wanna hear about the Nutanix innovation process and sort of how you have kept that culture of a tech start-up now that you are a company with a market cap in the multiple billions. >> You know, as I said before, we are like a billion dollar start-up, you know. And it's not easy, because everybody wants you to grow up, like, behave and grow up, and I saw one of my slides in there taking real potshots of the sand and we haven't changed much, you know. So in many ways, we're reminding everybody that it's still Day Zero and Day One. Is the great cultural gravitas that we need to keep, retained in the business, actually, in the company? You know, having the kind of humor that we had, and you know, keeping it personal and personable with everybody, as opposed to, you know, stiff upper lip, and suits and mahogany tables and corner offices. Those are things that are the antithesis of what Nutanix is. And just keeping it humble, you know. Like, the fact that even though we have layers of management in the middle, how do you go six levels deep and really have a conversation as technical as you wanted it to be and as business incisively as we want it to be? And you know, there's a lot of things you can do by going six levels deep that otherwise were not possible if you just said, look, I just talked to my next level action team, and to us, that's the engine of innovation. >> And how is your leadership changed? >> I have a new customer called Wall Street. >> That's true. >> 'Cause you know, they buy my product. It just happens to be a retail product that you folks can buy, too. It's called NTNX, the ticker. So I have Main Street customers and then I have Wall Street as a customer, and I need to figure out where to really keep them balanced, because I sell products to both of them, and it's a journey. You know, it's never easy, because there's a customer that actually wants instant success. There's another customer that says we are with you for the long haul, and what I need to find in this Wall Street customer is the ones who are actually for the long haul. My leadership, actually, is about balancing the two together. >> So let's talk about the Wall Street thing for a second, because I think that's interesting. You've always said to me, you're gonna play the long game and you do. We've kinda proved that, but Wall Street, they're very short sighted right? So the earnings come out, you gotta deal with the shot clock, as a public company. As you go to Wall Street, how are they looking at the long game? Because there's major examples. Microsoft stock's at an all-time high. They were in the 20s a few years ago. Cloud obviously is validated, so you got a cloud vision, this cloud marketplace. You're in the core enterprise, which has been revitalized with private cloud. Again, proves your thesis originally. So you're in good position and you got the cloud game right there. What are they missing? What's Wall Street missing? >> I think the biggest thing is that in any transformation is actually messy. Look at all the transformations in the last 20 years. The good thing is that those that took the tough call of transforming themselves, they really have done well, you know. And this is not just Microsoft alone, but Adobe, where I sit on the board. There is Autodesk and there is Parametric PTC and Cadence and many many other companies that have gone through this transition of getting out of the box to being software and subscription actually, and that's the journey that we said we couldn't punt and postpone 'cause we wanna be a hybrid cloud company. How can we not have subscription on prem? If subscription is gonna be the off prem, it has to have on prem subscription as well. And I think it requires communication, constant communication, watch, don't be stupid, with Wall Street as well. >> Well, Wall Street likes those valuations. If you look at the SaaS companies, or subscription-based companies, their valuations are really on a multiple, much higher than, >> I mean, look, valuation, to me, is not an end in itself. If you do it right by Main Street, I think this Wall Street thing will take care of itself. >> Awesome. On the long game with your innovation, I gotta ask you about how you're gonna look at the partnerships and integrating in, because the competitor out there in the middle of the room there is VMware and Dell Technologies. They want to go end-to-end and they want to own everything end-to-end. You guys are taking a different approach. Could you share your competitive strategy in terms of how you guys are different than that, because you're partnering? You're competing in a different way. >> Yeah, as we go into becoming a bigger company and yet, having a real child-like brain, I think it's important, really, that we are in this cooperative world and every competitor is also a company we cooperate with. Look, I mean, we run on top of VMware and more than half our customers still use VMware underneath us. We are an app on their platform. So we are a platform company. We are also an app company and our platform should run all apps and our apps should run on all platforms and that's the way we look at it. That's the reason why Microsoft is relevant again, 'cause they're still looking at, rather than a single stack strategy, how do you really look at yourselves as living two lives actually, you know? And to compete, you just have to go back to the three Ds I talked about. If you just keep doing a really good job of data, disrupting the biggest hardware players out there in data, and be really really good with design and elegance and friction-less delivery, I think we'll be in good shape. >> One of the compliments that the analysts on theCUBE always pay to you, Dheeraj, is that you have a really good sense of the wave. You really know which way the technological and economic winds are blowing. I wanna know, what do you read? Who do you talk to? What signals are you paying attention to? Or is it just this innate sense you have that the rest of us can't hope to ever achieve? >> Well, thank for that compliment, first of all. I'm honored. But I just have this simple mantra which is, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So I bring a lot of things from my consumer life because I read a lot about consumer life and I have a little bit of an artist in me and even though I am supposed to be a geek, I was telling somebody I was trying to recruit the other day that, look, I'm really, at heart, an artist, more so than an engineer, and I think a lot of what you see in this conference and this company and the product portfolio, it's really the empathy for the other side. You know, that really brings out a lot of the innovation, and obviously, I don't innovate alone, but the people that are with us in this company, I just try to tell them about the empathy that I invoke for everybody else and I read a lot of history, I'm a big history buff, and not just the last 30 years of IT, which I invoke a lot, but I'm deep into, like, the history of humans, you know. Like, last two weeks, I spent a lot of time reading about Neanderthals and the hybrid Neanderthals with humans, modern humans, and there's another ones that they found in these caves of Denisova. They call Denisovans, you know. So I read a lot of history and that gives me a lot of perspective and a lot of courage and I bring a lot of those things into this new life, that's again, as I said, it's the same as the old one, with some new color. >> You're an entrepreneur. That's what entrepreneurship is all about. What entrepreneurial thing are you working on right now? 'Cause I've known, You've gotta have your hands in some new things. What's the new entrepreneurial thinking or project that you're taking on? >> Well, the one that is very interesting one for operating a business is Capital Allocation, and it's a difficult one because you have to, basically, be somebody who really balances content and delivery, you know, and content is products and delivery is go to market, and when you go to market, it's marketing and sales. So as a company, we were tested in the last nine months to really understand Capital Allocation. I'm a big fan of the book, The Outsiders. I just read this probably a year ago, and you could see that there was some themes in The Outsiders about running the business on free cash flow, which is nothing new. It's not like Amazon invented it. They've been doing it for those 40, 50 years. Second one is Decentralized Decision Making. The third one is a really good capital allocation. So as an entrepreneur, I'm learning to actually understand what it means to decentralize decision making, and do a really good job of capital allocation, and finally, go and tell the Street about why free cash is the way to run a business as opposed to profitability and a gap way, because a lot of our dollars are sitting in the balance sheet, and they aren't in the P&L. So I think really running the business where growth matters, which is about free cash flow, about making sure that we can really create more CEOs in the company, independent decision making, and finally, this idea that you want to run this business as if it was a bunch of businesses, actually. >> Great. >> Awesome. >> One of the things you keep talking about in this interview is balance. You're balancing the needs of Main Street and Wall Street, the needs of your cloud customers, the needs of your employees, while also growing this business. How do you balance at all? As the CEO of this fast-growing company? You said you're an artist. And you read a lot of history. >> Honestly, I'm not a very balanced person. If you ask me, like, work and life, family and work, is because of my wife that I find a balance there. >> So you owe it all to her? >> Yeah, I think you can say that again, and the same thing is true for, like, one of my team members, our COO, David Sangster. He says, "Look, our health, family, and work, "in that order," and honestly, mine is in the reverse right now. So I need to really go and, These kind of conversations remind myself that it's important to actually have some balance. >> Great, well, Dheeraj, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier. We'll have so much more from Nutanix next coming up on theCUBE just after this. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is a wrap-up of the show. This is day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. And, I got to say, I'm surprised at how it's evolved, and the clarity of what's happening is coming into focus. We had a great kickoff, I thought, on day one. I thought we laid it out and kind of predicted and connected the dots on what was going to happen. But some kind of new white spaces were filled in. I want to get your thoughts on it. One, DevNet's success with the number of developers. Clearly a number success. But what's really interesting, after watching all the activity here at DevNet, talking to people in the hallways, is that DevNet is changing the face of Cisco. Because Cisco has an energy and an openness now, that's bringing the momentum and success and proven success of open store software to the networking layer, engaging and energizing the core base of the Cisco constituent, which is the customers, the network engineer, and allowing a path to cloud-native, a path to multi-cloud, and a path to innovation. I mean this is the story, in my opinion, at this event. There are some announcements, certainly, that tie into it, but the notion of what DevNet and DevNet Create are proving, besides being good execution by Susie Wee and the team, is that this is a tell sign that the programmable network is at a seminal moment where, like the iPhone was in 2007, that changed telephony, and created apps, the network is now programmable. New things are going to happen. This is, to me, the biggest story here at DevNet. >> Yeah, and John, in case somebody just listened to our wrap and hadn't heard the three days of coverage here, that number is 500,000. It was up, Chuck Robbins announced it on stage on day one here on Monday. 500,000 developers registered. By the way, Susie said we'd actually, we kept having to scrub the list and bring it down, so we had 300,000, it went down a little bit. She's like, "Are we still growing?" Now the momentum continues, so they're growing. But, you're right John, we've done two of these Cisco Lives. You and I did the Barcelona show and we did this show. And what's been crystallizing, what I learn and, in processing here that actually excites me, is I'm a networking guy, and so many waves that these technologies, remember it was like, "Oh ethernet fabrics are going to change everything", "SDN will totally revolutionize everything." I kind of looked and things and I was like, "You know, we're fixing networking problems, and how do I tie that to the business. Oh, I need to be more agile and I need to move faster." The punchline to what does it matter, this intent-based networking, which it's kind of a wonky term, but really we're building new applications, where the network is how we do that. It's built for microservices, it's this modern environment. And I have to have this DevNet ecosystem to enable it. Because it can't just be I manage my switch and I'm going and okay, I download software and I do some things over here. This is the career path for all of the people that, you know, the 25 years of CCIEs that we had, we've had this huge line next to us here, of everybody's getting their badges and they've got their area where they've got a little bit of special treatment of those CCIEs; there's an army of them and that's been Cisco's strength and can they take that army and get them ready for the new guerrilla warfare that is this modern application building and John, you know, how many times do people say, you know networking, they're just a bunch of plumbers, sitting down in there, wiring closet, they'll be left behind. >> Yeah, and this is the false narrative and that's absolutely the case. There definitely was a lull there. If you look at Cisco and what's going on in the networking world, we've talked. This is our ninth year with theCUBE, so you and I have pontificated and riffed many times about "the network's a bottleneck", and it's always the network, everything comes down to the network, which is why the network guys have always been the most powerful in companies. But here's what's happening here, the gestation period of SDN is an interesting dynamic. So here's what I think no one's yet reported. I think this is the real story. The SDN has been incubating and gestating now for what, four years, give or take, roughly? So SDN's embedded in at the network layer, the network's getting smarter. Then you've got the cloud scale happening, and you've got security issues in cyber, you've got cloud scale in the public cloud accelerating, the valuation of things, this costs this per minute. So, creating the economic kind of disruption. Then you have the Kubernetes on the scene, taking docker containers, making it a global container, it's not just docker, all containers generically as a key vehicle for wrapping around legacy. And it was Kubernetes, and now with Service Mesh on the horizon, there is a clear, visible path to the value creation. Combine that with the continuing explosion of open-source. Open-source has proven that the way to run things in the open is exactly how DevNet's doing it. So, all these things are elements that have just come together at a perfect time, and Cisco is taking advantage of it. And we were critical of Cisco at Barcelona by saying, they'd be crazy not to double down on this. I would quadruple down on it, it's proven. Not, "we own the network, you got to go through us", Blockchain, I sat in the blockchain session today. The central authority model in communities is flattening, this is the new normal. I think Cisco has lightning in a bottle here. Let's see what they do with it, Stu. I don't know what your reaction to that is, but they have an opportunity to make the network programmable, energize their base, it's just really exciting, I got to say. If I worked at Cisco, I would be all over the DevNet, the DevNet Create, get in the cloud scale, and ride that wave. >> Look, John, Cisco has been dominant in networking so long, that there's been so many waves hitting against it, said we were going to overtake Cisco. Open networking is one of those big waves. I've been to many conferences, I know a lot of the companies we've interviewed on theCUBE, many of the companies that are going to go take a chunk out of the monolith that was Cisco. Well, Cisco, you know, they're not deaf, they're listening-- >> They're disrupting themselves. >> They are disrupting themselves, and especially, you know, the line I heard for years was, you know, Cisco was the standard, it's like, oh, well, you know, they're dominating at the standards bodies and trying to push their way through. Well, they've got the customers. And they've got an ecosystem, and while they've invested in open source over the years, and we've talked to many of them, this DevNet activity has really pushed along, and is impressive. Doesn't mean that there aren't some pockets where other people are more advanced with the technology, you know, you can always have the debates as to who is more open than the others, which, you know, you and I have gone down many times, but it is impressive to see how Cisco is changing, what's here, the excitement has been palpable. And it's not just, you know, it's an infrastructure show, it's a networking show, when you and I interviewed Rowan Trollope at the Barcelona show, it's Cisco of the future is a software company, and they are making progress. If you give a little bit of a nudge as to, you know, what they didn't have, it's like, there weren't a ton of announcements, but the ones that they were, they were talking about the progress they've made, the DNA center-- >> Look, if you want to look for critiquing, I mean, you can look anywhere in anyone's life and find faults. There's plenty of things that Cisco's not advanced on, but time is on their side. They don't have to have big-doubt Istio version running on switches, that's coming down the road. They can work with Kubernetes, we saw some great demos in here. So I think time is a good friend for them right now, but they're doing all the right things, so again, it's an opportunity. The other thing I've noticed with the DevNet and the DevNet Create and all of our CUBE coverage, Stu, you know, I've been looking at theCUBE data, the SiliconANGLE, Wikibon data, and a new kind of persona personality is emerging, in, at least in our audience, that kind of is a tell sign to innovation. One, developers are kind of forming two lines of developers. Developers-- well, there's three. Classic developers, who just geek out and program. But two new personas. Business-oriented developers, who are being pulled to the front lines, who are dealing with issues like Capex, Opex, digital transformation. And we're seeing that, people who don't want to get an MBA, but they want to learn business. The other new category that I see developing here at DevNet is the entrepreneurial developer. This is the developer that has all the same attributes that someone starting a company would have. They're resourceful, they're looking at connecting the dots outside the box, they're using their creativity to identify using software to solve problems in the network. So, this is kind of interesting, because those are the ones that are going to jump on the grenades, take the chances, and they're inside the company. So this is going to be a wealth creation opportunity for the networking, because the networking is, right now, been waiting for the network to be scalable and programmable, we've been saying it for how many years. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, boy, John, you know, we lived through, I've said it many times on theCUBE. The decade of making networking work properly in a virtualized environment was kind of painful. When we look at containerization, what's happening to the cloud data space, I think networking understands the networking ecosystem, and especially Cisco, knows what they went through before, and they are attacking the space, and going at it hard to try and make sure that they, you know, get on this next wave, win some mine share, and you know, don't lose these customers. Because, John, something we've said many times is, right now, is probably the ripest time for customers to say, "You know, I've trusted and used this company for a really long time, but it's okay for me to try new things." And therefore, Cisco with its massive-- >> They got to try new things. >> Could be disrupted, if they don't try really hard. >> The customers have to try new things, Stu, that's definitely the case. Okay, let's get into some of the landscape issues. We saw a lot of startups come on, growing startups, so the question is will they be the M&A in the future of Cisco? But we had IBM on, we had NetApp on, Avi Networks, a lot of companies. We also saw Cohesity score a huge round of funding, 250 million dollars. We haven't seen a lot of venture-backed activity, here at the show, we've seen a lot of VC announcements, but you know, the big round for Cohesity crystallizes the competitive landscape. Your thoughts, you got the big players like IBM doing great with storage, Cloudify, NetApp with FlexPod, doing very well with the cloud. I mean, is the tide rising, where everyone's floating, and this is a lot of the competitive? And if so, is the scale attainable for the startups, or will they have to bought by the big players? Your thoughts. >> Well, John, to go back, we were just talking about DevNet, I actually feel like Cisco's pulling some of their ecosystem along. The storage-networking interactions isn't the most exciting thing in the world, and I spent ten years living in these environments. I mean, you know, storage-networking doesn't exactly get most people excited, but it is one of the fundamental things, it needs to make your environment work. Every time you did a bank transaction, or you know, bought a plane ticket, probably that was your storage and the networking underlied that, making that work. >> So what's your point, the ecosystem is going to grow, or? >> The ecosystem is following Cisco's lead, and getting involved in developer and cloud-native activity. So we're not just talking about boxes anymore. That wave towards software. NetApp, really nice story, as to how they fit into the multi-cloud environment. You know, they kind of rode down on the box trend, and as they really focused back on their core, which has always been software, they're making some strong moves there. You mentioned two of the vendors we had on, Cohesity and Avi Networks, both of them, part of their funding is from Cisco. So, you know, Cisco investing in some of the hot areas, you know, Cohesity, data protection-- >> Don't forget LiveAction was bought last Friday, their aperture in the market goes up, so we're seeing the partner network, really interesting dynamic. We're growing, we're going to see more people come in, what's your vision on this? >> No, the ecosystem's very dynamic. So, really good show floor here, you can feel the energy when you walk through this place and you go see what's happening. Big ecosystem, it showed. By the way, we didn't say it on the intro, but the number I heard was 26,000, which, this is a good size show. Bigger than a VN World, smaller than an AWS reinvent. But you know, really, much more, it's not-- >> It was my first time, it was my first show, at Cisco Live in North America. I got to say, I wasn't expecting the show floor to be that good. I mean, I was like, okay, Cisco, we have the vendors out there, partners, you know, a lot of people, you know, typical enterprise show. I was blown away, blown away by the energy of the future of creating value. I mean, the stories, it wasn't just people mailing it in. These real, compelling use cases of cloud scale. Not just selling boxes, Stu. >> Yeah, and John, you know, talk about community. You know, you and I both have a lot of networking DNA in our backgrounds. I love this community, it's people that, they love to collaborate, they love to share, they love to dig in. Lots of bloggers, there was a big podcasting going on. We brought some of those people on the program, and I loved, some of them are working for cool new startups. They're doing coding, they're doing developer activity. A section of this felt a lot like a KubeCon, or even, you know, some of the AWS and Google kind of mojo that we see at the cloud show. Which, I enjoyed Barcelona, but that was my critique, they're not as in that multi-cloud world. They were talking about it, but they're kind of stuck in this transition. It's not like they're fully there. Cisco still sells a lot of kit, and everybody makes money too. But we know this transition's going to take a long time. >> Chuck Robbins said at the keynote, that there'd be no cloud without networking. Networking and cloud people have a symbiotic relationship because networking people are inherently smart. You may argue, someone sitting at a desk, you know, doing networks, some of them have different personas inside that, but most of them are pretty smart, right. Networking people aren't dumbasses, generally speaking. The cloud people are innovating on the app side with the scale piece, also smart people, so when you get networking people with cloud, I just see a nice fit there, and I think, Kubernetes, and the Istio, and the service mesh, I think that's where it connects, because if you're a networking guy, using Ansible, using Python, you're going to naturally gravitate towards Kubernetes. It's the same concept. So, I'm watching that very closely, I think you and I have been talking about this at Linux Foundation, that's going to be the tell sign. If the network engineers can adopt the Kubernetes concept, and take the service mesh to the next level, that, to me, is going to be a tell sign. >> Yeah, and John, you know, we go to a lot of shows, we've got some really smart people who came on the program, we're a bit of intellectual snobs sometimes, and when we come on this program-- >> Speak for yourself, Stu. (laughs) >> No, I mean we love to talk to smart people. As I always say, John, if I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm in the wrong room. And I'm really excited, most of the time we're on theCUBE, we bring some really smart and interesting people on. >> Alright, let's wrap this up. Obviously the big story is DevNet. I think the community approach is great. Christine Heckart came on, she's the new senior executive, just started at Cisco. When we were at Barcelona, we saw her there. She saw DevNet, kind of a fresh eyes in Cisco, what impressed me about my observing her, on theCUBE and then watching her walk around was, she's fresh eyes. She's been in the industry, her eyes were lighting up. She sees DevNet, she understands. She came on and talked about network effects. Stu, our business is community-driven, theCUBE is very community-oriented with the content, we have network effects in our business. And I think she hit on something that I think is the next conversation point, is, the network effects is a technical and business dynamic and I think she's got her hands on a very successful narrative around where the value will go, and then when the engineering and the business come together to create value. I think DevNet has done the right thing with the open-source model, being welcoming, not elite. And I think that is worth noting. >> Yeah, and a lot of hard work went into reaching where we are with DevNet today. I love, we dug in with Susie, with Mandy. One of the interviews I did, John Apostolopoulos. You know, he's one of the ones in the labs inside of Cisco. So, it took, he walked me through, John, you know, the basically five years that led to this new DNA solution that we had. We of course had some great VIPs on the program, like Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Cohesity, Lee Howard, and of course, Zoginsash himself, Eric Herzog, who, both of those gentlemen, when you walked around this show, they are everywhere. They're plastered on the screen before the keynote, they're walking around and talking to them, so we love, as part of our community, to get to talk to those as well as, you know, all different aspects in our about 30 interviews we did this week. >> Well, we're looking forward to more coverage, Stu, I want to thank you for great coverage, thank the guys here, we're going to be going and covering Cisco like a blanket, we're going to hit all their events, Cisco Lives in Barcelona and the US. We'll continue, got a great thing going on here with the DevNet and the DevNet Create events, look for those. Check out thecube.net for theCUBE schedule. But I also want to put a shout-out for the sponsors, if it wasn't for sponsors, we wouldn't be able to bring the great crew here. Want to thank NetApp as the headline sponsor. NetApp's FlexPod, great stuff, check it out, those guys got a new mojo going on with cloud, and on premise really creating a software model. And also, Cisco, IBM, LiveAction, and Avi Networks. Thanks so much for that community support, that sends a signal that you're investing in the codevelopment of content, it's great stuff. >> And John, yeah, actually, Cohesity and Presidio helping round that up, John. One of the highlights of the show had to be the Ludacris party. >> Yep, Cohesity's new funding, great concert. >> 250 million dollars, it's a ludicrous round. >> (laughs) Stu Miniman with his own meme. Thanks for watching, we are here at Cisco Live, that's a wrap-up for the show here on day three, I'm John here with Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (digital music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE special coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. We're here at VMware's Radio 2018, its 14th year, its annual, I won't call it a spring fling, I won't call it the burning man. