(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we've been following AWS generally and the public sector specifically for a number of years now. We've seen the ascendancy of an expansion of public sector. We've covered the career of Teresa Carlson, and we're here in London ahead of AWS Summit London. There's a pre-day here, there's a number of public sector companies, there's a focus on healthcare. Kieron James is here, he's the founder of Wonderful.org. Wonderful.org is a fundraising vehicle, it's a really setup platform essentially for self-service. Kieron, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming up. >> Hello. >> So, tell me about Wonderful, why you started this organization? >> Wonderful was kicked off when I got to my 50th birthday, essentially, it's a way to give back. I've been involved in the tech sector for many years and we were sitting on quite a lot of infrastructure. We thought we had some spec paucity as well and we thought what we can do with the resource, human and physical, in terms of giving something back to charities. So, one of the things that looked like a great opportunity was to setup a completely fee-free fundraising platform. And essentially, that's what we kicked off with a brief of concept in 2016. >> So, fee-free meaning I can come in, I can setup my own fundraising vehicle so all the money goes to the recipients. >> A 100%, we have no charges whatsoever to charities, to donors, to fundraisers. And essentially, all the card processing fees as well are covered, and through the generosity of AWS and its NPO program, we've been able to also cover things like hosting as well which has been phenomenal for us, 'cause it really does enable us to give every single penny to charity. >> So, how do you fund your staff? >> The staff currently on our model going forward, if it's one that we continue, if we can continue to support is through secondment. So, we seconded our technical resource from my day job which is essentially running a telecoms business, and those guys are incredibly generous with their time. So, evenings and weekends have been devoted to setting up and maintaining the platform. We've called in favors from people we have networked with over the years. So again, when we moved beyond proof of concept into the current website now, the current build, we were able to get that done with some cost but albeit, a fraction of what we would've paid commercially. And essentially as we move forward, we want the whole concept to Wonderful.org to be something much bigger than just the organization. It's a vehicle for commercial organizations to do good. >> So, lots of in-kind contributions, lots of your time obviously so, when did you start the organization? >> 2016 and essentially, we went through what I describe as a proof of concept. We set three broad milestones, one was the first 100 charities onboard, first 100,000 pounds of a revenue or charity not really revenue but charity donations through the website. And we launched our first Wonderful week where we brought some sports celebrities including Phil Neville, now the manager of the England women's football team. He came on board to do some charity work for us with his family. Once we passed through those three milestones, it was then a case of saying, okay we've achieved all of these now, let's push the button and actually do this properly in inverted commas, and that's when we looked at hosting the thing properly, looked at the commercial build and so on. >> So that those milestones were really the prove the concept. >> Yeah. >> But they're pretty substantial milestone, >> Sure. >> And you hit them pretty fast though. >> We did hit them fast but again to give you some context on that, the first 100,000 through the website probably took us I would guess between 12 and 14 months. In the last 28 days, we've processed about a quarter of a million pounds through the website. So, the growth's been phenomenal and the appetite from the charities is enormous. What's particularly interesting about our sector is that whilst the lot of the events that take place like the London Marathon and so on, are very predictable, we know exactly the date and time that people are gonna be donating. Clearly, you get events that are completely unpredictable. We've gotta be able to respond and be available for donors to give when those kinds of things happen. >> Okay so, this leads me to the conversation about your infrastructure and obviously the Cloud. When you started the organization, you had your own owned premises infrastructure, correct? >> Correct. >> So take us through what that looked like and your decision to move to the Cloud. >> Expensive, disjointed, very complex. So, we were running essentially a full stock on a number of servers that were hosted independently. Co-location was expensive, maintenance was expensive, even things like getting to site were expensive, and if the rare occasions when you do have to do that in a hurry it can be quite time-consuming, particularly as I say given our profile where these guys are really doing it for love not money. So, it became apparent to us, I think learning from some scenarios that we've seen in the real world with other platforms as well when even the predictable events had still created some concerns for some of the charities in terms of availability. So, we've took a long hard look at what we had and said, are we scalable, are we fully available? Probably not, we need to look at this in some detail now. So, that was when we completely re-architected the website and looked at AWS. >> So, it was not only a matter of say scaling up for high demand and unpredictability but you had a fragile infrastructure. >> We did. >> And essentially, (chuckles) you're volunteers trying to keep it together. >> Exactly. >> So that's not a good formula for high availability, right? >> No, absolutely not. >> So, how does that change with the Cloud? >> With the Cloud, I think what we've got now is we've got a really good view of everything. We've got a view of the whole of our infrastructure in one place, so it gives our operations director a lot more peace of mind 'cause he can see all of the resources at his disposal. I think in terms of security, it's far far better for us as well, because we can manage access to various components, available US, depending on who needs access. So, our web developers are currently remote, they're not formally part of the organization. So, we can strict access to things that we don't want 'em to have access and so on and give them full access where it's required. So, I think that's been a lot of peace of mind for the operations director. And just having that confidence in clearly a brand that's got a huge reputation and people feel immensely confident about seeing. So, for us being to put the AWS badge on the website to reinforce to our users, to our donors that we're here, we're solid, we're stable, we're not going anywhere, it's really really important. >> Anyway, you said upfront that Adobe has some skin in the game, they're providing some services, >> They are. >> Some contributions. >> Yeah. >> So, that's gotta be pretty substantial. >> Massive. >> For you guys, yeah. >> Absolutely massive. I mean in all honesty, it's second only to card processing which is a significant cost of doing our business and one which is paid for by our other corporate sponsors. It's our second biggest cost without a doubt or would be if it were a cost but mercifully, AWS has come to the rescue and we're able to do what we're doing now. >> So corporate sponsors, give a little commercial, how does that work? >> Well essentially, our biggest corporate sponsor, our main partner at the moment is The Co Operative Bank and they have underwritten all of our card processing fees for the duration of that partnership. The big caveat with that is that we don't know what they will be and whilst we can provide some forecast based on empirical evidence, worst case scenario, there's another tragedy, people reach for their wallets and give, and suddenly that can go through the roof in the course of a couple of weeks. So, the difficulty in bringing corporate sponsors on for us is just that kind of unpredictability of the sector that we're operating in, but they've been tremendous. >> That's amazing right? >> Yeah. >> 'cause I could say that's a big junk of your cost >> For sure. >> Along with your infrastructure but, I'm fascinated by this organization and just wanna congratulate you on the mission and actually getting it off the ground because we all when we give to a charity, we always ask okay, what are the administrative cost behind this? You go to the website and you look it up and sometimes you just don't feel comfortable, and so what you've done is actually just eliminated that overhead. >> Completely. >> And where do you see this going? I mean you've got like 15 hundred registered charities now. >> Yes, yeah we're up to 15 hundred, again we've had a couple of fairly major events we were endorsed by the Money Saving Expert at number one but how could they not put us at number one. (they both laugh) Would've been very odd if they hadn't, given that we're the only completely fee-free platform. That clearly creates the demand and I think that endorsement was a huge catalyst to the growth. More recently, we've seen other things, BT MyDonate actually pulled out of this sector which has caused a lot of charities to migrate to our platform as well. In terms of where we see it going, we will need to continue to raise money from corporate sponsors to support it. But, there is a real step game in that, we have to manage that growth to meet their expectations as best as we can. But equally, new corporate sponsors coming onboard will want to see that we've got enough eyeballs to make it worth their while getting behind the organization. So, it's that constant game of trying to bring on the next round of funding and getting people through. >> How global do you see this getting? How is it today and in the future? >> Conceptually, there's no reason at all why this shouldn't be a global phenomenon but, we're now very concentrated on the UK, just because of our resource and we do get requests all of the time for international charities, for international fundraisers and so on, but we've gotta be realistic about what we can support. But going back to the point that I made earlier, it really isn't about Wonderful.org, it's about just corporations, fundraisers, charities, donors, we see all of the last three being wonderful all of the time by the nature of what they do, we're just trying to get more corporations to be as wonderful as, sounds terribly sick and fancy, but as AWS has been in supporting what we're doing, it's that sense of what we're trying to achieve here goes beyond one organization. >> Well, and the Cloud allows you to scale potentially to the extent that you can get the resource. There's no reason you can't go global. >> No. >> I'm gonna check it out and see even for a little local charity, can I (he chuckles), >> Absolutely. >> Can I participate, what does that involve? Do you have to have some minimum threshold or? >> No? >> No, anybody can-- >> Anybody, but you need to be a registered UK charity with one of the UK registrars. Beyond that, we go through a little bit of due diligence with the charity, so we will need to see some documentation. So, there's a little manual step in onboarding charities, but for all the right reasons, we wanna be diligent about the people using the platform to give the fundraisers the confidence that they're donating to a charity. So, we don't do any peer-to-peer fundraising, it is literally you'll register as a charity and the fundraisers can support your charity, often led by the fundraisers rather than the charities, interestingly, so the fundraisers will be saying to the charities, why are you not on this platform which gives you everything and you're already on this platform which doesn't. So, there's quite a lot of pressure now coming from the fundraisers to pull the charities in. >> So, there's a lot of word-of-mouth, a lot of peer-to-peer. >> Absolutely. >> Right, you don't really have the funding. >> There is no. >> The budget to go market. >> Not at all. >> Yeah, that's remote. >> Absolutely not. >> Well, hopefully this will help. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Alright, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be back right after this short break from AWS HQ in London, right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. You're watching The Cube, and we have a special coverage here of the pre-day at AWS headquarters in London. I'm Dave Vellante and The Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alastair Allen is here, the chief technical officer of Healthcare Kainos Software. It's a Belfast based company, publicly traded company. Alastair, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you, thanks for coming out. You were downstairs earlier addressing the audience, we're gonna talk about that. But first of all, tell us about Kainos. >> So Kainos, Belfast based company, formed in the late '80's a spin out of Queens University in Belfast. We've grown to now over 1300 people and we build digital technology to help people work faster, smarter and better. There's two things we do. We provide digital services, bespoke services for public and private sector organizations across the world, and we provide digital platforms for work day customers and also for healthcare organizations. >> So, when you say digital platforms. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell our audience. >> So, our digital platforms in healthcare is something that we can talk about. So platforms to enable both hospitals to digitize their workflow and also regions, so CCG's , STP's within the NHS. To bring information together using a platform and normalizing that data and making it available to clinicians and patients. >> And this is, your flagship product is called Evolve. Correct? >> Correct. >> And you're one of the sort of founders or inventors of Evolve. Tell us more about Evolve. >> So Evolve, originated just over ten years ago, our first customer was Ipswich Hospital and Ipswich had a big problem with paper, with a large medical records library and they asked us to come in and help them digitize that and make it available in an easy to view, accessible format for their clinicians. >> So tell me more about that. So you digitize it, you take all this mounds of paper and what does that do? Other than reduce the amounts of paper. Does it make it searchable? >> Yeah, we index the content, we apply metadata whenever we capture it, trying to make it accessible for clinicians. I think when you digitize paper , the one good thing paper had going for it was you could pick it up and it was tactile. So we've done a lot of work to try and make it mobile, make it accessible, make it searchable and increasingly now with some of the services that AWS provide, we're able to look at taking that even further and getting more information out of that content. >> Add some color to that. So how has the AWS cloud affected your ability to deliver these capabilities to your customers? >> Well I think, the breathe and depth of services that AWS provide, enables us to be able to innovate quickly, to use services like I've mentioned like comprehend medical. That take the heavy lifting, away from us and helps us focus on delivering better applications for our customers. >> So part of what you do, is you architected the software that's running on the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? What you guys have built. Presumably the cloud allows you to scale. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> And take advantage of more innovations. But discuss the architecture if you would. >> So, the product that I originally talked about in 2009 and about four years ago in 2015, we decided to re-platform for the cloud. And that was in response to a number of problems that we were seeing in the market. And moved to patient centered care, a drive to try and standardize care away from the variable nature that was there and also to get away from closed silos of information. And we decided at that point to create our platform natively in the cloud and using the services of Amazon web services. So we created a microservices based architecture that runs in multi-candidate cloud native way. With a AWS. That allows us to adopt disciplines like continuous delivery and cultures like DeVops. We've been able to release value quickly and often to our customers. >> So it was a total rewrite of the platform? >> Yes. So we started again from scratch and we developed that using the modern cloud services. And we've used that then for all use cases as well so we've moved beyond just settings within a hospital. And been able to take that beyond the walls of a hospital, out into the community, into primary care, mental health. And delivering solutions like that, across regions within the NHS, to join up information. Where before clinicians would simply not have had access to those. >> In a sense you're migrating your existing install base to the cloud based platform, as I presume it's a SAS based platform. Is that right? >> So, Evolve Integrated Care is a platform it's a SAS based platform. So we run it, we monitor it, we maintain it and we deliver that as a service to our customers. >> And so your existing customers now have an opportunity to migrate and how does that all work? >> Yeah, so we're talking to our existing customers, how they can leverage the cloud based platform and the breathe of different services that it provides. We very much see an opportunity for helping to digitize a hospital. So how do you optimize the flow of patients through a hospital and making sure that clinicians have access to the information. Many of customers have hundreds of applications, information spread across their estate, bringing that together and orchestrating the workflow for particular pathways or particular conditions. >> Plus they have to manage their own infrastructure, I presume. >> Absolutely, and we want to build applications quickly, they want to focus on delivering healthcare. They don't want to focus on managing ten and server rooms within their hospitals. So, our move to the cloud really came about because of our customers telling us that they're struggling to manage this infrastructure. They wanted us to take some of that burden away from them and to help them with some of their security challenges, availability challenges. Quite often their local infrastructure was not very resilient. And by moving to AWS, we were able to use native cloud services to address many of those challenges. >> So you're taking away that heavy lifting for them. AWS takes it away for you. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> In a large regard as well. While your engineers can obviously program the infrastructure. But how have you seen the customers that have moved and taken advantage of this. What has it done for their business specifically? What's the impact? >> So, what I think, it frees up people within their organization to scale up in other areas to do other things. It frees up physical space as well in many cases. It takes away risks and we've all heard of some of the recent security incidents. Wanna Cry was a huge thing in the NHS not so long ago. Coming around from just simple things like not patching servers and work stations. So, by taking on that responsibility we're freeing up those hospital systems to focus on what they do best. >> How do they do that? Do they kind of retrain folks? What's that been like? I presume it wasn't frictionless but it's an opportunity for people to advance their careers. Do you have any visibility on how your customers have handled that? >> To be honest, not a huge amount. It has, I agree, there has been some friction there. It's not always an easy journey, there's a whole mindset change of what people used to do before and the types of activity that they'll do tomorrow. And it's something that our customers are still on a journey on. And so we're quite early on in that process. >> But I would say to folks in the IT community of your expertise's of managing storage arase, there's probably a better future for you if you can move up the stack and learn more about applications , data, machine intelligence. >> Absolutely, higher up the value chain and getting closer to the user, closer to the customer. >> I mean, that's where the difference is. And it's particularly in healthcare right? You try to balance the cost of healthcare, everybody's aware of the rising cost of healthcare with the patient outcomes. And technology is a way to address that problem. Isn't it? >> Absolutely, and I think never before. I think it's just a great time to work in health IT. We've now got access to some fantastic services the rise of artificial intelligence, the machine learning has never before been so available. And really having organizations such as ourselves to really solve those problems that our customers have and introduce those efficiencies and ultimately better patient outcomes. >> So how are you using the data that lives in Evolve, I presume you're looking at applying artificial intelligence and the like, talk about that. But also, how do you ensure security, privacy, etcetera? >> So, a couple things on data, I think one of the things we've done recently is the adoption of the FHIR standard within healthcare and all the data that we aggregate from the various clinical systems, we normalize that down into a single FHIR data profile and that really helps us then have a common data model that our application can use. But that's only the start, that creates the potential then to use that for secondary usage, such as publishing health data analytics and ultimately machine learning. And we're looking at a number of errors in machine learning, I think there are some ethical challenges there to be aware of and we've started with a recent examples of understanding how we can use machine learning to try and get that structured data out of the documents, that's something that we're working on with data with the AWS team at the minute, to leverage a lot of that scanned content that we have and evolve and be able to create the structured outcome. Really to make it easier for clinicians to find information within the medical record. >> So the AWS reinvent last fall, you know Sage Maker was of course buzzing. Is that something that you're looking at? >> It's something, so we haven't used it in Evolve so far but within Kainos we have an AI practice and we have a group of guys that are focused on the AI capability. Evaluating those tools, working with AWS and helping us understand how we can use that technology to solve the problems of our customers. >> Yeah, it's early days. So you talk about helping solve the problems of the customers. Summarize for us the key problems that you see machine intelligence, AI solving. >> I think there's probably different categories of how you could use it. There's the diagnostic sort of use case where you could use AI to help process imagery, to help with the diagnostic process. There's being able to add personalization to whether that be to patients or to clinicians, helping to provide insight into whatever the use case may be and all the use cases similar to that. >> Last words, so you're addressing the pre-day healthcare reform that's going on here at AWS. What's that like, what's going on downstairs, what did you tell the audience? >> Yeah, great day. So we had a group of healthcare professionals across the NHS in Ireland, very interesting group. We spoke this morning, I spoke with our customer Gloucester CC chief and we talked about the shared care record solution that we've delivered into Gloucester. So that's bringing information together for over 600,000 patients across the region and providing information in a single joined up view that was not available before. So great feedback, great interaction, lots of questions afterwards so looking forward to going back down and chatting some more to the group. >> Excellent. Hard to do that without the cloud I would imagine , accommodating all of the 600,000 customers right. >> Not possible. >> Alastair thanks so much for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Appreciate having you. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching The Cube from AWS headquarter in London. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with The Cube, the leader in tech coverage, and we're here at AWS. We wanted to cover deeper the public sector activity. We've been covering this segment for quite some time, with the public sector summit in DC, went to Bahrain last year, and we wanted to extend that to London. We're doing a special coverage here with a number of public sector folks. Anjenesh Babu is here, he's a network manager at Oxford GLAM. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Thank you.], thanks. >> GLAM, I love it. Gardens, libraries and museums, you even get the A in there, which everybody always leaves out. So tell us about Oxford GLAM. >> So we are part of the heritage collection side of the University. And I'm here representing the gardens and museums. In the divisions we've got world renown collections, which has been held for 400 years or more. It comprises of four different museums and the Oxford University Botanic Gardens and Arboretum. So in total, we're looking at five different divisions, spread across probably sixteen different sites, physical sites. And the main focus of the division is to bring out collections to the world, through digital outreach, engagement and being fun, bringing fun into the whole system. Sustainment is big, because we are basically custodians of our collections and it has to be here almost forever, in a sense. And we can only display about 1% of our collections at any one point and we've got about 8.5 million objects. So as you can imagine, the majority of that is in storage. So one way to bring this out to the wider world is to digitize them, curate them and present them, either online or in another form. So that is what we do. >> In your role as the network manager is to makes sure everything connects and works and stays up? Or maybe describe that a little more. >> So, I'm a systems architect and network manager for gardens and museums, so in my role, my primary focus is to bridge the gap between technical and the non-technical functions, within the department. And I also look after network and infrastructure sites, so there's two parts to the role, one is a BAU business as usual function where we keep the networks all going and keep the lights on, basically. The second part is bringing together designs, it's not just solving technical problems, so if I'm looking at a technical problem I step out and almost zoom out to see, what else are we looking at which could be connected, and solve the problem. For example, we could be looking at a web design solution in one part of the project, but it's not relevant just to that project. If you step out and say, we could do this in another part of the program, and we may be operating in silence and we want to breakdown those, that's part of my role as well. >> Okay, so you're technical but you also speak the language of the organization and business. We put it in quotes because you're not a business per say. Okay, so you're digitizing all these artifacts and then making them available 24/7, is that the idea? What are some of the challenges there? >> So the first challenge is only 3% of objects are actually digitized. So we have 1% on display, 3% is actually digitized, it's a huge effort, it's not just scanning or taking photographs, you've got cataloging, accessions and a whole raft of databases that goes behind. And museums historically have got their own separate database collection which is individually held different collection systems, but as public, you don't care, we don't care, we just need to look at the object. You don't want to see, that belongs to the Ashmolean Museum or the picture does. You just want to see, and see what the characteristics are. For that we are bringing together a layer, which integrates different museums, it sort of reflects what we're doing in out SIT. The museums are culturally diverse institutions and we want to keep them that way, because each has got its history, a kind of personality to it. Under the hood, the foundational architecture, systems remain the same, so we can make them modular, expandable and address the same problems. So that's how we are supporting this and making it more sustainable at the same time. >> So you have huge volume, quality is an issue because people want to see beautiful images. You got all this meta data that you're collecting, you have a classification challenge. So how are you architecting this system and what role does the Cloud play in there? >> So, in the first instance we are looking at a lot of collections were on premises in the past. We are moving as a SaaS solution at the first step. A lot of it requires cleansing of data, almost, this is the state of the images we aren't migrating, we sort of stop here let's cleanse it, create new data streams and then bring it to the Cloud. That's one option we are looking at and that is the most important one. But during all this process in the last three years with the GLAM digital program there's been huge amount of changes. To have a static sort of golden image has been really crucial. And to do that if we are going down rate of on premise and trying to build out, scale out infrastructures, it would have a huge cost. The first thing that I looked at was, explore the Cloud options and I was interested in solutions like Snowball and the Storage Gateway. Straightforward, loads up the data and it's on the Cloud, and then I can fill out the infrastructure as much as I want, because we can all rest easy, the main, day one data is in the Cloud, and it's safe, and we can start working on the rest of it. So it's almost like a transition mechanism where we start working on the data before it goes to the Cloud anyway. And I'm also looking at a Cloud clearing house, because there's a lot of data exchanges that are going to come up in the future, vendor to vendor, vendor to us and us to the public. So it sort of presents itself a kind of junction, who is going to fill the junction? I think the obvious answer is here. >> So Snowball or Gateway, basically you either Snowball or Gateway the assets into the Cloud and you decide which one to use based on the size and the cost associated with doing that, is that right? >> Yes, and convenience. I was saying this the other day at another presentation, it's addictive because it's so simple and straight forward to use, and you just go back and say it's taken me three days to transfer 30 terabytes into a Snowball appliance and on the fourth day, it appears in in my packets, so what are we missing? Nothing. Let's do it again next week. So you got the Snowball for 10 days, bring it in transfer, so it's much more straightforward than transferring it over the network, and you got to keep and eye on things. Not that it's not hard, so for example, the first workloads we transferred over to the file gateway, but there's a particular server which had problems getting things across the network, because of out dated OS on it. So we got the Snowball in and in a matter of three days the data was on the Cloud, so to effect every two weeks up on the Snowball, bring it in two weeks, in three days it goes up back on the Cloud. So there's huge, it doesn't cost us any more to keep it there, so the matter of deletions are no longer there. So just keep it on the Cloud shifting using lifecycle policies, and it's straight forward and simple. That's pretty much it. >> Well you understand physics and the fastest way to get from here to there is a truck sometimes, right? >> Well, literally it is one of the most efficient ways I've seen, and continues to be so. >> Yeah, simple in concept and it works. How much are you able to automate the end-to-end, the process that you're describing? >> At this point we have a few proof of concept of different things that we can automate, but largely because a lot of data is held across bespoke systems, so we've got 30 terabytes spread across sixteen hard disks, that's another use case in offices. We've got 22 terabytes, which I've just described, it's on a single server. We have 20 terabytes on another Windows server, so it's quite disparate, it's quite difficult to find common ground to automate it. As we move forward automation is going to come in, because we are looking at common interface like API Gateways and how they define that, and for that we are doing a lot of work with, we have been inspired a lot by the GDS API designs, and we are just calling this off and it works. That is a road we are looking at, but at the moment we don't have much in the way of automation. >> Can you talk a bit more about sustainability, you've mentioned that a couple of times, double click on that, what's the relevance, how are you achieving sustainability? Maybe you could give some examples. >> So in the past sustainability means that you buy a system and you over provision it, so you're looking for 20 terabytes over three years, lets go 50 terabytes. And something that's supposed to be here for three years gets kept going for five, and when it breaks the money comes in. So that was the kind of very brief way of sustaining things. That clearly wasn't enough, so in a way we are looking for sustainability from a new function say, we don't need to look at long-term service contracts we need to look at robust contracts, and having in place mechanisms to make sure that whatever data goes in, comes out as well. So that was the main driver and plus with the Cloud we are looking at the least model. We've got an annual expenditure set aside and that keeps it, sustainability is a lot about internal financial planning and based on skill sets. With the Cloud skill sets are really straightforward to find and we have engaged with quite a few vendors who are partnering with us, and they work with us to deliver work packages, so in a way even though we are getting there with the skills, in terms of training our team we don't need to worry about complex deployments, because we can outsource that in sprints. >> So you have shipped it from a CAPX to an OPX model, is that right? >> Yes >> So what was that like, I mean, was that life changing, was it exhilarating? >> It was exhilarating, it was phenomenally life changing, because it set up a new direction within the university, because we were the first division to go with the public Cloud and set up a contract. Again thanks to the G-Cloud 9 framework, and a brilliant account management team from AWS. So we shifted from the CAPX model to the OPX model with an understanding that all this would be considered as a leased service. In the past you would buy an asset, it depreciates, it's no longer the case, this is a leased model. The data belongs to us and it's straight forward. >> Amazon continues to innovate and you take advantage of those innovations, prices come down. How about performance in the cloud, what are you seeing there relative to your past experiences? >> I wouldn't say it's any different, perhaps slightly better, because the new SDS got the benefit of super fast bandwidth to the internet, so we've got 20 gigs as a whole and we use about 2 gigs at the moment, we had 10 gig. We had to downgrade it because, we didn't use that much. So from a bandwidth perspective that was the main thing. And a performance perspective what goes in the Cloud you frankly find no different, perhaps if anything they are probably better. >> Talk about security for a moment, how early on in the Cloud people were concerned about security, it seems to have attenuated, but security in the Cloud is different, is it not, and so talk about your security journey and what's your impression and share with our audience what you've learned. >> So we've had similar challenges with security, from security I would say there's two pots, one's the contractual security and one is the technical security. The contractual security, if we had spun up our own separate legal agreement with AWS or any other Cloud vendor, it would have taken us ages, but again we went to the digital marketplace, used the G-Cloud 9 framework and it was no brainer. Within a week we had things turned around, and we were actually the first institution to go live with and account with AWS. That is the taken care of. SDS is a third party security assessment template, which we require all our vendors to sign. As soon as we went through that it far exceeds what the SDS requires, and it's just a tick box exercise. And things like data encryption at rest, in transit it actually makes it more secure than what we are running on premise. So in a way technically it's far more secure than what we could ever have achieved that's on premise, and it's all taken care of, straight forward. >> So you've a small fraction of your artifacts today that are digitized. What's the vision, where do you want to take this? >> We're looking at, I'm speaking on behalf of gardens, this is not me, per say, I'm speaking on behalf of my team, basically we are looking at a huge amount of digitization. The collection should be democratized, that's the whole aspect, bringing it out to the people and perhaps making them curators in some form. We may not be the experts for a massive collection from say North America or the Middle East, there are people who are better than us. So we give them the freedom to make sure they can curate it in a secure, scalable manner and that's where the Cloud comes in. And we backend it using authentication that works with us, logs that works with us and roll-back mechanisms that works with us. So that's were we are looking at in the next few years. >> How would you do this without the Cloud? >> Oh. If you're doing it without the Cloud-- >> Could you do it? >> Yes, but we would be wholly and solely dependent on the University network, the University infrastructure and a single point. So when you're looking at the bandwidth it's shared by students using it network out of the university and our collection visitors coming into the university. And the whole thing, the DS infrastructure, everything's inside the university. It's not bad in its present state but we need to look at a global audience, how do you scale it out, how do you balance it? And that's what we're looking at and it would've been almost impossible to meet the goals that we have, and the aspirations, and not to mention the cost. >> Okay so you're going to be at the summit, the Excel Center tomorrow right? What are you looking forward to there for us from a customer standpoint? >> I'm looking at service management, because a lot of our work, we've got a fantastic service desk and a fantastic team. So a lot of that is looking at service management, how to deliver effectively. As you rightly say Amazon is huge on innovation and things keep changing constantly so we need to keep track of how we deliver services, how do we make ourselves more nimble and more agile to deliver the services and add value. If you look at the OS stack, that's my favorite example, so you look at the OS stack you've got seven layers going up from physical then all the way to the application. You can almost read an organization in a similar way, so you got a physical level where you've got cabling and all the way to the people and presentation layer. So right now what we are doing is we are making sure we are focusing on the top level, focusing on the strategies, creating strategies, delivering that, rather than looking out for things that break. Looking out for things that operationally perhaps add value in another place. So that's where we would like to go. >> Anjenesh, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you >> It was a pleasure to have you. All right and thank you for watching, keep right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube, from London at Amazon HQ, I call it HQ, we're here. Right back. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, Room. Welcome back to London. You watching the Cube? The leader and tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante. We're here in a special program that we've constructed. It's the day before the eight of US London summit and we wanted to come and talk to some customers, some executives of startups, and really dig into what's going on in the public sector. Chris Heman is here. He's the director of UK and Ireland Public sector for eight of us. Chris, Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks for vitamins. Christ. >> Yeah. So you guys have a special public sector healthcare pre day that's going on downstairs? What's that all about? >> Yes. So obviously we'LL remain summit tomorrow expecting about twelve thousand people, which is phenomenal today that we could do something with one of our special industries, which is health care. So we've invited a number of customers and executives along for that today to learn more about cloud, how they can get going with the cloud and get, you know, start adopting a pace. So I believe you spoke with the missus about earlier on. So he misses a supplies the n hs, but also people and hs digital and so on her adopting the platform. So that's what today's all about. >> So health care is one of those sectors. It's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been, you know, disrupted in a big way and digitized and it's starting. But the challenge is, how do you balance the cost of health care? Everybody's sensitized to that with the quality. Yeah, here. And so that's what really the problem. Show yourself. How does he ws in the cloud? Help solve that. >> Yeah, I think across the public sex. Really not just for the healthcare, but, you know, one of the things organizations are trying to do is reduce that large legacy footprint of infrastructure and really deliver against their mission, whether it be patients or citizens or whatever it may be. Ah, good example. In the in the case of the health care is we're working with a partner and I just school Business Services Authority on they have a large call center that was a really, you know, costly experience having traditional call center set up. So they've used our connect platform, our call center platform, and also some voice technologic called Lex. And they're able to reduce they stood up in about three weeks is a phenomenal effort, and they reduce their call volume by forty two percent. So basically getting the computer's towards some of the really easy queries, which, of course, meant that some of the tougher call center queries went to the actual humans and the call center handlers. So you know those sort things, I really think impact the bottom line for the HS and save some cost, but really helping to innovate a swell for for their patients and sis isn't so. >> Let's stay in health care for a second. So any just has, ah, nearly half a billion pound initiative to modernize. So if had they asked me, they didn't ask me. But had they ask me, I say, Well, part of that should be to get rid of the heavy lifting, so moved to the cloud and then really try toe transform your labor force to focus on more value added areas. It's actually helps to solve your problems. Is that essentially, what's happening? >> Understand, so that the contacts into very you know, that the people are now answering fines aren't doing those sort of Monday enquiries were it's just going to take four to six weeks. It's Maur, you know, transferring that. You know that's the computer and letting the humans do the heavy lifting. So I think that's you know, certainly one thing. But I think it's also enabling these organizations to really be closer to their citizens into their patients as well. With free liquor organizations like in the local authority, space, like else prevail. There are also using voice technology with Alexa to enable citizens to answer queries like You know who is my counselor or to update about various things within their sort of council record. And socially public sector organizations love that because they've now got this unique touch point with the sisters and at scale, whereas they would never have been able to do that previously. So that's a really good, you know, close engagement for them. >> So you hear the bromide people say data is the new oil. It's it's the it's the new natural resource. We actually think date is more valuable than oil because you can only use oil in one place. The data you can use many, many places, so data becomes increasingly important. But the problem that most traditional companies have is there, Their data is locked in silos. It's hardened into an application. And so so how are you guys attacking that problem? What do you see? A CZ trends in the customer base in terms of being able tto have sort of, ah, unified data model. And what role does the cloud >> play there? Yeah, I think it's really good questions. So there's a number of things that we're doing. First of all, we're very passionate about public date sets. So we host a number of public day sets like Lanza imagery and these sort of things, you know, fundamentally, we believe data has gravity, so, you know, for overto host and provide this data at scale for researchers and so on. That has tremendous huge benefit. But you're right about public sector organizations, and I silos a good example. Where we've we've worked is with transport for London. Obviously, if you want to get in and around the city of London, typically you go to tear filled look after UK, which runs on a dress, and you'LL say, I want to get from you know, Frank and to Liverpool Street, and that's all kind of running on top of a dress. But the really cool thing is they've opened up all that information so they don't have to develop. Those ups themselves are effectively crowd sourcing the development of those APS. So they've got some four thousand developers now working against all this data. Ah, Delight recently did a study. They reckon it's goingto generate economic benefits of one hundred thirty million pounds per annum just by making this really time data available. So So you're gaining unique business in size. But not only that, you've got organizations like city mapper who can commercialize that data develop, perhaps, and sell those apse on behalf of you know, you took to the community and so on. So you've got double bubble of s on the engagement, but also the public benefit as well. So that's really cool >> now, years ago Ah, in a past life, I had an opportunity when I worked for I d see the research company to run the government business. And when I went around and talked to the heads of military heads, the heads of agencies, there was a common theme. They were trying to close the gap between public sector and commercial. Yeah, and they never quite could get there. The cloud seems to me, Chris, to be changing that. I mean, to me, the CIA deal in twenty thirteen was a seminal moment for just the cloud and need of us specifically. But increasingly, you're seeing innovation. Yeah, it's still very difficult because you get turnover and agencies and administrations and so forth. But what are you seeing in terms of of those trends? Are you seeing public sector organizations leaning in modernizing? And again, what role does the cloud play there? >> Yeah, one hundred cent. I think you're absolutely rise. It is a unifier. In that sense we worked with, you know, we're moving mission systems to the cloud now with our customers. Ah, we worked with Dr Vehicle Stands Agency. So they're responsible for making sure our car's unroadworthy in the UK. They migrated their entire platform, which supports on thirty thousand small businesses. Try the rest in ten weeks. So it's amazing what public sector organizations are able to achieve with the pace of cloud. And a lot of it starts with experimentation. You know, that's the great thing is that you can try something. If it doesn't work, you can turn it off and you haven't lost anything but that that pace of being out to move, even mission systems. So the cloud is happening in public sexual across the board, >> and I mentioned the CIA before they start to be the American sort of parachuting in, and it's obviously a bias that I have. I'm working on my accent. But But But But the CIA was significant because everybody in the early days were so concerned about security that the head of tea in the CIA stood up last year at the D. C. Public sector Summit and said, My worst day of security in the cloud is better, far better than my client server ever. Wass. Yeah. So what about security concerns? Have they abated? They they still there? How is that evolving? >> Well, I think first of always, absolutely right that public sector organizations one hundred percent laser focused on security. But the good news is that we are to you know, its job. Zero for us is absolutely everything that we don't live and breathe by. And I think we've demonstrated that in a number of ways. I mean first of all, just the way in which we operate our physical infrastructure and everything that we do it physical pace, but then above the layer with the kind of the things that are a customer's responsible for. We have something called a shared responsibility model, so the responsibility for kind of everything above the physical infrastructure, but we provide the tools that they just never would've been able to get access to in a in a physical world, you know what our CEO's in public sector organizations do You know every servant you have, you know, just things like that. And they would just be like Now I've got no idea, but with a cloud, you have that visibility. You can see every single thing that's happening in the environment. So you get farm or visibility in control that he ever was ever were able to in a physical world. So I think that's first thing and obviously everything that we do around certification atter stations around. I so certification all the reporting and so on that we do Teo to assure our customers that we do a good job of that level as well. Ministry of Justice actually came out and said you could be more secure in the cloud than on premises and you have to focus on those areas where you're not in the cloud. So I think that was a huge testament by the UK. Come and say, Actually, this is this is secure, and this is fit for purpose, which is which is good. >> One of the things I've observed boat just technology adoption in general. You know, Silicon Valley's unique, obviously, And but, you know, outside of Silicon Valley, maybe technology adoption, you know, twenty years ago occurred more slowly. It seems like cloud adoption is very much consistent across the globe. I wonder if you could talk about that, But then specifically, public sector jobs in the cloud Do you see this Very similar sort of cadence from, you know, us rest of >> world? Yeah, I do. And I think you know, we were doing a fantastic job in the UK, Actually. Really fantastic job. Talked about some of stuff we're doing round. I I am machine learning. You know, some of these things are really leading edge on DH. If you speak to a miss earlier, they're investigating things like Blockchain for their tops of solution. So these sort of things are really pushing the boundary. But Paramount, All of that is this idea that you can experiment to try things. There's no longer there's a kind of is no longer a disparity around. Think something's fundamentally when you when you log into the console, you got access to one hundred sixty five different things and you can get going with you in the UK whether you're in the candor or in North America. So our customers are picking these things up on DH, accelerating a pace, which is which is fantastic trying all different types of things and work lights. >> Okay, if I were to ask Alexa what's gonna happen with Brexit, what would what would you tell me? I think first of >> almost, you know, with the way we think about it is it's just business as usual for us. You know, it's a fairly mundane answer, but fundamentally, you know, organization still need to adapt. This stone is transformed. They still need to evolve, and that's where we're helping and we're leaning in, you know, we're helping them with some of their EU accept programs around tooling and process and things like that. But I still came to adopt cloud a place which is which is also >> so come back to the session that you guys are running downstairs. I saw some of descriptions of it and I think there were three areas of focus. The public payers, the health care providers in the publicly funded research organizations is kind of what you guys are focused on today. So maybe close there and give us a vision for where you see eight of us public sector in the UK and >> I I think this were obviously healthcare's really fast growing vertical for us, which is fantastic upper across the board. Demand has never been greater, which is phenomenal on DH were really pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. Yeah, we're working with, you know, I talked about some the public sector organizations with working with, you know, partners like he miss, but also small businesses as well as great example. Working with a company called Ad Zuna, which provides job search functionality. They run on a dress and they want a contract for Jobcentre Plus, which part of our department work and pensions. So it's not just the direct engagement we have with our customers. But it's also a ll the partners that we're working with to enable that in tow and functionality, which is which is really good. So we're doing a lot, lots of work in that space. And I could liken see Maura Mohr organizations not just customers in customers, but also partners technology providers coming to talk to us. Ah, and then across the spectrum, in health care, whether it's supplies to the chess or at the NSS himself, an individual trusts and and hospitals and so on, the kind of using our technology. So it's a real broad mixing spectrum of adoption. >> Outstanding, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube really appreciate it. And they were seeing the growth of a device is a DBS is actually astounding thirty billion dollars run rate company growing at forty plus percent a year. But more importantly, you're starting to see not only region expansion, but you're seeing expansion into specific verticals and ecosystems forming startups. And you guys are doing a great job of attracting these. Thanks very much for coming. Thanks. Thanks. Alright, Keep it right there. Buddy. This is David, Dante and the Cuba right back. Right after this short break. Wait

(electronic music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We're here with a special session in London, we've been following the career of Teresa Carlson around, we asked, "hey, can we come to London to your headquarters there and interview some of the leaders and some of the startups and innovators both in public sector and commercial?" Andy Isherwood is here, he's the managing director of AWS EMEA. Andy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, thank you very much for your time. >> So you're about a year in, so that's plenty of time to get acclimated, what are your impressions of AWS and then we'll get into the market? >> Yeah, so it's nearly a year and a half actually, so time definitely goes pretty quickly. So I'd say it's pretty different, I'd say probably a couple of things kind of jump out at me. One is, I think we just have a startup mentality in everything we do. So, y'know, if you think about everything we do kind of works back from the customer and we really feel like a kind of startup at heart. And we always say, y'know, within the organization, we should also make it feel like day one. If we get to day two, y'know, the game's over. So we always try and make day one something that's kind of relevant in what we're doing. I think the second thing is customer obsession. I think we are truly customer obsessed. And you could say that most organizations actually say, y'know, they're customer obsessed. I'd say we're truly customer obsessed in everything we do so if you think about our re:Invent program, if you think about, y'know, London, the summit coming up, what you will notice is that there will be customers everywhere, speaking about their experiences and that's really important. So we start with the customer and we always work back. So super important that we never forget that and if you think about how we develop our services, they start with the customer. We don't go out like a product company would and make great products and sell them. We start with the customer, work back, develop the solutions and then let the customer use them, and we iterate on those developments. So I'd say it's pretty different in those two aspects. I'd say the other thing is, it's just hugely relevant. Every customer I go into, and I've seen hundreds of customers in the last year and a half, were hugely relevant. Y'know, we are at the heart of what people want to do and need to do, which makes it important. >> Yeah, so we've been following the career of Andy Jassy for years and we've learnt about the Working Backwards documents, certainly you guys are raising the bar all the time, is sort of the mantra, and yeah, customer centricity, you said it's different, y'know, we do over a hundred events every year and every company out there talks about, "we're focused on the customer", but what makes AWS different? >> I think it's the fact that we truly listen and work back from the customer. So, y'know, we're not a product company, we don't make products with great R&D people and then take them and sell them. We don't obsess about the competition, y'know, we start with the customer, we go and speak to the customer, I think we listen intently to what they need, and we help them look round corners. We help them think about what they need to do for them to be successful, then we work back and probably 90% of what we do is fundamentally developed from those insights that the customer gives us. That's quite different. That really is a working back methodology. >> We run most of our business on AWS and it's true, so I remember we were in a meeting with Andy Jassy one time and he started asking us how we use the platform and what we like about it and don't like about it, and my business partner, John Furrier, he's kind of our CTO, he starts rattling off a number of things that he wanted to see, and Andy pulls out his pad and he starts writing it down, and he was asking questions back and forth, so I think I've seen that in action. One of the things that we've observed is that the adoption of cloud in EMEA and worldwide is pretty consistent and ubiquitous, there's not like a big gap, y'know, you used to see years later, y'know, Europe would maybe adopt a technology and you're seeing actually in many cases, you certainly see it with mobile, you're seeing greater advancements. GDPR, obviously, is a template for privacy, what are you seeing in Europe in terms of some of the major trends of cloud adoption? >> Yeah, I don't think we're seeing major differences, y'know, people talk a lot about, "well, Europe must be two years behind North America" in terms of adoption. We don't see that, I think it is slightly slower in some countries, but I don't think that's kind of common across the piste. So I'd say that the adoption, and if you think back to some