(melodic music) >> Good afternoon. Welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, it's great to be back in person. People are excited to be here. >> Yeah. We've had some great conversations with folks from Ansible and the community and the partner side. >> Yeah. One of the things I always love talking about John, is talking with organizations that have been around for a long time that maybe history, maybe around nearly a hundred years, how are they embracing technology to modernize? Yeah, we got a great segment here with the financial services leader, end user of Ansible. So it's be great segment. >> Absolutely. Please welcome Noor Shadid to the program, the senior SVP, excuse me, senior technology manager at Wells Fargo. Noor it's great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us. >> Of course. Happy to be here. >> Thanks. >> Talk a little bit about technology at Wells Fargo. I was mentioning to you I've been a longtime customer and I've seen the bank evolve incredibly so in the years I've been with it. But... >> Yeah. >> ...talk about Wells Fargo was a technology-driven company. >> Yeah. So I like to consider Wells, right? Being in a financial institution company. So I consider us a technology company that does banking as a customer, right? Like we were talking about. There's so much that we've been able to release over the couple of years, right? I mean, decades worth of automation and technology has been coming out, but lately, right? The way we provide for our customers, how fast at scale, what we're doing for our customers, it's been, it's been significant, right? And I think our goal is always how can we enhance the process for our customers and how can we provide them the next best thing? And I think technology has really allowed us to evolve with our customers. >> The customers. We are so demanding these days. Right? I think one of the things that short supplied in the last two years was patience and tolerance. >> Yes. >> People. And I don't think that's going to rubber band back? >> Yeah. No, I don't think so. >> So how, talk to us about how Wells is using automation to really drive innovation and, surprise and delight those customers on a minute by minute basis. >> Yeah. And so, you know, if you think about banking, we've been able, with automation, we've been able to bring banking into the 21st century. You do not have to go to a branch to manage your money anymore. You do not have to go, you know, go to deposit your check inside of a branch. You can do it through your mobile app, right? That's driven by automation and innovation, right? And, you know, we have all of these back ends tools working for us to help get us to this next generation of, of banking. We can instantly send money to each other. We don't have to worry about, I need to go and figure out how I'm going to get money to this person and I need to wait, you know, X amount of days. You, you have the ability and you have, you feel safe being able to manage your money at the organization. And so automation has really allowed us to get to this place where we can constantly enhance and provide features and reliability to our customers. >> It's interesting you mentioned that you guys are a technology can have it do banking reminds me of the old iPhone analogy. It's a computer that happens to make phone calls. >> Yeah. >> So like, this is the similar mindset. How do you guys keep up? >> Yeah. >> With the technology? >> So it's tough, right? Because there's so much that comes out. And I think the only thing that's constant in technology is change, right? Because it's constantly evolving. But what we do is we, integrate very well with these new tools. We do proof of concepts where we try to, you know, what's on the market, what's hot, how can we involve, like, how can we involve these new tools in our processes? How can we provide a better end result for our customers by bringing in these new tools? So we have a lot of different teams that bring, you know, their jobs are to like, do these proof of concepts and help us build and evolve our own strategies, right? So it keeps us, it keeps us on our toes and I think it keeps, you know, all these new things that are coming out in the market. We're a part of it. We want to evolve with those, what the latest and greatest is. And it's, it's been working right as customers of financial services and us managing our money through, you know, through banks. It's been great. >> So the business is the application. >> Yes. >> And how do you guys make that happen when it comes down to getting the teams aligned? What's the culture like? Explain. >> Yeah. So at Wells we have evolved so much over the, over the last few years. The culture right now is we want to make changes. You know, we are making changes. We want to drive through innovation. We want to be able to provide our, you know, it's a developer centric approach right now, right? We want to push to the next and the greatest. And so everybody is excited and everybody's adapting to all of what's happening in the environment right now. So it's been great because we are able to use all of these new features and tools and things that we were just talking about by allowing our developers to do that work and allowing people to learn these new skills and be able to apply them in their jobs, which is now creating this, you know, a better result for our customers because we're releasing at such a faster pace. And at scale. >> Talk about how, you talked about multiple groups in the organization really investing in innovative technology. How do you get buy-in? What's that sort of pyramid like up to the top level? >> Yeah. >> Because to your point, you're making changes very quickly and consumers demand it. >> Yep. >> You can do everything from home these days. >> Yep. >> You don't have to go into a branch. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Which has changed dramatically in the last it's. >> Powerful few years. Yeah. >> But how, what's that buy-in conversation like from our leadership? >> Yeah. If you don't have leadership buy-in, it's very difficult to make those changes happen. But we at Wells have such a strong support from our leadership to be a part of the change and be, you know, constantly evolve and get better. So the way we work, cause we're such a large organization, you know, we bring in our business, you know, our business teams and we talk to them about what is it that's best going to better our customers. How do we also not just support external but internal, right? How do we provide these automated tools or processes for people to want to do this next work and, and do these, you know, these new releases for our customers. And so we bring in our business partners and, and we bring in our leadership and, our stakeholders and we kind of present to them, you know, this is what we're trying to do. This is the return that you'll get. This is what our customers will also receive. And this is, you know, this is how we keep evolving with that. >> How has the automation culture changed? Because big discussion here is reuse, teamwork, I call it multiplayer kind of organizations where people are working together. 