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers as Steve Harod, former CTO said on stage. Rajiv Ramaswami chief operating officer of VMware products, one of the groups here, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here John. >> So Steve Hared kind of coined it, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers, which is like motivating, intoxicating, a lot of energy, a lot of good technical buzz going on. >> [Man] Indeed. >> People are flexing their muscles, stretching their minds. >> [Man] Totally, totally. >> Creating their sparks of innovation. >> Totally, totally. >> [John Furrier] How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, you know, let me take a step back here. Innovation overall at VMware, it's part of the culture. It's not something that is just purely dropped down to it, in fact I don't believe we can simply drive down innovation from the top, it has to come from within. But what we do at VMware is, culturally we have several set of activities that we foster, that create this culture of innovation. Let me lay out a few examples. And of course we will get to radio, and why we're here. But, everything from, you start with this Tech Talks. Anybody can bring a group of people together, we have weekly Tech Talks, to talk about anything. It might be stuff that they're working on that they want to get a broader audience for, or there may be stuff that, you know, is far out, that they just want to get an audience and communicate. So we have Tech Talks. We have our own version of Hackithon, we call them ballithons. We run globally at all our sites you know our 7,000 plus R and D engineers globally. We run these everywhere and out of those by the way, come great ideas. And these are typically one to two day kind of events that groups of people get together, they actually build prototypes. They called prototypes, the expectation is they have to show us something working at the end of those two days. And all kinds of cool things have come out of those. The next step there is, flings. If you have a prototype and you actually want to get customer feedback, and you want to get equal system feedback, it's not a sanctioned product. But you can go out there and release it and have customers support that and test it for you. And finally then we have sort of a more incubation type, what we call like slaps, that it's actually now more of a centrally funded project that moves on and works on a particular topic. And last, but not least, this event, Radio. >> So the Radio encapsulates the big tent event but you're talking about a specific process for innovation. >> Yep, exactly. >> So, it's organic so I gotta ask you, one of the things I've observed over my 19 years living in Palo Alto and nine years covering VMware, seeing from founding principles to now is, there's two things that jump out at me. Engineering culture, and community. >> [Man] Yes. >> These have always been kind of like the, you know, the nine lives for VMware. You guys always been leveraging those two things. >> [Man] That's right. >> How do you guys do that going forward because as it becomes more competitive you're bigger now, you got a process, so that's cool, I get that. How do you guys drive the process without sacrificing the engineering and the community? >> So let me tell you one thing that you should keep in mind. All of this is done on people's spare time. This is not their day job. Every one of these people, engineers who are here are doing this separate from their day jobs. And so they are motivated and what prompts people to come to VMware in the first place is the ability to work on interesting, difficult problems. Particularly when it comes to infrastructure related. Our motto and our mission is around how software can really change the world. So there's a fundamental driven culture. >> The passion is you want to work on hard problems, changing the world kind of thing. >> That's right, they want to work on hard problems and we foster that, we encourage them to do that and you know, they like it. And also the fact that in most cases these are not individuals. In fact almost every people that you see here is actually a small group of people. And what I'm amazed at as I look through the work that people do, a lot of the stuff, some of it may be a derivative of what they're actually doing in their day jobs and that there's some substance but a lot of it is actually stuff that is actually done completely different from what they do in their day job. >> In the X labs, is it just because you have two tracks as we heard earlier, there's kind of like, continue to incubate it further with some funding while you do your day job, then it's like, oh my god, you know, functions is a service. Let's fast track that, take a break, find someone else to fill your job, or we'll do it and you work it full time. >> [Rajiv] That's right, that is a full time job. Once we get to an X lab, that is a funded incubation project that you are dedicated to. And we allow people to go out and go off and do that, and sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it won't and then they can come back. >> Rajiv, I gotta ask you the engineering question because all my engineering friends, we always talk about this and you hit it the first one which was, we want to work for a company that solves hard problems. >> Yeah. >> You guys, check. And you've been voted a great place to work across the board so great culture, I can attest the culture is great. The second problem is all the engineers, you know, oh I didn't get picked, or who made this selection, there's also self governance going on so you have to manage the typical engineering reaction because everyone loves their baby. So it might not get picked for Radio. >> [Rajiv] But you know what, I mean. >> [John] How do you manage that dynamic? >> So, yeah it's a competitive process by the way. And we run Radio, let me talk a little bit about Radio. We run Radio much like any world class technical conference that Ithiam would run or I typically would run. We encourage an open process where people can submit papers, we have a committee that's actually sitting and reviewing these papers. Just like any other technical conference, some of them are gonna make it, some of them won't. >> It's not a black box though, it's transparent. >> It's not a black box. It's a pretty open, transparent feedback. Okay, it's not like, hey you submit something and we throw it over the fence. We actually give feedback. In fact there's a whole process here. So first of all, this year for example, we had over 1,200 submissions and we picked 200. That's all we can afford. Think about the acceptance rate right there. That is on par, if not better than most top notch technical conferences. So there is a very high bar, okay. And by the way, the stuff that doesn't get picked can still continue. If not, maybe refine it and do better next year, maybe they'll continue some of it, >> [John] Or join in someone else in the team. >> Yeah, exactly, yeah. >> You allow for people to come together. >> Of course, people can come together and it's completely informal, we don't mandate who comes together, they can come together. And once they get selected by the way, the other part of this is actually helping the engineers double up as public speakers and presenters also. You know, a lot of us engineers particularly like to sit in their black box, they're sitting up their coding on a daily basis. Here's an opportunity for them to actually go out and present their ideas to a broad forum. And we actually, part of it is we help coach them and build them into good presenters as well as part of this process. So for them it's a personal development experience. This competitive dynamic by the way is what actually holds up the bottom quality for Radio. It actually has no negative value. It's not like if you don't get selected this year there is a bad feeling or anything. You can try again next year, and to new people every year. >> It's a pride just to be a part of it. >> Exactly. >> And succeeding the bar is a big accomplishment internally. >> Yes, yes, and frankly by the way out of these 1,200 submissions or so in addition to the papers that get accepted here about 200 of these actually are invention disclosures that eventually find their way into patents over time too. So there's other ways that these things get moved forward. >> There's a social benefit also a personal benefit to grow. >> Absolutely. >> And you have the patent option. >> And the networking that comes here, the most important part. I don't know if you saw the poster session yesterday, I mean, the energy in the room is just phenomenal. The people are there who are really passionate about talking about their work, and people are there wandering and you meet new people. In fact, for me in my world, what I enjoy