customers that were very early adopters, just from an overall global cloud perspective, companies like Shell, for example, y'know they were really early adopters, and those were European-based companies, you could say they're global companies, absolutely, but a lot of what they did was developed in Europe. So I would say that there are countries that are slower to adopt, sometimes driven by the fact that, y'know, security is an issue, or was an issue, that data sovereignty was a bigger issue for some of these countries. But I think all of those are pretty much passed now, so I think we are very quickly kind of catching up with regards to the North American market. So, yeah. >> You mentioned your sort of startup mentality, you mentioned BP. Is it divisions within a large company like that that are startup-like? Is that what you're seeing in terms of the trends? >> No, I'm seeing three patterns. So I'm seeing a pattern which is, y'know, large organizations that go all-in very quickly, typically, y'know, strong leadership, clear vision, need to move quickly. >> Dave Vellante: We're going cloud? >> Yeah, we're going cloud, and we're going all in and that may be, like an NL would be a great example. So NL's a really good example of a top-down approach, very progressive CIO, very clear-thinking CEO that's driven adoption. So I'd say that's pattern one. For me, pattern two is where large organizations create an entity alongside, so almost a separate business. So probably Openbank is probably a good example, part of Santander. And now that organization has about one and a half million customers, obviously started in Spain, but they built a digital bank, clearly tapping into all of the data and customer sets within Santander, but building an experience which is fundamentally different. >> So a skunkworks that really grew and grew? >> Correct, absolutely, a skunkworks that grew, but grew quickly and now it's becoming y'know, a key part of their business. And then the third area, or the third pattern for me is very much a kind of a bottoms-up-led approach. So this is where the developers basically love the services that we have, they use the services, they typically put them on their credit card or AMEX, and then they'll go and use the services and create real value. That value is then seen and it snowballs. So those are kind of the three patterns. I'd say the only outlier to those three patterns is a startup organization, and as you know we've been hugely successful with startups, from, y'know, Pinterest, to Uber, to Careem, to all of these organizations and those organizations it's really important to influence them early on, to make sure that they are aware, and the developer community and the founders are aware of what we can do and we have a number of programs to really help them do that. And they start to use our services, and as those organizations are successful then our business grows alongside them and they, y'know, typically start to use a lot more of the services. >> One of the defining patterns of three, the bottoms-up and four, the start-ups, is they code infrastructure. And, y'know, sometimes the one, the top-down may not have the skillsets and the disciplines and the structure to do that. What are you seeing in terms of that whole programmable infrastructure, the skillsets, programmers essentially coding the infrastructure? Are you seeing CIOs come in and say, "Okay, we need to re-skill", are they bringing in new staff, kind of like number two, the Openbank example might be, y'know, some rockstars that they wanna sort of assign to the skunkwork. How is the number one category dealing with that in terms of their digital transformation? >> Yeah, so y'know, skills is something that is critically important, having the right skills in the right place at the right time. And if you think about Europe it's a big outsourced market, so a lot of those skills were outsourced typically to a lot of the outsourcing companies, as you'd expect. What you're seeing now is organizations, BP's a good example of this, where they're building the innovation capability back into their organizations to make sure that they can create the offerings and create the user experience and create the business models for the new world. And what we're doing is really trying to make sure that we're enabling those organizations to build the skills. So probably at a number of different levels, kind of, y'know, very basic level, or at a very junior level we're kind of influencing people in schools. So, y'know, we're going to be announcing, or announcing at the summit, Guess IT, which is basically a program to train up year eight students. So you start there, and basically you go all the way through to offering training and certification, we have a very big function associated with that to make sure that we're building the right skills for organizations to be successful, and also then working with partners, so all of those training and certification skills, we are working with the partners like the Cloudreaches of this world, but also the DXCs of this world, the Accentures of this world, the Atoses of this world, really to make sure that they have the right skills and capability, not only around our services but around the movement to cloud which is what these organizations need to do to help them innovate. >> And it sounds like your customers wanna learn how to fish, they see that as IP, in a sense, still work with partners, but help them transfer that knowledge and then, y'know, continue to innovate, raise the bars, as we like to say. >> Yes, yes. >> One of the biggest challenges that we see, we talk to customers all the time, is the data challenge. Particularly companies that have been around for a while, they have a lot of technical debt, the data's locked into these hardened silos, obviously I'm sure you see that as a challenge, maybe can you address that, how you're helping customers deal with that challenge and some of the other things that you see cloud addressing? >> Yeah, so y'know, we're really trying to help customers be successful in doing what they do in the timescale that they're setting themselves, and we're helping them be successful. I think from a data point of view, we have a lot of capability, so just to give you a perspective, so since I've been here that year and a half, we started with 125 services. That number of services has gone to 170-odd services now and the innovation that we have within those services has now reached, I think last year, just over the 1900 level so this is iterations on the product. In addition to that, we are continually building new offerings, so if you think about our database strategy, y'know, it's very much to create databases that customers can use in the right way at the right time to do the right job and that's just not one database, it's a number of different databases tuned for specific needs. So we have 14 databases, for example, which are really geared to make customers use the right database at the right time to achieve the right outcome, and we think that's really important, so that's helping people basically use their data in a different way. Obviously our S3, our core storage offering is critically important and hugely successful. We think that as-is, the bedrock for how people think about their data and then they expand and use data lakes, and then underpinning that is making sure that they've got the right databases to support and use that data effectively. >> At the start of this millennium there was like a few databases, databases was a boring marketplace and now it's exploded, as Inova says, dozens a minute it's actually amazing >> Yep >> how much innovation there is occurring in that space. What's your vision for AWS in EMEA? >> Yeah, so you know the overall Amazon vision is to be the world's most customer-obsessed organization, so y'know, here in EMEA, that holds true, so y'know, we start with the customer, we work back, and we wanna make sure that every single customer's happy with what we're doing. I think the second thing is making sure that we are bringing and enabling customers to be innovative. This is really important to us, and it's really important to the customers that we sell to, y'know, there's many insurgents kind of attacking historic business models, it's really important that we give all of the organizations the ability to use technology, whether they're a small company or a big company. And we call that the democratization of IT, we're making things available that were only available to big companies a while back. Now, we have made those services available to pretty much every single company, whether you're a startup in garage, y'know, to a large global organization. So that's really important that we bring and we continue to democratize IT to make it available for the masses, so that they can go out there and innovate and do what ultimately, customers wanna do, y'know, customers want people to innovate. Customers want a different experience. And it's important that we give organizations the tools and the wherewithal to go and do that. >> Well you've been in the industry long enough, and you've worked at product companies prior to this part of your career, and you know the innovation engine used to be Moore's Law. It used to be how fast can I take advantage of that curve, and that's totally changed now. You see a number of things happening, it's get rid of the heavy lifting, so you can focus on your business, that's what cloud does for you, but it's kind of this combination, the cocktail of data, plus machine intelligence, and then the cloud brings scale, it attracts innovative companies. How do you see, first of all do you buy that sort of new cocktail, and how do you see customers applying that innovation engine? >> Yeah, y'know, to answer the first bit first, we definitely see that cocktail. So y'know, the kind of undifferentiated work that was historically done to kind of build servers and make sure that they ran and all of those things, people don't need to do that now. We do that really really effectively. So they can really focus their time, attention, their money, their efforts, their innovation, on creating new experiences, new products, new offerings, for their customers. And they should also work back from customers themselves and work out what's really required. Every single business model, every single offering, needs to be questioned, by every single organization and I think that's what we do. We give the ability to organizations to really think differently about how they use what we have to do the really important things, the things that differentiate them and the things that ultimately give customers a different experience. And that's why I think we've seen so many very successful companies, y'know, from Airbnb, to Pinterest, to Uber. It's giving people a fundamentally different experience and that's what people want, so y'know, we're here to I think give people the ability to create those different experiences. >> Kind of amazing when you go back and you remember the book Does IT Matter? the Havard Business Review famous... It couldn't have been more wrong, at the same time it couldn't have been more right because it really underscored that IT was broken and that preceded 2006 introduction of EC2 and now technology matters more than ever before, every company's a technology company, y'know, you hear Marc Bennioff talk about software's eating the world, it's so true, and so as companies become technology companies, what's your advice to them? I mean obviously you gotta say, "Let us handle the heavy lifting," but what do they have to do to succeed in their digital transformation in your view? >> Yeah, I think it's about changing the mindset and changing the culture of organizations. So I think you can try and instill new processes and new tools on an organization but fundamentally you've gotta change the culture and I think we have to create and enable cultures to be created that are innovative and that requires, I think, a very different mindset. That requires a mindset which is about, "we don't mind if you fail". Y'know, and we'll applaud failure. We in Amazon have had many failures but it's applauded, and if it's applauded, people try again so they'll dust themselves off and they'll move on. You can see this in Israel which is, y'know, very much a startup nation. You can see people start a business, they might fail. Next day, they start a new one. So I think it's having this culture of innovation that allows people to experiment. Experimentation's good, but it's also prone to failure. But, y'know, out of 10 experiments you're gonna get one that's successful. That one could be the make or break for your organization to move forward, and give customers what they actually need, so, y'know, super important. >> Break things, move fast, right? >> Exactly. >> I love it. All right, what should we expect tomorrow at the London summit? We gotta big crowd coming, it's at the ExCeL Center >> Yeah, I think you'll see us continue to innovate, I think you'll see a lot of people, and I think you'll see a lot of customers talk about their experience and share their experience, y'know, these are learning summits, y'know, they're not kind of show and tell, they're very much about explaining what other customers are doing, how people can use the innovation and you'll see lots of experiences from different customers that people will be able to take away and learn from and go back to their offices and do similar things, but probably in a different way. So, y'know there'll be lots of exciting announcements, as you saw from re:Invent, we continue to innovate at a fair clip, as I said, 1950-odd innovations, y'know, significant releases last year, so not surprisingly you'll see a few of those. >> These summits are like mini re:Invents, aren't they? And as you said, Andy, very customer-focused, customer-centric; a lot of customer content. So, Andy Isherwood, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was really great to have you. >> Great >> All right. >> Thank you >> You're welcome Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellente, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Hello, everyone. This is a special presentation of the Cube. We're here in London at eight of us, one of eight of US locations in London. My name is Dave Volante and the Q We go, we'd like to go out to the events. We extract a signal from the noise and we've been following the ascendancy of a ws public sector from its early days. If you go back to two thousand thirteen, there was a significant moment in the history of eight of us where it won CIA contract a very large contract. CIA. It was contested by idea. My bm was used to kind of the what sometimes called the old guard the legacy companies used to selling into the government big, big contracts. And here comes this start up essentially eight of us taking away government business with CIA no less huge, huge contract. Well, IBM contested it. Judge Wheeler ruled against IBM for eight of us. And when reading that ruling, it was clear that the eight of US platform was superior to the IBM platform. He laid out the essentially the components of the R F P and the line by line and showed that a ws was the winner and virtually all of the line items. I think there was parody and won the reason why that was so important. It was that there were several factors there. One, It was a major milestone event. No, only Frito. Eight of us. But for cloud in general, if you think about security Ah, CIA, obviously very security conscious. It was the recognition that cloud actually could be more secure than on premises infrastructure. So the government was actually one of the first to kind of realise that and lean into that as a side effect, IBM had to go out and spend two billion dollars on soft layer toe actually compete in the cloud market Plys. So you had all these ripple effects Fast forward today to two thousand nineteen. You have the jet icon to contract a joint enterprise defense initiative. It's a ten billion dollar contract. A ws is in the lead for that contract. Oracle again another old Guard company has contested. And when you look through when when a company contests these bids, a whole lot of public information comes out. What? What the information suggested was that a single cloud the D o d determine that a single cloud was more secure, less complex and more cost effective. And so Oracle contested the the likelihood of an award to a single company because government contracts usually are awarded to multiple vendors. But in this case, because it's so critical tohave the data in one place so that they can serve the field better and responded the field better, the D o. D decided to use a single cloud. So oracles, you know, throwing off all rights of muck into the ring. Ah, basically asking the General Accountability Office to look at it. They did, Ggo said. If we're going to go with the D. O. D s decision, the D. O. D itself did an internal investigation. Now it's narrowed down to two vendors eight of us and Microsoft, and we believe that eight of us is the leading contender. Why is that? It's because eight of us says the most services. It's the most advanced, the highest levels of security and certifications within the government that are necessary to win these types of contracts. Why don't I spend so much time on these things? There's a two milestone events, the CIA contract in two thousand thirteen and what will soon to be the Jet I contract in two thousand nineteen. And what we're seeing is Amazon Web services, a thirty billion dollars run rate company growing at forty plus percent per annum. It's just a massive flywheel effect that we always talk about on the Cube. So we're here in London because we wanted to see how the public sector activities of Amazon are translating into the European markets. So we're here at a special public sector mini summit, if you will. There's a healthcare predate going on. This is ahead of the eight of US London summit, and we're siphoning off a number of the practitioners in and and startups software companies. Eight of US partners in the health care industry, as well as a WS executives particularly focused on the public sector today. So we're doing this sort of. We followed the career of Teresa Carlson for a number of years, seen the ascendancy of a ws public sector. We've covered ah, public sector summit in D. C. We flew to Bahrain last year. John Fairy of my business partner did the Bahrain summit. Bahrain was the first country in the Middle East to declare cloud first. So ah, critical location in the Middle East and you're seeing it now. Europe across a number of industries, obviously n hs than Ethan's. National Health Service is a very prominent in in the UK in a in a big consumer of services all kinds of startups and other software companies trying to sell and helped transform The N H s N hs has ah put forth a half a billion dollars nearly a half a billion dollar pound initiative on modernization. Ah, lot of that modernization is evolving the cloud. So the cube is here. We're trying to peel back the onion, understand what's going on here. Who were the winners? Who was going to get affected? Practitioners of startups, CEOs, nonprofit organizations, NGOs, executives from a ws and across the industry. So we'LL be here. We have three events this week in Ah in London here today at eight of US headquarters in London. Ah, tonight we have an impact investor event and then tomorrow we're at the eight of us Summit in AA in London at the XL Center. So keep it right here. Watch this channel. Check out silicon angle dot com For all the news, check out the cube dot net, which is where we host all these videos. And of course, we could bond downward for all the research. So thank you for watching and keep it right there. And you're watching the Cube this day, Volante.