'Cause that's a big theme of automation. >> Yeah. >> Reuse, leverage. >> Yep. >> Can you explain how you guys look at that? >> Yeah. It's changed the way that we do banking because we're eliminating a lot of the repetitive tasks in the toil because we have partners that are developing these, you know, services. So specifically with Ansible, we have these playbooks, rather than having every customer write the same playbook but with their own little, you know, flavor to it, we're able to create these generic patterns that customers can just consume simply by just going into a tool, filling out you know, filling out that playbook template, credentials, or whatever it is that they need and executing it. They don't have to worry about developing something from scratch. And it also allows our customers to feel safe because they don't have to have those skills out the box to be able to use these automation tools, right? They can use what's already been written and executed. >> So that make things go faster with the benefits or what? Speed? >> Faster stability, right? We're now speed, stability, scalability, because we're now able to use this at scale. It's not just individual teams trying to do this within small spaces. We're able to reliable, right? Automation allows us to be reliable internally and for our customers. Because you're not asking, there's no human intervention when you're automating, right? You have these opportunities now for people to just, it's one click, you know, one click solution or you're, you're end to end. You got self-healing involved. It's really driving the way that we do our work today. >> So automation sounds like it's really fueling the internal employee experience at Wells... >> Yes. >> ...as well as the customer experience. And those two things are like this to me. They're inextricably linked. >> A hundred percent because if you need it, they need to be together, right? You want your internal to also be happy because they want to be able to develop these solutions and provide these automation opportunities for our teams, right? And so with the customers, they're constantly seeing these great features come out, right? We can, you know, with AIML today, we're now able to detect fraud significantly. What we would've, what we could've done a couple years ago. And, and developers are excited to be able to do that, right? To be able to learn all these new tools and new technologies. >> What's interesting Wells is you guys are like an edge application. Obviously everyone's got banking in their hand. FinTech obviously money's involved. So there's people interested in getting that money. >> Yeah. >> Security hackers or whatnot. So when you got speed and you got the consistency, I get that. As you look at securing the app, that becomes a big part of what, what's the conversations like there? >> Yeah. >> 'Cause that's the number one concern. And it's an Edge app. I got my mobile, I got my desktop. >> Yeah. >> Everything's in the cloud on premise. >> Yeah. And, and I think for us, security is number one. You know, we want to make sure that we are providing the best for our customers and that they feel safe. Banking, whatever financial service you're working with, you want to feel like you can trust that your money with those services. Right? So what we do is we make sure that our security partners are with us from day one. They're a part of the process. They're automating their pieces as well. We don't want to rely on humans to do a lot of the manual work and do the checking and the logging. You want it to be through automation and new tools, right? You want it to be done through trusted services. You don't, you know, security is right there with us. They're part of our technology organization. They are in the technology org. So they're the ones that are helping us get to that next generation to provide, you know, more secure processes and services for customers. >> And that's key for trust. >> Yes. >> And trust is critical to reduce churn and to, you know, increase the customer lifetime value. But, but people, I mean, especially with the amount of generations that are alive today in banking, you need to be able to deliver that trust intrinsically to any customer. >> Yes, a hundred percent. And you want to be able to not only trust the service but yourself that you can do it. You know, when you go into your app and you make a payment, or when you go in and you want to send, you know, you want to send money to a different, you know, a different bank account, you want to be able to know that what you just did is secure and is where you plan to send it. And so being able to create that environment and provide those services is, is everything right for our customers. >> What are some of the state-of-the-art kind of techniques or trade craft around building apps? 'Cause I mean, basically you're digitally transformed. I mean, you guys are technology first. >> Yeah. >> The app is the company. >> Yeah. >> That's, that's the bank. How do you stay current? What's some of the state of the art things that you guys do that wasn't around just a few years ago? >> Yeah, I mean, right now just using, we're using tools like Terraform and Ansible. We're making sure that those two are hand in hand working well together. So when we work on provisioning, when we, during provisioning where it's all, you know, it's automated, fully end to end, you know, AI ops, right? Being able to detect reoccurring issues that are happening. So if you have a incident we want to learn from that incident and we want to be able to create, you know, incident tickets without having to rely on a human to find that, you know, that problem that was occurring and self-healing, right? All of this is starting to evolve and bringing in the, the proper alerting tools, bringing in the pro, you know, the right automation tools to allow that self-healing to work. That's, you know, these are things that we didn't have, you know, year, decade ago. This is all coming out now as we're starting to progress and, and really take innovation and, you know, automation itself.... >> What's the North star internally when you guys say, hey, you know, down five years down the road, bridge to the future, we're transforming, we've continued to innovate. Scale is a big deal. Data, data sovereignty, all these things are coming up. And what's the internal conversation like when you talk about a future state? >> Yeah, I think right now we're on our cloud transformation journey, right? We're moving right now. We have