the most is of course getting to hear what these guys are doing but also helping to make connections. Because I sort of look at all of R and D and then somebody here is doing something, in fact I will give you an example. There was somebody who was figuring out how to do, the topic was called teleportation, but it was really about fast data movement. So this was a team in our core virtualization platform. And then I said hey, there's this other team that is focused on hyper-connectivity, you guys should connect because they're actually building a product that could leverage what you do. So you make those informal connections here and then off they run. >> You know it's interesting. Ray Alferil and I were talking about the confluence of these markets coming together. You guys started out in a data center, you got cloud, AI now, which is big data, and now block chain, really interesting stuff you guys are doing with block chain. We were talking off camera and I talked with some of your folks, you guys are already eyeing that way pretty heavily and I know there's work going on there. But in the intersection of infrastructure, AI, cloud, block chain and decentralized applications is a lot of really important stuff. This is the confluence, this where it all has to mash together, the mash up of security, IOT and data. Not big data, or AI. Data hits everything, security hits everything, IOT is hitting everything. So do you have to tweak your R and D focus? How do you guys manage these changing confluences? >> Yes, we are constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It's never static. I will give you an example from recent times. When we call it networking we find we constantly find software to find networking. And we came on initially, it was all about data center. It was about how to, you know, connect and secure applications inside data centers. Then we saw the world changing. Applications are moving out to the public cloud and then more recently applications are moving to the edge to your earlier point. So what did we do? We took that networking mission, we expanded it to now include public clouds, include the edge, and that's what we just launched recently. So that's an area where things are dynamic, our innovation moves on. As I do believe the edge is gonna be one of the next big areas of investment and opportunity. And security is pervasive across the board. So our vision now encompasses security everywhere. All the way from your mobile device, to the edge, to branch offices, to the public cloud, and to your data centers. Anywhere where you have applications running data sitting, and users, you gotta secure that. >> What's the big waves? Pat Gelser's gonna come on soon and he always talks about the waves of innovation. If you're not out in front of the next wave you're driftwood, his famous quote on theCUBE years ago. You gotta pick the big waves obviously, you see block chain as a great call, cloud, no brainer, you're there. Data center, you've been there entrenched. You got AI, I know you guys are working on stuff. Are those the waves you're on, is there a new wave that no one's seeing, and how do you guys look at that? >> Of course it's all adjacent right? Edge computing is adjacent to what we do, and IOT so that's obviously a big area for us. Telcos, for us, you may not necessarily think of it as innovation but they are actually redoing how they do their entire infrastructure. And that's a great opportunity for us. At the end of the day, there's two things. We have innovation and innovation is correlated to also to what markets we can go after that are new and driving committal business for us. So the edge and Telco in our view are two big big opportunities for us. >> You guys are doing a great job. World class organization, it's fun to watch. It's a pleasure to interview such great smart people here. Rajiv you're one leading the team. My final question I want to ask you for the folks watching who don't work at VMware describe what it's like to work here. What's the DNA of the culture? Explain the dynamic, 'cause it's like a kid in a candy store in here if you're an engineer. Explain what's goin on. >> Look, the things that I continue to be impressed by here, and I have been here about two and a half years is the quality and depth of the engineering talent we have and the willingness to work on difficult and interesting problems. And also share that across the board. There is no, very rarely do we have people sitting isolated that go off and do something. People are willing to share. We work as a community together. That really really stands out. I worked at many companies and I have to say, no other company really creates this kind of culture of innovation where we bring all these people together. This event, Radio is absolutely unique. I have not really seen it at this scale anywhere else. >> It's a great use case of world class in a modern era. I think you guys have the secret, engineering and community focus has been a key backbone for you guys. >> The other thing, by the way, I will say is, engineers feel that their ideas are valued, and they are actually used. Something that starts out, you know, in a very small way actually could end up getting a lot of visibility. I will give you an example. Out of our Ballithon last year or so somebody came up with the idea of using a virtual reality headset to figure out how you can actually manage your entire data center using virtual reality and pick and place. >> [John] That's great for working at home. >> Cool, right? This just came out of a two day hackathon session. And what did we do with that? Well, we did that, I took that and made it a demo center stage at VM world and all our VM forums across the world And all of us by the way, Pat, myself, we were all sitting out there doing virtual reality demos built on what a couple of engineers had done in two days. Great visibility. Now that's not gonna go into a product anytime soon I think but it's a cultural thing. >> It's a cultural example of grassroots innovations sparks of innovation can come from anywhere. >> That's right. >> Rajiv, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. This is theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for Radio 2018, its 14th year annual event it's turning into quite the showcase for flexing and also stretching the minds of the smartest people in VMware. Of course theCUBE's here on the ground. I'm John Furrier. Back with more coverage after this break. Stay with us. (digital music)

>> Narrator: New York City, it's the Cube covering CyberConnect 2017 brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage in New York City's Grand Hyatt Ballroom for CyberConnect 2017 presented by Centrify. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube with my co-host this week is Dave Vellante, my partner and co-founder and co-CEO with me in SiliconAngle Media in the Cube. Our next guest is James Scott who is the co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> You guys are putting on this event, really putting the content together. Centrify, just so everyone knows, is underwriting the event but this is not a Centrify event. You guys are the key content partner, developing the content agenda. It's been phenomenal. It's an inaugural event so it's the first of its kind bringing in industry, government, and practitioners all together, kind of up leveling from the normal and good events like Black Hat and other events like RSA which go into deep dives. Here it's a little bit different. Explain. >> Yeah, it is. We're growing. We're a newer think tank. We're less than five years old. The objective is to stay smaller. We have organizations, like Centrify, that came out of nowhere in D.C. so we deal, most of what we've done up until now has been purely federal and on the Hill so what I do, I work in the intelligence community. I specialize in social engineering and then I advise in the Senate for the most part, some in the House. We're able to take these organizations into the Pentagon or wherever and when we get a good read on them and when senators are like, "hey, can you bring them back in to brief us?" That's when we know we have a winner so we started really creating a relationship with Tom Kemp, who's the CEO and founder over there, and Greg Cranley, who heads the federal division. They're aggressively trying to be different as opposed to trying to be like everyone else, which makes it easy. If someone wants to do something, they have to be a fellow for us to do it, but if they want to do it, just like if they want to commission a paper, we just basically say, "okay, you can pay for it but we run it." Centrify has just been excellent. >> They get the community model. They get the relationship that you have with your constituents in the community. Trust matters, so you guys are happy to do this but more importantly, the content. You're held to a standard in your community. This is new, not to go in a different direction for a second but this is what the community marketing model is. Stay true to your audience and trust. You're relied upon so that's some balance that you guys have to do. >> The thing is we deal with cylance and others. Cylance, for example, was the first to introduce machine learning artificial intelligence to get passed that mutating hash for endpoint security. They fit in really well in the intelligence community. The great thing about working with Centrify is they let us take the lead and they're very flexible and we just make sure they come out on top each time. The content, it's very content driven. In D.C., we have at our cocktail receptions, they're CIA, NSA, DARPA, NASA. >> You guys are the poster child of be big, think