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. You watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at the new improved Mosconi Center covering Google next twenty nineteen. I'm Dave along with my co hosts. Two minutes to get to see you. Russell Warming is here. He's the head of infrastructure at AutoTrader UK. Russell, Thanks for coming on the Cube. You very welcome. AUTOTRADER uk not to be confused with the U. S. Not a lot of you guys. They're separate cos >> yet completely separate. So way operate the largest automotive marketplace in the UK something like the sixteenth busiest website in the UK around fifty five million cross platform visits each month on average. Probably about five hundred thousand vehicles that were advertising out. Tio consumers >> are traitors. Awesome website If your eyes are second biggest purchase typically behind the home and and so Stew was asking you earlier if you if digital transformation meant anything to you and you said Well, we kind of went through a ten years ago yet, and it's kind of true You guys were like born in the Internet company would talk about >> that. So our heritage is that we've been around for forty forty years. We started producing magazines back in nineteen seventy seven. And then in ninety six, we would launched our first website on DH. We've basically just migrated those revenues from our print business online. And then about two thousand thirteen. We stop printing magazines all together. So we're truly digital business now, >> and people talk about digital transformation oftentimes in the context of data. So maybe talk about some of the things that you're doing in your business, some of the challenges that you face, where data fits in and we'Ll really get into it. >> Okay, so I'm we've got a couple of areas where we've been on premise for our data centers. Wave had that strategy for probably about fifteen years, and we've started to reach limits in terms of how we manage capacity within their on what we found is using cloud services as really enables so unlock capabilities, particularly around things like data on their. More recently, when we're thinking about using Cuban eaters and SDO, we've been able to take advantage of things like some of the security features, mutual tear less and service discovery. >> All right, so they also bring us inside your organization a little bit. You're head of infrastructure? Yeah. What does that mean to your business today? >> So way basically run the platform that runs auto trader dot co dot uk on were responsible for making sure that's available twenty four seven three six five So way. Want to make sure that we're able to give our internal customers the ability to release new applications new features as quickly as they want, but also that we're ensuring that our consumers are retailers get a great experience that it's fast performance secure. >> Yeah, and it could give us tease out a little bit, just kind of the scope, how many people you have and how do you balance the stuff that kind of is under your purview and the stuff that you manage that is outside of your four walls. >> So there's about twenty five people within the team. There's probably about ten people building the infrastructure and about fifteen people that are responsible for monitor in it. So we're not a big organization in terms of operations in infrastructure on. We have to work very closely with our product squads because we manage some elements of it. But we're dependent on them managing other elements as well. So we're trying to unlock platform capabilities so that we've got consistency that we're trying to provide those those capabilities rather than going off on finding something else. >> You've got infrastructure on Prem and you've got infrastructure in the cloud to cloud services, right? Yes. So oftentimes those aren't the same. But talk about your situation and you're on a journey, I presume. >> Way started about forty months ago, building out our cloud services on DH. Probably in the last four months, we've really started accelerating that that migration plan of applications moving it up into into Google Cloud on DH. Our ambition is to get that done in eighteen months because the complexity of managing multiple environments is something that we want to try and avoid. Minimize that. >> So is the aspiration to go all in >> waiting absolutely way. We've taken a view that for services that we can we'll take money services and then everything else will be cloud first >> believe I heard you say Cooper Netease is in the mix now. Can you explain where that fits? How you're using it? >> So that see, that's the platform that we're using. Teo. Build out all our applications in the clouds so that that's that's That's a lot of important >> air using any communities in your data center today? No, not all from a cloud. That's the platform layer that using the >> public? Absolutely so when we talked about should we use Cuban? It is way did discussed. Should we do it on Prem or do it in the cloud? And we just figured that we didn't want the overhead of managing it ourselves on prime, we thought it be better just to take it as a service almost and manage up in the cloud. >> Most of the shows we go too many of them, anyway. It's too, and I and the Cube they talk about multi cloud, and we often say multi cloud as a function of multi vendor. But certainly way heard today from Google. A multi cloud. What's your cloud strategy? Because there there's another camp that says, Well, if you do, multi cloud is more complex, it's less secure, it's more expensive. Are you trying to be kind of unit cloud or is that horses for courses? >> So we're three clouds today. So our data platforms, it's partly in G C P. But then partly in another cloud provider on then we're also for our enterprise applications were using another cloud provided because it makes sense to do so. So we want to use the right cloud for the right applications. I think that most of our customer facing applications will end up in G C. P. But some of the back end services my end up in of the cloud provide us >> Okay, so it's strategic fit based on the application? Absolutely. So what is the wheelhouse of of of? Of Google, in your view, from a customer's perspective. >> Um, so the fact that Cuban eighties was developed by Google is a really strong play there. It gives you confidence that they know Teo to look after it. Things like SDO have made a massive difference to our organization as well. We part of the reason why we've ended up using GDP was based on using SDO, and that was around solving a specific problem that we had so that those of the sort to to solve areas that we focused on. >> Just when you look at you know, you've got that hybrid, multi cloud environment that we find is pretty much the standard today. Can you speak a little bit of the management layer? How you look at that, you know, Is it good enough today? And what what? What could the industry do to make it even better? >> It's good enough for our needs. I think that the challenge that you've always got is data ingress and egress between between clouds as you want to move data or query data, making sure that you could do that in a secure way. That's probably the biggest challenge that you'd have on also around the cost of doing so. Those you know, those are probably the bigger challenges >> in the challenges. The cost in time of moving data is its security or the above. Maybe you could dig into that little bit. >> It's probably a little bit of all the above. If I'm honest, I think you could do so much to security plight. Private VP ends Between Between the cloud providers It's I guess that's the time and actually moving some of that data between the clouds is that there's a challenge, and then they cost. Like I say, it's difficult to predict how much it might cost you two to move some of that >> big challenges and from a business perspective that a driving your technology strategy, obviously you want consumers coming to your site. You want to make that as rich as possible for them. You've gotta monetization strategy as well. But you talk a little bit about the business drivers that are affecting your technology. >> Okay, so consumer demand is constantly changing. Technology is massively disrupting how people think about search for cars. We can see that there's a demanding in the in the marketplace for people just to be ableto choose it, choose a car on DH, have that customizing delivered. They want tohave complexity around how they look for finance on their cars. They want all that sort of taken away. They don't wanna have to turn up tio a car showroom and then go through the same conversation that live with salesperson that they've just gone through online. They want that journey to be seamless, so there's some challenges that the industry facing trying to do that where we're trying to help our retailers, providing those services that customers want. So to be able to understand what the part ex valuation is on their car before they turned up to the dealership and know that it's going to get honored because they've got to trust in it so they can understand what, what making spend on a monthly faith on what cars are available. So we're trying to change what we provide to our consumers on also to support our retailers. Manage that changes well, >> Russell thinks a really great point. You make way. No many industries, and especially your industry, is changing really fast. So what are those stresses and strains mean to the infrastructure team in Oak and maybe talk a little bit about the relationship of kind of business? Tow it how that's changed in the last few years. >> So probably over the last ten years, it has always been seen as the sort of the blocker in terms of making sure that new products and features become become available quickly on our role is really to make sure that we're providing the infrastructure at the right time for people so that they can basically just dial it in when they need it. So if they want to release a new application, they don't need to come and speak to somebody in ops to stop provisional server. They just create a pipeline, deploy their application and then the service provisioned at the same time. On we do things like checking for a Wasp Bonham abilities at the same time and making sure that the application and the infrastructure is working hand in hand. So we've taken a lot of that dependency away from people, sort of with handoff points and everything. >> You're a business that has obviously transformed over the years. I think you said you started in the sixties seventies seventies is a publisher basically, paper printing presses and the like. Nineteen ninety six is when you went online. Is that right? So that early days pretty much of the Internet. So the heart, uh, and so you've proven that you could transform forward thinking. I'm wondering what the conversation might be like inside the company about things like autonomous vehicles. Is there a day that comes where owning your own vehicle is the exception rather than the norm? What implications that might have for your business. It's very hard to predict, obviously, But are you having those kind of conversations? You have other lines of business that you're launching toe >> say you're absolutely right. Those those things are area of concern on wave people, constantly looking at new and emerging changes in threats across the whole industry. On DH, they are absolutely looking at how that might impact our business. What we're actually seeing, though, through research that we've done is people still aspire to own car. So car ownership is still something that people want to want to look at with regards to the second part of your question. We are ultimately focus, that is, that's where we are. We don't operate outside of the UK and Ireland. We absolutely focus on our core on making sure that the services that we offer around that really support our customers need, whether that be consumer or retailer. >> Well, it's interesting that the auto industry really has it been wildly disrupted. I mean, you certainly see Tesla and people talk about autonomous vehicles, but still, the big car makers, they're still doing quite well. They dominate the market so and so it's going to take some time, you know, and there's some skeptics out there, but it's very interesting to see how you guys evolve, what other opportunities you go after. I want to ask you. So Google next is coming to tow London in November. How important is it for you? As somebody is based in the UK tohave, Google have local events like that? I mean obviously a traveling a far distance to come to this event. How important is that to you as a customer? >> It's important for us to be able Teo, get more people involved in the conversation. There's obviously a cost on time effort in terms of coming out tio something here. But it's in The scale of this is enormous in comparison to what we see in the UK, but it just means that having that presence in the U. K. Means that we can just get more of our engineers in front of the right people tohave a better conversation, understand more about what's coming and how we might be able to use that within our business >> things that so you just sort of near early on in your cloud journey. But knowing what you know, and you get it early on, I think you might do differently if you had a mulligan, you want to do over again our advice you give to your colleagues and piers. >> So I think the big thing that we found is modest modernizing applications Before you start moving them into the cloud, I think there is a tendency, Probably way we're in the in the cloud, probably about nine years ten years ago and we bought those workloads back on prime. And the reason why we did that is because we didn't treat them differently way manage those instances in the same way that we managed on prime, which is completely do a wrong way to do it, in my opinion. So we needed to change our mind set in terms of how we manage the infrastructure. You need to make sure that you re architect your applications, that you are taking advantage off the features and functionalities things like auto scaling, that you plan for failure. All those things that you typically control on Prem. You have to think about differently in the clouds. >> We will talk about this a lots to changing, the operator >> said that the long pole in the tent is, you know, modernized those applications. Any change? Migrations is really tough. So but do you have a time for him? How long would take you to get to that? All in that you're planning on >> eighteen months, Cesar, that's >> not just a lift, Did Shift >> S O. That is a modernization. But the approach that we've taken and is to try and give the people the confidence and courage really to go at it is we've picked ofsome easier applications. So this journey about being cloud native, we started six or seven years ago, and we've started getting people building their applications on our private cloud. And those ones have been really easy to move on to the public cloud and some of the applications that I've been a little bit trickier that I've been on our short traditional virtual ization platform. We're trying to pick those off in parallel, so you do one that's really easier one that's a bit harder. So you give people confidence and then you're trying to solve some tricky problems alongside it, and I think that just incrementally gives you more confidence that you're moving in the right direction. >> Right straight. Just like skiing on the then the blacks. And they go into the greens and they're making your moves. >> Just just a little bit. A little bit harder each time you got it, but yeah. >> Russell, thanks so much for coming in. The queue was great. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you for watching. We'll be right back from Google next in San Francisco.