small. >> Exactly. Intimate. >> You say Centrify is doing things differently. They're not falling in line like a lemming. What do you mean by that? What is everybody doing that these guys are doing differently? >> I think in the federal space, I think commercial too, but you have to be willing to take a big risk to be different so you have to be willing to pay a premium. If people work with us, they know they're going to pay a premium but we make sure they come out on top. What they do is, they'll tell us, Centrify will be like, "look, we're going to put x amount of dollars into a lunch. "Here are the types of pedigree individuals "that we need there." Maybe they're not executives. Maybe they're the actual practitioners at DHS or whatever. The one thing that they do different is they're aggressively trying to deviate from the prototype. That's what I mean. >> Like a vendor trying to sell stuff. >> Yeah and the thing is, that's why when someone goes to a Centrify event, I don't work for Centrify (mumbles). That's how they're able to attract. If you see, we have General Alexander. We've got major players here because of the content, because it's been different and then the other players want to be on the stage with other players, you know what I mean. It almost becomes a competition for "hey, I was asked to come to an ICIT thing" you know, that sort of thing. That's what I mean. >> It's reputation. You guys have a reputation and you stay true to that. That's what I was saying. To me, I think this is the future of how things get done. When you have a community model, you're held to a standard with your community. If you cross the line on that standard, you head fake your community, that's the algorithm that brings you a balance so you bring good stuff to the table and you vet everyone else on the other side so it's just more of a collaboration, if you will. >> The themes here, what you'll see is within critical infrastructure, we try to gear this a little more towards the financial sector. We brought, from Aetna, he set up the FS ISAC. Now he's with the health sector ISAC. For this particular geography in New York, we're trying to have it focus more around health sector and financial critical infrastructure. You'll see that. >> Alright, James, I've got to ask you. You're a senior fellow. You're on the front lines with a great Rolodex, great relationships in D.C., and you're adivising and leaned upon by people making policy, looking at the world and the general layout in which, the reality is shit's happening differently now so the world's got to change. Take us through a day in the life of some of the things you guys are seeing and what's the outlook? I mean, it's like a perfect storm of chaos, yet opportunity. >> It really depends. Each federal agency, we look at it from a Hill perspective, it comes down to really educating them. When I'm in advising in the House, I know I'm going to be working with a different policy pedigree than a Senate committee policy expert, you know what I mean. You have to gauge the conversation depending on how new the office is, House, Senate, are they minority side, and then what we try to do is bring the issues that the private sector is having while simultaneously hitting the issues that the federal agency space is. Usually, we'll have a needs list from the CSWEP at the different federal agencies for a particular topic like the Chinese APTs or the Russian APT. What we'll do is, we'll break down what the issue is. With Russia, for example, it's a combination of two types of exploits that are happening. You have the technical exploit, the malicious payload and vulnerability in a critical infrastructure network and then profiling those actors. We also have another problem, the influence operations, which is why we started the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. We've been asked repeatedly since the elections last year by the intelligence community to tell us, explain this new propaganda. The interesting thing is the synergies between the two sides are exploiting and weaponizing the same vectors. While on the technical side, you're exploiting a vulnerability in a network with a technical exploit, with a payload, a compiled payload with a bunch of tools. On the influence operations side, they're weaponizing the same social media platforms that you would use to distribute a payload here but only the... >> Contest payload. Either way you have critical infrastructure. The payload being content, fake content or whatever content, has an underpinning that gamification call it virality, network effect and user psychology around they don't really open up the Facebook post, they just read the headline and picture. There's a dissonance campaign, or whatever they're running, that might not be critical to national security at that time but it's also a post. >> It shifts the conversation in a way where they can use, for example, right now all the rage with nation states is to use metadata, put it into big data analytics, come up with a psychographic algorithm, and go after critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. You can do anything with those guys. You can spearfish them. The Russian modus operandi is to call and act like a recruiter, have that first touch of contact be the phone call, which they're not expecting. "Hey, I got this job. "Keep it on the down low. Don't tell anybody. "I'm going to send you the job description. "Here's the PDF." Take it from there. >> How should we think about the different nation state actors? You mentioned Russia, China, there's Iran, North Korea. Lay it out for us. >> Each geography has a different vibe to their hacking. With Russia you have this stealth and sophistication and their hacking is just like their espionage. It's like playing chess. They're really good at making pawns feel like they're kings on the chessboard so they're really good at recruiting insider threats. Bill Evanina is the head of counterintel. He's a bulldog. I know him personally. He's exactly what we need in that position. The Chinese hacking style is more smash and grab, very unsophisticated. They'll use a payload over and over again so forensically, it's easy to... >> Dave: Signatures. >> Yeah, it is. >> More shearing on the tooling or whatever. >> They'll use code to the point of redundancy so it's like alright, the only reason they got in... Chinese get into a network, not because of sophistication, but because the network is not protected. Then you have the mercenary element which is where China really thrives. Chinese PLA will hack for the nation state during the day, but they'll moonlight at night to North Korea so North Korea, they have people who may consider themselves hackers but they're not code writers. They outsource. >> They're brokers, like general contractors. >> They're not sophisticated enough to carry out a real nation state attack. What they'll do is outsource to Chinese PLA members. Chinese PLA members will be like, "okay well, here's what I need for this job." Typically, what the Chinese will do, their loyalties are different than in the west, during the day they'll discover a vulnerability or an O day. They won't tell their boss right away. They'll capitalize off of it for a week. You do that, you go to jail over here. Russia, they'll kill you. China, somehow this is an accepted thing. They don't like it but it just happens. Then you have the eastern European nations and Russia still uses mercenary elements out of Moscow and St. Petersburg so what they'll do is they will freelance, as well. That's when you get the sophisticated, carbonic style hack where they'll go into the financial sector. They'll monitor the situation. Learn the ins and outs of everything having to do with that particular swift or bank or whatever. They go in and those are the guys that are making millions of dollars on a breach. Hacking in general is a grind. It's a lot of vulnerabilities work, but few work for long. Everybody is always thinking there's this omega code that they have. >> It's just brute force. You just pound it all day long. >> That's it and it's a grind. You might have something that you worked on for six months. You're ready to monetize. >> What about South America? What's the vibe down there? Anything happening in there? >> Not really. There is nothing of substance that really affects us here. Again, if an organization is completely unprotected. >> John: Russia? China? >> Russia and China. >> What about our allies? >> GCHQ. >> Israel? What's the collaboration, coordination, snooping? What's the dynamic like there? >> We deal, mostly, with NATO and Five Eyes. I actually had dinner with NATO last night. Five Eyes is important because we share signals intelligence and most of the communications will go through Five Eyes which is California, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Those are our five most important allies and then NATO after that, as far as I'm concerned, for cyber. You have the whole weaponization of space going on with SATCOM interception. We're dealing with that with NASA, DARPA. Not a lot is happening down in South America. The next big thing that we have to look at is the cyber caliphate. You have the Muslim brotherhood that funds it. Their influence operations domestically are extremely strong. They have a lot of contacts on the Hill which is a problem. You have ANTIFA. So there's two sides to this. You have the technical exploit but then the information warfare exploit. >> What about the bitcoin underbelly that started with the silk roads and you've seen a lot of bitcoin. Money laundering is a big deal, know your customer. Now regulation is part of big ICOs going on. Are you seeing any activity from those? Are they pulling from previous mercenary groups or are they arbitraging just more free? >> For updating bitcoin? >> The whole bitcoin networks. There's been an effort to commercialize (mumbles) so there's been a legitimate track to bring that on but yet there's still a lot of actors. >> I think bitcoin is important to keep and if you look at the more black ops type hacking or payment stuff, bitcoin is an important element just as tor is an important element, just as encryption is an important element. >> John: It's fundamental, actually. >> It's a necessity so when I hear people on the Hill, I have my researcher, I'm like, "any time you hear somebody trying to have "weakened encryption, back door encryption" the first thing, we add them to the briefing schedule and I'm like, "look, here's what you're proposing. "You're proposing that you outlaw math. "So what? Two plus two doesn't equal four. "What is it? Three and a half? "Where's the logic?" When you break it down for them like that, on the Hill in particular, they begin to get it. They're like, "well how do we get the intelligence community "or the FBI, for example, to get into this iphone?" Civil liberties, you've got to take that into consideration. >> I got to ask you a question. I interviewed a guy, I won't say his name. He actually commented off the record, but he said to me, "you won't believe how dumb some of these state actors are "when it comes to cyber. "There's some super smart ones. "Specifically Iran and the Middle East, "they're really not that bright." He used an example, I don't know if it's true or not, that stuxnet, I forget which one it was, there was a test and it got out of control and they couldn't pull it back and it revealed their hand but it could've been something worse. His point was they actually screwed up their entire operation because they're doing some QA on their thing. >> I can't talk about stuxnet but it's easy to get... >> In terms of how you test them, how do you QA your work? >> James: How do you review malware? (mumbles) >> You can't comment on the accuracy of Zero Days, the documentary? >> Next question. Here's what you find. Some of these nation state actors, they saw what happened with our elections so they're like, "we have a really crappy offensive cyber program "but maybe we can thrive in influence operations "in propaganda and whatever." We're getting hit by everybody and 2020 is going to be, I don't even want to imagine. >> John: You think it's going to be out of control? >> It's going to be. >> I've got to ask this question, this came up. You're bringing up a really good point I think a lot of people aren't talking about but we've brought up a few times. I want to keep on getting it out there. In the old days, state on state actors used to do things, espionage, and everyone knew who they were and it was very important not to bring their queen out, if you will, too early, or reveal their moves. Now with Wikileaks and public domain, a lot of these tools are being democratized so that they can covertly put stuff out in the open for enemies of our country to just attack us at will. Is that happening? I hear about it, meaning that I might be Russia or I might be someone else. I don't want to reveal my hand but hey, you ISIS guys out there, all you guys in the Middle East might want to use this great hack and put it out in the open. >> I think yeah. The new world order, I guess. The order of things, the power positions are completely flipped, B side, counter, whatever. It's completely not what the establishment was thinking it would be. What's happening is Facebook is no more relevant, I mean Facebook is more relevant than the UN. Wikileaks has more information pulsating out of it than a CIA analyst, whatever. >> John: There's a democratization of the information? >> The thing is we're no longer a world that's divided by geographic lines in the sand that were drawn by these two guys that fought and lost a war 50 years ago. We're now in a tribal chieftain digital society and we're separated by ideological variation and so you have tribe members here in the US who have fellow tribe members in Israel, Russia, whatever. Look at Anonymous. Anonymous, I think everyone understands that's the biggest law enforcement honeypot there is, but you look at the ideological variation and it's hashtags and it's keywords and it's forums. That's the Senate. That's congress. >> John: This is a new reality. >> This is reality. >> How do you explain that to senators? I was watching that on TV where they're trying to grasp what Facebook is and Twitter. (mumbles) Certainly Facebook knew what was going on. They're trying to play policy and they're new. They're newbies when it comes to policy. They don't have any experience on the Hill, now it's ramping up and they've had some help but tech has never been an actor on the stage of policy formulation. >> We have a real problem. We're looking at outside threats as our national security threats, which is incorrect. You have dragnet surveillance capitalists. Here's the biggest threats we have. The weaponization of Facebook, twitter, youtube, google, and search engines like comcast. They all have a censorship algorithm, which is how they monetize your traffic. It's censorship. You're signing your rights away and your free will when you use google. You're not getting the right answer, you're getting the answer that coincides with an algorithm that they're meant to monetize and capitalize on. It's complete censorship. What's happening is, we had something that just passed SJ res 34 which no resistance whatsoever, blew my mind. What that allows is for a new actor, the ISPs to curate metadata on their users and charge them their monthly fee as well. It's completely corrupt. These dragnet surveillance capitalists have become dragnet surveillance censorists. Is that a word? Censorists? I'll make it one. Now they've become dragnet surveillance propagandists. That's why 2020 is up for grabs. >> (mumbles) We come from the same school here on this one, but here's the question. The younger generation, I asked a gentleman in the hallway on his way out, I said, "where's the cyber west point? "We're the Navy SEALS in this new digital culture." He said, "oh yeah, some things." We're talking about the younger generation, the kids playing Call of Duty Destiny. These are the guys out there, young kids coming up that will probably end up having multiple disciplinary skills. Where are they going to come from? So the question is, are we going to have a counterculture? We're almost feeling like what the 60s were to the 50s. Vietnam. I kind of feel like maybe the security stuff doesn't get taken care of, a revolt is coming. You talk about dragnet censorship. You're talking about the lack of control and privacy. I don't mind giving Facebook my data to connect with my friends and see my thanksgiving photos or whatever but now I don't want fake news jammed down my throat. Anti-Trump and Anti-Hillary spew. I didn't buy into that. I don't want that anymore. >> I think millennials, I have a 19 year old son, my researchers, they're right out of grad school. >> John: What's the profile like? >> They have no trust whatsoever in the government and they laugh at legislation. They don't care any more about having their face on their Facebook page and all their most intimate details of last night's date and tomorrow's date with two different, whatever. They just don't... They loathe the traditional way of things. You got to talk to General Alexander today. We have a really good relationship with him, Hayden, Mike Rogers. There is a counterculture in the works but it's not going to happen overnight because we have a tech deficit here where we need foreign tech people just to make up for the deficit. >> Bill Mann and I were talking, I heard the general basically, this is my interpretation, "if we don't get our shit together, "this is going to be an f'd up situation." That's what I heard him basically say. You guys don't come together so what Bill talked about was two scenarios. If industry and government don't share and come together, they're going to have stuff mandated on them by the government. Do you agree? >> I do. >> What's going to happen? >> The argument for regulation on the Hill is they don't want to stifle innovation, which makes sense but then ISPs don't innovate at all. They're using 1980s technology, so why did you pass SJ res 34? >> John: For access? >> I don't know because nation states just look at that as, "oh wow another treasure trove of metadata "that we can weaponize. "Let's start psychographically charging alt-left "and alt-right, you know what I mean?" >> Hacks are inevitable. That seems to be the trend. >> You talked before, James, about threats. You mentioned weaponization of social. >> James: Social media. >> You mentioned another in terms of ISPs I think. >> James: Dragnet. >> What are the big threats? Weaponization of social. ISP metadata, obviously. >> Metadata, it really depends and that's the thing. That's what makes the advisory so difficult because you have to go between influence operations and the exploit because the vectors are used for different things in different variations. >> John: Integrated model. >> It really is and so with a question like that I'm like okay so my biggest concern is the propaganda, political warfare, the information warfare. >> People are underestimating the value of how big that is, aren't they? They're oversimplifying the impact of info campaigns. >> Yeah because your reality is based off of... It's like this, influence operations. Traditional media, everybody is all about the narrative and controlling the narrative. What Russia understands is to control the narrative, the most embryo state of the narrative is the meme. Control the meme, control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. Control the belief system, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the population. No guns were fired, see what I'm saying? >> I was explaining to a friend on Facebook, I was getting into a rant on this. I used a very simple example. In the advertising world, they run millions of dollars of ad campaigns on car companies for post car purchase cognitive dissonance campaigns. Just to make you feel good about your purchase. In a way, that's what's going on and explains what's going on on Facebook. This constant reinforcement of these beliefs whether its for Trump or Hillary, all this stuff was happening. I saw it firsthand. That's just one small nuance but it's across a spectrum of memes. >> You have all these people, you have nation states, you have mercenaries, but the most potent force in this space, the most hyperevolving in influence operations, is the special interest group. The well-funded special interests. That's going to be a problem. 