>> Announcer: It's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018 everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Mike Conjoice is here, he's a Solutions Architect at Bupa Dental. Mike, over from the pond? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Over the pond rather, to America, welcome, from Bristol, England, great to have you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Bupa Dental. Tell us about this 90,000 person organization. >> Yeah, so, Bupa's a global organization. They're primarily known for their health care insurance. Bupa Dental is a market unit that provides dental, NHS and private. So we're one of the largest private providers in the UK. We've got around 460 practices at the moment across the UK and Ireland. Bupa itself, 90,000 staff, 8,000 of that is dental. So that's clinicians and support staff. Were acquiring new practices, about three practices a week. >> Massive scale. >> Mike: Absolutely, it's huge. >> I've got to ask you, before we get into it. So health care, in England, NHS, you mentioned NHS and private. A lot of us in the United States, you know, have I think misconceptions, but what's your take on the quality of healthcare in England and the UK? A lot of people I talk to love it, they say it's really high quality. What's your take? >> It's certainly a different way of doing things, but then, it's a good model I feel. 'cause we all pay in, everyone can get that healthcare they need, they don't have to worry about being ill. You know, being ill shouldn't bankrupt you. So we do the NHS and private side of things. It's usually a lot of the same clinicians that run those models, but private we tend to cut the line a lot quicker, things like that. You're paying for the speed of the access to the clinicians, things like that. >> Okay, so but it's a hybrid model, so if you can afford it, then you can complement it, and it allows you to accelerate things. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Okay, so there's still that level of quality that you can pay for, >> Yes, it's tiered >> But everybody's got healthcare, a hundred percent of the citizens are covered. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Mike, what's the kind of the stresses and the changes happening in healthcare, regulation like that impact from the technology sector? >> So at the moment, GDPR is obviously the big buzzword, I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard that this week. >> It's May 2018 >> We've got a countdown going. So a lot of our data is patient data, so it's critical healthcare data. So we're very lucky in Bupa to have a large information governance team that can manage a lot of the compliance and regulatory factors for us. So we need to be very aware of what we're doing with that data. We have the GDPR compliance side of things, where you've got the right to forget in an organization, but also the healthcare side of things can overrule that, that we are obliged to keep records for you know, certain amounts of time, depending on ages and things like that. >> And what kind of solutions are you architecting? >> So we, as I said, we acquire heavily, we acquire about two to three practices a week. So we are growing, so everything we look at is scale, not where we are now, but where we're going to be. You know, we've got plans to be at a thousand practices in no time at all. So a lot of the legacy frameworks that we follow, a lot of the legacy operational models we went with, they worked, but they don't scale well. So we need to put things so automation and intelligence, like Danny's been talking about in the keynote. It's things we really need to look at. We've started leveraging our data a lot more. So we pull back a lot of this data, we've got so much data, but we weren't really doing a lot with it. We've started running a lot of business intelligence, you know MIS data across that, to kind of learn how our patients use, I mean nobody likes going to the dentist, it's not a luxury treat that people go for. So trying to make that journey easier for the patients is kind of our end goal. We want to make it as painless as possible, apart from the dental bit. From making an appointment to kind of feeding back afterwards, and keeping that loop going, it's not just a one time end to end project. >> Yeah, so that whole experience. Take us inside the pieces that your patients don't see. Paint a picture of your infrastructure, I mean, what's there, what does it look like, and ultimately what applications are you supporting, you know, the top ones. >> Yeah, so dental practice management software isn't as advanced as probably as most people would think. Each practice has got a virtualization host in each. So we've got 500 service, remote branches on an MPLS link, so they're all coming back to a central data center where we keep all our offsite backups. >> Those are 500 physical servers? >> Yes, they're running Hyper-V, so they've got... They're quite low capacity, so there might be one or two VMs on each one. So although the scale is huge, the kind of the density is quite minimal. So we're bringing all that back across MPLS links that we're still not in an amazing place with network links in the UK, so some of our practices, they're not the best links, they're slow. Bringing back a lot of that data every night can be, you know, a massive issue, especially with the legacy software we were using previously. We need an offsite copy, we can't just cope with a local copy. We've had issues where practices have failed, practices have flooded, and without an offsite copy, you know, that backup drive floating in the water (mumbles) >> How does that local copy get made? That's done in an automated way from your remote location >> Yeah, so... >> It's not some gal at the desk doing the backup >> No, no, no >> like it used to be. >> Each practice has got like a USB or a NAS, depending on the size of the practice, and so we centrally manage that through the Veeam console in our data center. So each practice has a local backup job, to that storage every night, and then a backup copy job to our offsite data center to keep two copies of the data. >> And the office is closed, right, so it's not like you're dealing with high volume transactions that you're having to capture. I mean you've got a long enough window to get the stuff offsite, is that true? >> Yeah, so our bottleneck is always network, it's never source or target, it's always network. You know, some of our links we might get 200K uploads, so, if you're transferring a few gig of data it's never good. A lot of our data is digital imaging as well, which is really taking off. So you know you used to go and get an x-ray, now it's all 3D models of a scan of your mouth. So those files are... >> A lot of data. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well we've done Cube gigs in the UK, so we know, sometimes those pipes are pretty small. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so in the primary applications that you're supporting is this dental, this what you folks offer >> Yeah, so we've got, there's a couple of big players in the practice management software space, so we're kind of a split across those. They are moving towards private cloud software, but it's a slow process. These are the same softwares that you find in a single-person dental practice to these massive scales that we've got, so there's... They're very well known across the industry. So change is quite hard for them. >> So you're a Microsoft shop. Who's your server vendor? >> Dell. >> So you've got Dell servers, and Dell storage as well? >> Yes, so we've got Dell storage in the core. Just equal, equal logic. >> But Veeam is your primary data protection right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And how long have you had Veeam in there? >> Probably two and a half years now. >> Okay, great, so let's go back to three years ago. >> The good times. >> What was life like then, and why did you bring in Veeam, and what change, take us through that whole case. >> So, like I said, we're highly acquisitive. So that came with a certain cadence and expectation. So we basically got what was given to us when we bought the practice. There was a lot of legacy backup providers, you know, all the classic ones. All over the place, no standardization of what was set up, what was backing up, the reporting. There was no central pane of glass to manage that. So it was taking a lot of engineer time to check those backups. So the infrastructure team that look after that, they were having to dedicate possibly two engineers a day just to check backups, which was an absolute nightmare. It's expensive as well, you know, they're not cheap guys to hire, so you just, you're getting them to do manual admin work. So we needed a change obviously, especially with the expectations of growth. I'd worked with Veeam previously as an MSV, so I knew the product, I knew how it worked. I kind of put it forward, I think it would be the best idea for us to go with it. So we kind of went through a partner, to kick off the initiation, and straightaway they said this is a big project, you want to get Veeam directly involved. So we had a lot of help from Veeam, the SEs, the sales guys. Everyone we wanted, we had access to, just because of the size of it. And it was something Veeam hadn't really done before, the whole remote office, the whole remote office scheme, because of the licensing, it can work out expensive per socket. So they were quite interested in it as well. That was our primary driver was kind of centralizing all that management and the reporting, and just freeing up time, just was the main... >> So did you, was it sort of a wholesale, we're doing Veeam, we're going all in? Across 500 server platforms. >> It was a big blast of it at the start, so we had a lot of physical 2003 servers, so they needed to be replaced anyway, so that was perfect timing for that. >> Dave: How convenient. >> Yeah it was good timing. 2008 >> Sorry CFO, we got to do it. >> We were very lucky actually. Our finance team are very trusting of us. If we say this is the right solution, they kind of, well, if that's what it takes. >> They bite the bullet. >> Yeah, yeah. So we had probably about 200 in one go, well, in one go, over a period of a couple of months. >> Dave: In (mumbles) kind of >> It wasn't the slickest process, because we were learning at the time. The network bandwidth was a big issue. But now moving forward we're still replacing servers. Any kind of BAU replacements, we'll always go out with this Hyper-V Veeam model. Any new practice we bring on, Hyper-V Veeam. It's just, we've done a lot of power shell scripting on the background as well to... 'Cause if you think, we've got 500 hosts, that's a thousand jobs running. It's 500 local, 500 copy. It's a lot to keep track of, so... >> So Mike, the next acquisition, do you have to change the infrastructure, or can you drop Veeam in as a first before you rip out some of the gear? >> We do tend to rip and replace, just to kind of standardize it. So we keep a... We don't want to go to 350 practices and they're one model, and there's 10 at a different one. So we tend to rip and replace with our MPLS and the server, switching, just trying to keep it standard as possible for management. >> Hard work. I mean what was your result? >> Pretty good actually, yeah. >> What changed? How did you measure the success? Was it sort you saw it and... >> So, reporting before was done by an MSP that looked after us. Reporting was creative, shall we say. So were getting 98-100% successes of what they reported on. So they may have been backing up 20 files, that was working. >> They had their thumb on the scale. >> Absolutely. So we've got a lot more confidence in what we're backing up now, even if we, you know, get, which we never do, but even if 30% failures, I'd rather know about 30% actual failures than just be blissfully ignorant. It's saved a lot of the infrastructure team's time, you know, with the scripting and the reporting, we're pulling a lot into Power BI as well, so management can see those stats realtime. It's just, you know buzzword, it just works. >> That was an ad, it just works. So you save time, your staff save time. What happened, they got their weekends and nights back? You were able to not hire as many people, I presume you didn't fire anybody? >> Not that I know of, no. It's allowed them to concentrate on the work they should be doing, the project work, the forward thinking work. With that kind of block it was not allowing these guys to innovate and to see where to change. They were doing a lot of reactive work, whereas now they're fully proactive, they're kind of looking about, what's the next thing, how can we get ahead of the curve. >> Why Veeam, I know we've got to go, and you might want to jump in. But why Veeam relative to the other choices that you had? >> Well first of all it was my experience with Veeam. I've never had a bad experience dealing with them. Their support is absolutely flawless. Anyone I speak to, I always say, hopefully you never need them, but, their support guys are just out of this world. The help they'll give and what they'll, they'll go above and beyond, they'll help with things that aren't necessarily Veeam, just to get you up and running. >> Mike, the last question I had for you is, you've been expanding beyond just virtualization, you're using Hyper-V, it was big news when Veeam supported that. You're doing a lot with SAS these days, you're probably not too much in public cloud, but what do you see, what interests you, what might bring you beyond kind of the one product you're using today? >> So 365 is big for us, we're going to be pushing to 365 next year. So the Veeam backup for Office 365 is something we're definitely going to look at. We do leverage Azure very heavily for our development. So things like direct restore to Azure are good for us. We can spin up a practice straight in Azure if their physical area fails, things like that are a big boost to us. >> All right we got to go. Mike, are you going to the party tonight? >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Dave: You're fired up? >> Theme party, yeah. >> Right, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you from me. >> Actually, sorry, one last question. >> Okay. >> If you had 'em all again, what would you do over, differently? >> Probably nothing, really. >> Oh, that was easy. All right, well, thanks again for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Keep right there, we're going to be back with our next guest right after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone; I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE NEWS and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our SiliconANGLE NEWS MWC NEWS UPDATE in Barcelona where MWC is the premier event for the cloud telecommunication industry, and in the news here is Red Hat, Red Hat announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA, Samsung and Arm on Efficient Open Networks. Red Hat announced updates across various fields including advanced 5G telecommunications cloud, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, and radio access networks, RAN, and Efficiency. Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, has added support for NVIDIA's converged accelerators and aerial SDK facilitating RAND deployments on industry standard service across hybrid and multicloud platforms. This composable infrastructure enables telecom firms to support heavier compute demands for edge computing, AI, private 5G, and more, and just also helps network operators adopt open architectures, allowing them to choose non-proprietary components from multiple suppliers. In addition to the NVIDIA collaboration, Red Hat is working with Samsung to offer a new vRAN solution for service providers to better manage their open RAN networks. They're also working with UK chip designer, Arm, to create new networking solutions for energy efficient Red Hat Open Source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter project, or Kepler, has been donated to the open Cloud Native Compute Foundation, allowing enterprise to better understand their cloud native workloads and power consumptions. Kepler can also help in the development of sustainable software by creating less power hungry applications. Again, Red Hat continuing to provide OpenSource, OpenRAN, and contributing an open source project to the CNCF, continuing to create innovation for developers, and, of course, Red Hat knows what, a lot about operating systems and the telco could be the next frontier. That's SiliconANGLE NEWS. I'm John Furrier; thanks for watching. (monotone music)

(soft music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Fira in MWC23. Is just an amazing day. This place is packed. They said 80,000 people. I think it might even be a few more walk-ins. I'm Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin is here, David Nicholson. But right now we have the Analyst Hot Takes with three friends of theCUBE. Chris Lewis is back again with me in the co-host seat. Zeus Kerravala, analyst extraordinaire. Great to see you, Z. and Sarbjeet SJ Johal. Good to see you again, theCUBE contributor. And that's my new name for him. He says that is his nickname. Guys, thanks for coming back on. We got the all male panel, sorry, but it is what it is. So Z, is this the first time you've been on it at MWC. Take aways from the show, Hot Takes. What are you seeing? Same wine, new bottle? >> In a lot of ways, yeah. I mean, I was talking to somebody this earlier that if you had come from like MWC five years ago to this year, a lot of the themes are the same. Telco transformation, cloud. I mean, 5G is a little new. Sustainability is certainly a newer theme here. But I think it highlights just the difficulty I think the telcos have in making this transformation. And I think, in some ways, I've been unfair to them in some degree 'cause I've picked on them in the past for not moving fast enough. These are, you know, I think these kind of big transformations almost take like a perfect storm of things that come together to happen, right? And so, in the past, we had technologies that maybe might have lowered opex, but they're hard to deploy. They're vertically integrated. We didn't have the software stacks. But it appears today that between the cloudification of, you know, going to cloud native, the software stacks, the APIs, the ecosystems, I think we're actually in a position to see this industry finally move forward. >> Yeah, and Chris, I mean, you have served this industry for a long time. And you know, when you, when you do that, you get briefed as an analyst, you actually realize, wow, there's a lot of really smart people here, and they're actually, they have challenges, they're working through it. So Zeus was saying he's been tough on the industry. You know, what do you think about how the telcos have evolved in the last five years? >> I think they've changed enormously. I think the problem we have is we're always looking for the great change, the big step change, and there is no big step change in a way. What telcos deliver to us as individuals, businesses, society, the connectivity piece, that's changed. We get better and better and more reliable connectivity. We're shunting a load more capacity through. What I think has really changed is their attitude to their suppliers, their attitude to their partners, and their attitude to the ecosystem in which they play. Understanding that connectivity is not the end game. Connectivity is part of the emerging end game where it will include storage, compute, connect, and analytics and everything else. So I think the realization that they are not playing their own game anymore, it's a much more open game. And some things they will continue to do, some things they'll stop doing. We've seen them withdraw