2020, I keep hitting that because I was doing an interview earlier. 2020 is going to be a tug of war for the psychological core of the population and it's free game. Dragnet surveillance capitalists will absolutely be dragnet surveillance propagandists. They will have the candidates that they're going to push. Now that can also work against them because mainstream media, twitter, Facebook were completely against trump, for example, and that worked in his advantage. >> We've seen this before. I'm a little bit older, but we are the same generation. Remember when they were going to open up sealex? Remember the last mile for connectivity? That battle was won before it was even fought. What you're saying, if I get this right, the war and tug of war going on now is a big game. If it's not played in one now, this jerry rigging, gerrymandering of stuff could happen so when people wake up and realize what's happened the game has already been won. >> Yeah, your universe as you know it, your belief systems, what you hold to be true and self evident. Again, the embryo. If you look back to the embryo introduction of that concept, whatever concept it is, to your mind it came from somewhere else. There are very few things that you believe that you came up with yourself. The digital space expedites that process and that's dangerous because now it's being weaponized. >> Back to the, who fixes this. Who's the watchdog on this? These ideas you're talking about, some of them, you're like, "man that guy has lost it, he's crazy." Actually, I don't think you're crazy at all. I think it's right on. Is there a media outlet watching it? Who's reporting on it? What even can grasp what you're saying? What's going on in D.C.? Can you share that perspective? >> Yeah, the people that get this are the intelligence community, okay? The problem is the way we advise is I will go in with one of the silos in the NSA and explain what's happening and how to do it. They'll turn around their computer and say, "show me how to do it. "How do you do a multi vector campaign "with this meme and make it viral in 30 minutes." You have to be able to show them how to do it. >> John: We can do that. Actually we can't. >> That sort of thing, you have to be able to show them because there's not enough practitioners, we call them operators. When you're going in here, you're teaching them. >> The thing is if they have the metadata to your treasure trove, this is how they do it. I'll explain here. If they have the metadata, they know where the touch points are. It's a network effect mole, just distributive mole. They can put content in certain subnetworks that they know have a reaction to the metadata so they have the knowledge going in. It's not like they're scanning the whole world. They're monitoring pockets like a drone, right? Once they get over the territory, then they do the acquired deeper targets and then go viral. That's basically how fake news works. >> See the problem is, you look at something like alt-right and ANTIFA. ANTIFA, just like Black Lives Matter, the initiatives may have started out with righteous intentions just like take a knee. These initiatives, first stage is if it causes chaos, chaos is the op for a nation state in the US. That's the op. Chaos. That's the beginning and the end of an op. What happens is they will say, "oh okay look, this is ticking off all these other people "so let's fan the flame of this take a knee thing "hurt the NFL." Who cares? I don't watch football anyway but you know, take a knee. It's causing all this chaos. >> John: It's called trolling. >> What will happen is Russia and China, China has got their 13 five year plan, Russia has their foreign influence operations. They will fan that flame to exhaustion. Now what happens to the ANTIFA guy when he's a self-radicalized wound collector with a mental disorder? Maybe he's bipolar. Now with ANTIFA, he's experienced a heightened more extreme variation of that particular ideology so who steps in next? Cyber caliphate and Muslim brotherhood. That's why we're going to have an epidemic. I can't believe, you know, ANTIFA is a domestic terrorist organization. It's shocking that the FBI is not taking this more serious. What's happening now is Muslim brotherhood funds basically the cyber caliphate. The whole point of cyber caliphate is to create awareness, instill the illusion of rampant xenophobia for recruiting. They have self-radicalized wound collectors with ANTIFA that are already extremists anyway. They're just looking for a reason to take that up a notch. That's when, cyber caliphate, they hook up with them with a hashtag. They respond and they create a relationship. >> John: They get the fly wheel going. >> They take them to a deep web forum, dark web forum, and start showing them how it works. You can do this. You can be part of something. This guy who was never even muslim now is going under the ISIS moniker and he acts. He drives people over in New York. >> They fossilized their belief system. >> The whole point to the cyber caliphate is to find actors that are already in the self-radicalization phase but what does it take psychologically and from a mentoring perspective, to get them to act? That's the cyber caliphate. >> This is the value of data and context in real time using the current events to use that data, refuel their operation. It's data driven terrorism. >> What's the prescription that you're advising? >> I'm not a regulations kind of guy, but any time you're curating metadata like we're just talking about right now. Any time you have organizations like google, like Facebook, that have become so big, they are like their own nation state. That's a dangerous thing. The metadata curation. >> John: The value of the data is very big. That's the point. >> It is because what's happening... >> John: There's always a vulnerability. >> There's always a vulnerability and it will be exploited and all that metadata, it's unscrubbed. I'm not worried about them selling metadata that's scrubbed. I'm worried about the nation state or the sophisticated actor that already has a remote access Trojan on the network and is exfiltrating in real time. That's the guy that I'm worried about because he can just say, "forget it, I'm going to target people that are at this phase." He knows how to write algorithms, comes up with a good psychographic algorithm, puts the data in there, and now he's like, "look I'm only going to promote this concept, "two people at this particular stage of self-radicalization "or sympathetic to the kremlin." We have a big problem on the college campuses with IP theft because of the Chinese Students Scholar Associations which are directly run by the Chinese communist party. >> I heard a rumor that Equifax's franchising strategy had partners on the VPN that were state sponsored. They weren't even hacking, they had full access. >> There's a reason that the Chinese are buying hotels. They bought the Waldorf Astoria. We do stuff with the UN and NATO, you can't even stay there anymore. I think it's still under construction but it's a no-no to stay there anymore. I mean western nations and allies because they'll have bugs in the rooms. The WiFi that you use... >> Has fake certificates. >> Or there's a vulnerability that's left in that network so the information for executives who have IP or PII or electronic health records, you know what I mean? You go to these places to stay overnight, as an executive, and you're compromised. >> Look what happened with Eugene Kaspersky. I don't know the real story. I don't know if you can comment, but someone sees that and says, "this guy used to have high level meetings "at the Pentagon weekly, monthly." Now he's persona non grata. >> He fell out of favor, I guess, right? It happens. >> James, great conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Congratulations on the great work you guys are doing here at the event. I know the content has been well received. Certainly the key notes we saw were awesome. CSOs, view from the government, from industry, congratulations. James Scott who is the co founder and senior fellow of ICIT, Internet Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> James: Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> T is for tech. >> And the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. >> Good stuff. A lot of stuff going on (mumbles), exploits, infrastructure, it's all mainstream. It's the crisis of our generation. There's a radical shift happening and the answers are all going to come from industry and government coming together. This is the Cube bringing the data, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break. (music)