from moving into adjacent markets as much as we used to see. So a lot of them in the past went off to try and do movies, media, and a lot went way way into business IT stuff. They've mainly pulled back from that, and they're focusing on, and let's face it, it's not just a 5G show. The fixed environment is unbelievably important. We saw that during the pandemic. Having that fixed broadband connection using wifi, combining with cellular. We love it. But the problem as an industry is that the users often don't even know the connectivity's there. They only know when it doesn't work, right? >> If it's not media and it's not business services, what is it? >> Well, in my view, it will be enabling third parties to deliver the services that will include media, that will include business services. So embedding the connectivity all the way into the application that gets delivered or embedding it so the quality mechanism deliver the gaming much more accurately or, I'm not a gamer, so I can't comment on that. But no, the video quality if you want to have a high quality video will come through better. >> And those cohorts will pay for that value? >> Somebody will pay somewhere along the line. >> Seems fuzzy to me. >> Me too. >> I do think it's use case dependent. Like you look at all the work Verizon did at the Super Bowl this year, that's a perfect case where they could have upsold. >> Explain that. I'm not familiar with it. >> So Verizon provided all the 5G in the Super Bowl. They provided a lot of, they provided private connectivity for the coaches to talk to the sidelines. And that's a mission critical application, right? In the NFL, if one side can't talk, the other side gets shut down. You can't communicate with the quarterback or the coaches. There's a lot of risk at that. So, but you know, there's a case there, though, I think where they could have even made that fan facing. Right? And if you're paying 2000 bucks to go to a game, would you pay 50 bucks more to have a higher tier of bandwidth so you can post things on social? People that go there, they want people to know they were there. >> Every football game you go to, you can't use your cell. >> Analyst: Yeah, I know, right? >> All right, let's talk about developers because we saw the eight APIs come out. I think ISVs are going to be a big part of this. But it's like Dee Arthur said. Hey, eight's better than zero, I guess. Okay, so, but so the innovation is going to come from ISVs and developers, but what are your hot takes from this show and now day two, we're a day and a half in, almost two days in. >> Yeah, yeah. There's a thing that we have talked, I mentioned many times is skills gravity, right? Skills have gravity, and also, to outcompete, you have to also educate. That's another theme actually of my talks is, or my research is that to puts your technology out there to the practitioners, you have to educate them. And that's the only way to democratize your technology. What telcos have been doing is they have been stuck to the proprietary software and proprietary hardware for too long, from Nokia's of the world and other vendors like that. So now with the open sourcing of some of the components and a few others, right? And they're open source space and antenna, you know? Antennas are becoming software now. So with the invent of these things, which is open source, it helps us democratize that to the other sort of skirts of the practitioners, if you will. And that will bring in more applications first into the IOT space, and then maybe into the core sort of California, if you will. >> So what does a telco developer look like? I mean, all the blockchain developers and crypto developers are moving into generative AI, right? So maybe those worlds come together. >> You'd like to think though that the developers would understand everything's network centric today. So you'd like to think they'd understand that how the network responds, you know, you'd take a simple app like Zoom or something. If it notices the bandwidth changes, it should knock down the resolution. If it goes up it, then you can add different features and things and you can make apps a lot smarter that way. >> Well, G2 was saying today that they did a deal with Mercedes, you know this probably better than I do, where they're going to embed WebEx in the car. And if you're driving, it'll shut off the camera. >> Of course. >> I'm like, okay. >> I'll give you a better example though. >> But that's my point. Like, isn't there more that we can do? >> You noticed down on the SKT stand the little helicopter. That's a vertical lift helicopter. So it's an electric vertical lift helicopter. Just think of that for a second. And then think of the connectivity to control that, to securely control that. And then I was recently at an event with Zeus actually where we saw an air traffic control system where there was no people manning the tower. It was managed by someone remotely with all the cameras around them. So managing all of those different elements, we call it IOT, but actually it's way more than what we thought of as IOT. All those components connecting, communicating securely and safely. 'Cause I don't want that helicopter to come down on my head, do you? (men laugh) >> Especially if you're in there. (men laugh) >> Okay, so you mentioned sustainability. Everybody's talking about power. I don't know if you guys have a lot of experience around TCO, but I'm trying to get to, well, is this just because energy costs are so high, and then when the energy becomes cheap again, nobody's going to pay any attention to it? Or is this the real deal? >> So one of the issues around the, if we want to experience all that connectivity locally or that helicopter wants to have that connectivity, we have to ultimately build denser, more reliable networks. So there's a CapEx, we're going to put more base stations in place. We need more fiber in the ground to support them. Therefore, the energy consumption will go up. So we need to be more efficient in the use of energy. Simple as that. >> How much of the operating expense is energy? Like what percent of it? Is it 10%? Is it 20%? Is it, does anybody know? >> It depends who you ask and it depends on the- >> I can't get an answer to that. I mean, in the enterprise- >> Analyst: The data centers? >> Yeah, the data centers. >> We have the numbers. I think 10 to 15%. >> It's 10 to 12%, something like that. Is it much higher? >> I've got feeling it's 30%. >> Okay, so if it's 30%, that's pretty good. >> I do think we have to get better at understanding how to measure too. You know, like I was talking with John Davidson at Sysco about this that every rev of silicon they come out with uses more power, but it's a lot more dense. So at the surface, you go, well, that's using a lot more power. But you can consolidate 10 switches down to two switches. >> Well, Intel was on early and talking about how they can intelligently control the cores. >> But it's based off workload, right? That's the thing. So what are you running over it? You know, and so, I don't think our industry measures that very well. I think we look at things kind of boxed by box versus look at total consumption. >> Well, somebody else in theCUBE was saying they go full throttle. That the networks just say just full throttle everything. And that obviously has to change from the power consumption standpoint. >> Obviously sustainability and sensory or sensors from IOT side, they go hand in hand. Just simple examples like, you know, lights in the restrooms, like in public areas. Somebody goes in there and just only then turns. The same concept is being applied to servers and compute and storage and every aspects and to networks as well. >> Cell tower. >> Yeah. >> Cut 'em off, right? >> Like the serverless telco? (crosstalk) >> Cell towers. >> Well, no, I'm saying, right, but like serverless, you're not paying for the compute when you're not using it, you know? >> It is serverless from the economics point of view. Yes, it's like that, you know? It goes to the lowest level almost like sleep on our laptops, sleep level when you need more power, more compute. >> I mean, some of that stuff's been in networking equipment for a long time, it just never really got turned on. >> I want to ask you about private networks. You wrote a piece, Athenet was acquired by HPE right after Dell announced a relationship with Athenet, which was kind of, that was kind of funny. And so a good move, good judo move by by HP. I asked Dell about it, and they said, look, we're open. They said the right things. We'll see, but I think it's up to HP. >> Well, and the network inside Dell is. >> Yeah, okay, so. Okay, cool. So, but you said something in that article you wrote on Silicon Angle that a lot of people feel like P5G is going to basically replace wireless or cannibalize wireless. You said you didn't agree with that. Explain why? >> Analyst: Wifi. >> Wifi, sorry, I said wireless. >> No, that's, I mean that's ridiculous. Pat Gelsinger said that in his last VMware, which I thought was completely irresponsible. >> That it was going to cannibalize? >> Cannibalize wifi globally is what he said, right? Now he had Verizon on stage with him, so. >> Analyst: Wifi's too inexpensive and flexible. >> Wifi's cheap- >> Analyst: It's going to embed really well. Embedded in that. >> It's reached near ubiquity. It's unlicensed. So a lot of businesses don't want to manage their own spectrum, right? And it's great for this, right? >> Analyst: It does the job. >> For casual connectivity. >> Not today. >> Well, it does for the most part. Right now- >> For the most part. But never at these events. >> If it's engineered correctly, it will. Right? Where you need private 5G is when reliability is an absolute must. So, Chris, you and I visited the Port of Rotterdam, right? So they're putting 5G, private 5G there, but there's metal containers everywhere, right? And that's going to disrupt it. And so there are certain use cases where it makes sense. >> I've been in your basement, and you got some pretty intense equipment in there. You have private 5G in there. >> But for carpeted offices, it does not make sense to bring private. The economics don't make any sense. And you know, it runs hot. >> So where's it going to be used? Give us some examples of where we should be looking for. >> The early ones are obviously in mining, and you say in ports, in airports. It broadens cities because you've got so many moving parts in there, and always think about it, very expensive moving parts. The cranes in the port are normally expensive piece of kits. You're moving that, all that logistics around. So managing that over a distance where the wifi won't work over the distance. And in mining, we're going to see enormous expensive trucks moving around trying to- >> I think a great new use case though, so the Cleveland Browns actually the first NFL team to use it for facial recognition to enter the stadium. So instead of having to even pull your phone out, it says, hey Dave Vellante. You've got four tickets, can we check you all in? And you just walk through. You could apply that to airports. You could do put that in a hotel. You could walk up and check in. >> Analyst: Retail. >> Yeah, retail. And so I think video, realtime video analytics, I think it's a perfect use case for that. >> But you don't need 5G to do that. You could do that through another mechanism, couldn't you? >> You could do wire depending on how mobile you want to do it. Like in a stadium, you're pulling those things in and out all the time. You're moving 'em around and things, so. >> Yeah, but you're coming in at a static point. >> I'll take the contrary view here. >> See, we can't even agree on that. (men laugh) >> Yeah, I love it. Let's go. >> I believe the reliability of connection is very important, right? And the moving parts. What are the moving parts in wifi? We have the NIC card, you know, the wifi card in these suckers, right? In a machine, you know? They're bigger in size, and the radios for 5G are smaller in size. So neutralization is important part of the whole sort of progress to future, right? >> I think 5G costs as well. Yes, cost as well. But cost, we know that it goes down with time, right? We're already talking about 60, and the 5G stuff will be good. >> Actually, sorry, so one of the big boom areas at the moment is 4G LTE because the component price has come down so much, so it is affordable, you can afford to bring it all together. People don't, because we're still on 5G, if 5G standalone everywhere, you're not going to get a consistent service. So those components are unbelievably important. The skillsets of the people doing integration to bring them all together, unbelievably important. And the business case within the business. So I was talking to one of the heads of one of the big retail outlets in the UK, and I said, when are you going to do 5G in the stores? He said, well, why would I tear out all the wifi? I've got perfectly functioning wifi. >> Yeah, that's true. It's already there. But I think the technology which disappears in front of you, that's the best technology. Like you don't worry about it. You don't think it's there. Wifi, we think we think about that like it's there. >> And I do think wifi 5G switching's got to get easier too. Like for most users, you don't know which is better. You don't even know how to test it. And to your point, it does need to be invisible where the user doesn't need to think about it, right? >> Invisible. See, we came back to invisible. We talked about that yesterday. Telecom should be invisible. >> And it should be, you know? You don't want to be thinking about telecom, but at the same time, telecoms want to be more visible. They want to be visible like Netflix, don't they? I still don't see the path. It's fuzzy to me the path of how they're not going to repeat what happened with the over the top providers if they're invisible. >> Well, if you think about what telcos delivers to consumers, to businesses, then extending that connectivity into your home to help you support secure and extend your connection into Zeus's basement, whatever it is. Obviously that's- >> His awesome setup down there. >> And then in the business environment, there's a big change going on from the old NPLS networks, the old rigid structures of networks to SD1 where the control point is moved outside, which can be under control of the telco, could be under the control of a third party integrator. So there's a lot changing. I think we obsess about the relative role of the telco. The demand is phenomenal for connectivity. So address that, fulfill that. And if they do that, then they'll start to build trust in other areas. >> But don't you think they're going to address that and fulfill that? I mean, they're good at it. That's their wheelhouse. >> And it's a 1.6 trillion market, right? So it's not to be sniffed at. That's fixed on mobile together, obviously. But no, it's a big market. And do we keep changing? As long as the service is good, we don't move away from it. >> So back to the APIs, the eight APIs, right? >> I mean- >> Eight APIs is a joke actually almost. I think they released it too early. The release release on the main stage, you know? Like, what? What is this, right? But of course they will grow into hundreds and thousands of APIs. But they have to spend a lot of time and effort in that sort of context. >> I'd actually like to see the GSMA work with like AWS and Microsoft and VMware and software companies and create some standardization across their APIs. >> Yeah. >> I spoke to them yes- >> We're trying to reinvent them. >> Is that not what they're doing? >> No, they said we are not in the business of a defining standards. And they used a different term, not standard. I mean, seriously. I was like, are you kidding me? >> Let's face it, there aren't just eight APIs out there. There's so many of them. The TM forum's been defining when it's open data architecture. You know, the telcos themselves are defining them. The standards we talked about too earlier with Danielle. There's a lot of APIs out there, but the consistency of APIs, so we can bring them together, to bring all the different services together that will support us in our different lives is really important. I think telcos will do it, it's in their interest to do it. >> All right, guys, we got to wrap. Let's go around the horn here, starting with Chris, Zeus, and then Sarbjeet, just bring us home. Number one hot take from Mobile World Congress MWC23 day two. >> My favorite hot take is the willingness of all the participants who have been traditional telco players who looked inwardly at the industry looking outside for help for partnerships, and to build an ecosystem, a more open ecosystem, which will address our requirements. >> Zeus? >> Yeah, I was going to talk about ecosystem. I think for the first time ever, when I've met with the telcos here, I think they're actually, I don't think they know how to get there yet, but they're at least aware of the fact that they need to understand how to build a big ecosystem around them. So if you think back like 50 years ago, IBM and compute was the center of everything in your company, and then the ecosystem surrounded it. I think today with digital transformation being network centric, the telcos actually have the opportunity to be that center of excellence, and then build an ecosystem around them. I think the SIs are actually in a really interesting place to help them do that 'cause they understand everything top to bottom that I, you know, pre pandemic, I'm not sure the telcos were really understand. I think they understand it today, I'm just not sure they know how to get there. . >> Sarbjeet? >> I've seen the lot of RN demos and testing companies and I'm amazed by it. Everything is turning into software, almost everything. The parts which are not turned into software. I mean every, they will soon. But everybody says that we need the hardware to run something, right? But that hardware, in my view, is getting miniaturized, and it's becoming smaller and smaller. The antennas are becoming smaller. The equipment is getting smaller. That means the cost on the physicality of the assets is going down. But the cost on the software side will go up for telcos in future. And telco is a messy business. Not everybody can do it. So only few will survive, I believe. So that's what- >> Software defined telco. So I'm on a mission. I'm looking for the monetization path. And what I haven't seen yet is, you know, you want to follow the money, follow the data, I say. So next two days, I'm going to be looking for that data play, that potential, the way in which this industry is going to break down the data silos I think there's potential goldmine there, but I haven't figured out yet. >> That's a subject for another day. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on. You guys are extraordinary partners of theCUBE friends, and great analysts and congratulations and thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. >> Analyst: Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, this is a wrap on day two MWC 23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. Where Rob Hope and team are just covering all the news. John Furrier is in the Palo Alto studio. We're rocking all that news, taking all that news and putting it on video. Go to theCUBE.net, you'll see everything on demand. Thanks for watching. This is a wrap on day two. We'll see you tomorrow. (soft music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Good afternoon guys and gals. We're so glad you're here with us. Welcome back to the MGM Grand, Las Vegas. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, as I mentioned, our second day of coverage. We've learned a lot about cybersecurity, the complexity, the challenges, but also the opportunities. We've had some great conversations, really dissecting some recent survey data. We know that every industry, no industry is immune from this but healthcare is one of the ones that's quite vulnerable. We're going to be talking about that next, in part. >> Yeah. Cause we always talk about the super cloud and connecting hybrid across clouds and you know, on-prem, but also now out to the edge. >> Yes. >> You know, and nobody wants a separate stove pipe, but we saw this during the pandemic. We saw the pivot, work from home, to end point and cloud security rearchitecting the network, identity and you know, more stove pipes. Right? So, but that's not what the industry wants or needs, so. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Well I never would think about, you know you go to the doctor's office, you go to a hospital, X-ray machines, CT scanners, all these proliferation of medical IoT devices. Great for the patient, great for the providers, but a lot of opportunities for the attackers, as well. We're going to be talking about that, in part, in our next conversation with an alumni that's coming back to the program. Anand Oswal is here. The SVP and GM of network security at Palo Alto Networks. Great to have you back. >> Great to have me. Thank you. >> It's been a few years. >> Oswal: Yeah. It's been a time. >> So, I was looking at some of the unit 42 research: medical devices are the weakest link on the hospital network. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> But, so great for patient care, for doctors, providers, et cetera. But, a challenge and an opportunity for the adversaries. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you guys are seeing? I know you have some news on the medical IoT front. >> Yeah. Thanks for having me by the way. So, if you look at every industry has benefited from connected devices. Changes the outcome and the experiences, both for the end users, as well as the businesses. And healthcare is no different. If you look at the experience that we had as patients over the last decade has changed dramatically. And in the pandemic, even more changes happened, right? This is really ushering in a new era of patient care. It's connected devices. You know, I have a family member of mine who has diabetes. And, as you know, you got to check the blood glucose level periodically. It's usually pricking, it's cumbersome, it can hurt you. But now, with this new IoT based glucose margin systems, you can monitor these levels in real time, constantly. If it drops, can inject the right amount of insulins. So, changing the experience and the outcome for patients. Taking data from this devices to ensure that you have different outcomes. So, really, changing how you experience as patient. But, like you said, along with all of this is adding increased cybersecurity. Right? And we've seen over the last, I don't know, year or so, a 200% increase in cyber attacks on healthcare organizations. And, in the next couple of years, you're going to see 1.3 billion, yes, the "B," billion, new connected devices come to healthcare. So, that's including the attack surface. So, we've got to stay vigilant. There's a lot of great things you get from connected devices. It has cyber risk, just plan it properly. >> But, it's hard just to secure a medical IoT devices. Why is it so challenging? And how do you help? >> Yeah. Look, you can only secure what you see, first of all, right? So, it's very important to understand what devices you have on your network. And these can't be done statically, right? Because you're, they're made by different manufacturers and you're adding so many every day. So, you need to use machine learning to identify what these devices are. But just not what are devices, who's the manufacturer? What's the make, what's the model? What's the unpatched vulnerabilities? That's one part. I tell people that having visibility is good, but just that's not enough. It's like me telling you, you have a leak in your house. I don't give you any information on where the leak is. How do I call the plumber? What's the home warranty? Home insurance coverage? So you got visibility. Then you need to do segmentation. Segmentation all about who can talk to whom. Should your CT scan machine or MRI machine be talking to a server in the corporate environment? Should be talking to your point of sale terminal in the hospital? Maybe not. Right? So you need to define those policies. Again, those can be manual. They have to be automated because you're adding new devices every day. After you do that, it's around the data that is transporting on those devices. Do they have threats? Are they command controlled connections? Because threats can move laterally and need to inspect this in real time every day, constantly. Not just one time. Right? That's the whole notion of zero trust, which is no notion of implied trust. You want to have least privilege access. And the most important is that, look, we talked about this before. Majority of healthcare organizations have legacy security architectures. You can't have it solved better, the point product a new sensor, a partial solution. You need to get fully integrated because you need to reduce their operational cost. You need to ensure that they have better security. Right? I tell people what do organization want? Make more money, save money, and steer out trouble. Right? In simple ways. >> Valante: Yeah. >> I need to ensure that they're able to get this done securely. That's very important. >> So, a lot of the devices, so you think about oT, a lot of the devices been naturally air gaped. That was sort of the safety. What's it like in healthcare? Is the MRI machine, was it historically net-, you know, fenced off from the network and how is that changing? >> Yeah. I'll give an example. I talked to a customer, this is a few months ago. And this happened before the pandemic, luckily. They were doing, a doctor was doing a surgery on a patient at roughly two in the morning, on a, and using a ventilator. And guess what happened? The ventilator rebooted and said: firmware upgrading. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Wow. >> And luckily when I doctor, their customer, they said they had another ventilator that they could quickly do. This ventilator was connected to an ethernet cable, in this case. And somebody decided that two AM is the right time to upgrade things. Like, you know, you have windows of when you upgrade things. But, you need to be able to manage a lifecycle of these devices more intelligently. When is it being used? When it's upgraded? There's a life of a device, and then there's a cyber life. Now we have too many devices with end of life operating systems. We all remember the 2017 WannaCry attack. That was an end of life operating system. So, you have a shelf life and you have a cyber life. Need to be able to manage the life cycle of these devices and easily onboard new devices, but also have, be able to sunset devices as needed. >> Okay. So the business generally stays ahead, you know, of cyber, but are those worlds coming together? I mean, I feel like with digital transformation we're beginning to see that everybody talks about, you know, cyber can't just be a bolt on. >> Oswal: Yes. >> But it oftentimes is. So what's the state of play in healthcare? >> I think it's changing. If you think about the healthcare organizations or generally even oT environments, the decision maker is not just the CIO and CISO, it's also your plant manager, the hospital owner, or manager of the operations of the hospital. They have to be taken into account. The other, the other stakeholders: the clinical and biomed engineer who operates these devices, right? I was talking to a healthcare customer that said that asset utilization or devices important. Many times you find nurses or doctors will keep an infusion pump with them in their room because they want easy to use. And then they say, I want five more or 10 more, right? We all living in an environment where budget will be more and more important. So how do you get a full inventory of what's using what, how often are they used? For example, MRI machines are many times preset for scanning certain parts of the body. Now you can change it, but it takes time. It's effort. So if you know the actual utilization of what you're doing, you can be more efficient and have a much more efficient organization. >> And so how do they do that? Is that some kind of predictive analytics that they're using? Is it... >> Yes. It's the whole lifecycle of a zero trust architecture. It is the whole lifecycle of managing these devices effectively and then simplifying your operations. The three things that we have to do. >> How can zero trust be really tailored to healthcare specifically? >> Yeah. Let me tell you, first of all, when I talk of zero trust, I have a simple way of talking about it. Which is no notion of implied trust, right? Just because I'm in an environment doesn't mean have access to a device and application, et cetera. And when we think of medical device, it's like, who's the user who's accessing it? How do you authenticate that user? And that can be the things the organization has: password, an MFA, et cetera. That's, that's good. That's not enough. If you're accessing some, if I authentic authenticated you from this device, but what if this device itself is infected with malware? So, I need to know that it's the state of your device. Then what are you trying to access? Medical records, healthcare records, you'd like permission sets to access it. Are they read only, write only? Do you have confidential information about it? And when you're exchanging this information, is there malware in that data? You need to do this on a continuous basis. So, user, endpoint, access, and transaction. These four constructs have to be done continuously. That's the whole notion of zero trust. >> So, okay. Cause you had, we were talking off camera, you said, you know, get, say ask somebody what zero trust is, you get 10 different answers. 10 people, 10 different answers. So, I always would used to think unless a device or a person has been explicitly authorized and authenticated, they don't get access. But, you just added something more. It also has to be clean essentially. >> Yes. >> Right? And you've got the technology to do that? >> Absolutely. And we can, if you think about it, we can do this across all facets, all use cases. If you think of traditional network security, right? It doesn't secure the network. Like I said, it secures everything on the network. The users, the IoT devices, and the applications they access. Now I can be in the office, I can be on the road, or I can be home. I may use different notions of stacks. I may use a hardware-centric firewall for accessing data center based applications in my private data center. I may use a software firewall application for accessing things in the public cloud. I may use a cloud deliver SASE architecture from home or for remote branches. I wanted consistent security. The way I do threat, the way I do phishing protection, ransomware protection, IoT security. It should be consistent no matter where the user is, no matter where the data is, no matter where the applications is. And that's really what we can do with a consistent platform approach. >> So on-prem. In... >> The cloud, yes. >> In all the clouds, at the edge. >> Yes. >> Not only healthcare, but operational technologies? The factory? >> You want to make sure that it's not only the best in class security, it's also consistent security and consistent manageability. Right? Which means that the experience I have as an admin, from day minus one to day n. And it can be for any use case I have, it could be for securing my applications in my private data center, my application is the public cloud, or remote access from home or remote branch. I want that consistent security. I want that consistent policy. So, what is the treatment for you, the user, when you are in the office, on the go, or somewhere else? You don't want different experience. >> Valante: Yeah. >> You want same experience. >> Right? That goes... >> It should be optimal. It can be slow, it can be like, it takes you a long time to access your application either. Cause all of us are, we spoiled, we want it right away. >> Yeah. It can't be a blocker to productivity. >> Exactly. >> I was looking at some of the unit 42 data about, just the, all the vulnerabilities in different machines. We talk about cyber resilience a lot. How and, as I mentioned, and I think even the survey that Palo Alto Networks released yesterday, "What's Next in Cyber", was even demonstrating healthcare being one of the most vulnerable. >> Yes. >> And we talk about, you know, it being one of the weakest links. How can Palo Alto Networks work with healthcare organizations, large and small, across the globe to help them really dial up cyber resilience. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> And start reducing the vulnerabilities that are there as device proliferation is just going to happen. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit a very good point. We have data which says that 83% of imaging systems run end of life operating system stacks, right? And you remember in 2017, the WannaCry attack started with an end of life operating system device. Right? It affected 150 countries in the UK alone. 70,000 devices, 30,000 patient cancellations. We know that, if you think about infusion pumps, three out of four have unpatched vulnerabilities. Which means that you can patch it. But it's very hard for the biomed or clinical engineer to understand what to do and what not to do. Healthcare organization have lot of compliance requirements. Right? They have HIPAA compliance, they have other regulations. So, you need to make them audit ready: inventory of the devices, status of each device, make it audit ready, compliance ready. So, they're able to do what they do best in serving patients versus worrying about other things that they, that we can automate for themselves. Lastly, I'll say is that, you also want to simplify the operations of the health environment, right? Having more point products, more point solutions, that's solving only a certain aspect of what you do. Like only visibility, telling you have a leak, but not putting the end solution. Adds more and more complexity to organizations. >> So it's a different dynamic in this world, healthcare world, because you got to all these devices and they're not, you know, I think about Patch Tuesday, Right? I mean Microsoft's always putting out patches. And so, that tells the hackers, Hey, you know, go in on Wednesday. >> Yeah. >> And hack away. It's probably different in healthcare. They're probably not as frequent patches published or maybe there are, I don't know. I'll be curious as to whether they are. But I mean the, the device manufacturers, they're not, you know, the biggest software company in the world. >> Yeah. >> You know, so they're probably not as on top of it. >> Yeah. >> So I'm not saying it's better or worse, it's just a different environment. >> The patches to the end devices may not be as frequent, but patches that you can apply on from a security perspective on a security stack are like happening continuously in real time. The second things that you also want to ensure that the capabilities of your security product itself are able to stop attacks inline, in real time. For example, 95% of all malware in the world is MORF malware, which means it's variations of existing malware. You can stop this inline real time, right? Attackers are using more and more sophisticated techniques today, to evade traditional sand boxing techniques. So, you have to out-innovate them. And that's what we've done by all our cloud services. We move them very early on to the cloud to get the agility and scale that we get. But we invested a lot in machine learning and deep learning to stop these day-zero threats in line, real time. Attackers are using that window of opportunity, like you mentioned, between the time when a breach is announced or detected, and patched. And that breach could, that time window could be a minute. They're going to exploit that time. You want to reduce that to almost zero, which means that you need to stop it in line, in real time, continuously. >> So, take the sandbox example. >> Yeah. >> So, what do you say? So, if I'm doing a sandbox on-prem, one of the vulnerabilities is if my capacity is out of 10,000 files, they're just going to overwhelm me with a hundred thousand and then I'm going to be trying to figure out what's going on. And while I'm doing that, they're going to be sneaking in. And is that an example of... >> No. >> Valante: That you address because you're in the cloud, or...? >> Yeah, that's one. But, think about examples where attackers are devising malware, are creating malware that will basically evade traditional sand boxing techniques. So, if I do a memory lookup on the register, that malware will diffuse. It only detonates on an end user on a device or a database. So, now you need to do intelligent techniques. So, we built this, lot of infrastructure for intelligent realtime memory analysis to ensure that we are able to stay ahead of the competition. And we did that for phishing, we did that for command control connections, we did for software exploits, we did data for malware, for DNS. We're able to stop about 11 to 12 million additional phishing sites than anybody else. We're able to have our sand boxing more effective than anybody else. We're able to stop 26% more malicious sessions than others in the industry. >> Valante: Why? Architecture? >> Architecture. Couple of things. First, architecture. Second is that, through a lot of innovation that we've done in both machine learning and deep learning, to be able to look at unstructured data and be able to stop the attacks inline, real time. Think about it, the traditional way of doing URL filtering has always been to build a database of URLs in the world. And you categorize as URLs into groups of categories: news, adult. And then you say, what's my risk profile for each of these? And you put a score and you say, I want to have this tolerance. That doesn't work anymore. The reason is because attackers are sophisticated. Websites come in, up and down, in seconds. Before I build a database, it's gone. I can't do this old way of doing things, signature and databases. I've got to use the power of machine learning. I've got to use the power of deep learning and data. >> And it's, are healthcare leaders, do they have an appetite for that? >> I think healthcare data looking for outcomes. They're looking, when I talk to healthcare professionals, they want to basically do what they do best. Serve patients, right? Give them optimal care. They want someone to take care of all these things holistically, end to end. Simplify all the things that they have to do from a compliance perspective, architectural perspective, reduce their cost, give them a better outcome. That's what they want. >> It's all about outcomes. >> Oswal: It's all about outcomes. >> And we know you cover much more than healthcare, but we obviously used most of our time on that. It's such an interesting, fascinating industry. Obviously, a lot of opportunities there for organizations to work with companies like Palo Alto to really dial up their cyber resilience. >> Absolutely. >> And ultimately, to your point, deliver the outcomes that they are there to do. >> Absolutely, yes. >> We'll have to have you back cause we just, I feel like we just scratched the surface. Right? >> Oswal: Happy to come back. >> Valante: Thank you. >> Oswal: Thank you. >> Awesome. >> Oswal: Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure to have you on the program. For Anand Oswald and Dave Valante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. [Pedantic Music Fades]

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.