workloads into our two CSPs or public cloud. Also providing a better service for infrastructure and being able to provide services internally at a faster space, right? So moving into the public cloud, making sure everything's virtualized, moving away from hard, you know, physical hardware or physical servers. That's kind of the journey that we're on right now. Right? Also, machine learning. We want to be able to rely on these, you know, bots. We want to be able to rely on, on things learning from what we're doing so that we don't make the same mistakes again. >> Where would you say the most value or the highest ROI that you've gotten from automation today? Where is that in the organization? >> There's so much, but what I mean because of all of the work that we're doing, there's a lot that I could list, but what I will say is that the ability to allow self-healing in our environments without causing issues is a very big return. Automating failovers, right? I think a lot of our financial institutions have made that a priority where they want to make sure that their applications are active, active and also that when things do go wrong, there is something in place to make sure that that incident actually doesn't, you know, take down any problems. I think it's just also investing in people. Right now, the market is hot and we want to make sure that people feel like they're being able to contribute, they're using the latest and greatest tools. They're able to upskill within our own environments at the firm. And I think our organization does an amazing job of prioritizing people. And so we see the return because we're prioritizing people. And I think, you know, a lot of institutions are trying, you know, people first, people first. But I can say that at Wells, because we are actually driving this, we're allowing, you know, we're enforcing that. We want our engineers to get the certifications. We're providing, you know, vouchers so that people can get those clouds certifications. It's when you do that and you put people first, everything kind of comes together. And I think, you know, a lot of what we see in our industry, it's not really the technology that's the problem, it's process because you're so, you know, we're working at large scales. Our environments are massive. So, you know, my three years at Wells have seen a significant amount of change that has really driven us to be.... >> On that point better. How about changing of the roles? IT, I mean, back in the day, IT serves the business, you know, IT is the business now, right? As, as you've been pointing out. What does the roles change of as automation scales in, is it the operator? I mean, we know what's going on with dev's devs are doing more IT in the CICD pipe lining. >> Yep. >> So we see that velocity check, good cloud native development. What's the op scene look like? It seems to be a multi-tool role. >> Yeah. >> Where the versatility of the skill set... >> Yep. >> ...is the quick learner. >> Yep, able to adapt. >> And yeah, what's your view on this new persona that's emerging from this new opportunity? >> Yeah, and I think it's a great question because if you think about where we're going, and even the term DevOps, right? It means so many things to different people. But literally when you think about what DevOps is allowing our developers and our operations to work together on one team, it's allowing, you know, our operation engineers aren't, you know, years ago, ops engineers were not doing the development work. They were relying on somebody to do the development work and they were just supporting making sure our systems were always available, right? Our engineers are ops are now doing the development work. They're able to contribute and to get, they're writing their own playbooks. They're able to take them into production and ensure that they're, being used correctly. We are change driven execution organization. Everything is driven through change and allowing our ops engineers or production score engineers to write their own playbooks, right? And they know what's happening in the environment. It's powerful. >> Yeah. You're seeing DevOps become a job title. >> Yeah (laughs). >> Used to be like a function of philosophy... >> Yeah, yeah. >> ... and then SRE's... >> SRE's. >> SRE are like how many servers do you have? I don't know, a cloud, what's next? (all laugh) >> What's next? Yeah, I think with SREs it's, you know, it's important that if you have site reliability engineers, you're working towards, you know, those non-functional requirements... >> Yeah. >> ...making sure that you're handling those key components that are required to ensure that our systems, our applications and our integrations, you know, are up there and they're meeting the standards that we set for those other faults. >> And, and I think Red Hat Ansible nailed it here because infrastructure is code. We get that infrastructure has configuration as code, but OPS says code really is that SRE outcome. SRE also came from the Google background, but that means infrastructure's just doing, it's thing. >> Yes. >> The ops is automated. >> Yes. >> That's an interesting concept. >> Yeah, because it's not, you know, it's still new, right? A lot of organizations used to see, and they probably still see operations as being the, you know, their role is just to make sure that the lights are on and they have specific access so they, you know, they're not touching code, but the people that are doing the work and know the environment should really be the ones under creating the content for it. So yeah, I mean it's crazy what's happening now. >> So I got an analogy that's going to be banking analogy, but for tech, you know, back in the automation, Oh, going to put my job out of business, ATMs are going to put the teller out of business as more tellers now than there are before the ATMs. So that metaphor applies into tech where people are like, "What am I auto? What's automating away? Is it my job?" And so actually people know it's not. >> Yeah. >> But what does that free up? So if you assume, if you believe that's good, you say, okay, all the grunt work and the low level on differentiated heavy lifting gets automated away. >> Yeah. >> Great. What does that free up the talent to do? >> Yeah, so when you, and that's great that you bring it up because I think people fear, you know, of automation, especially people that weren't doing automation in the past and now their roles are now they're able to automate those roles out. They're fearful that they don't have a space, a role anymore. But that's not the case at all. What we prioritize is now that those new engineers have this new skill set, apply them. Start using it to be a part of this transformation, right? We're moving from, we went from physical to virtual to now, you know, we're moving into the public, moving into the cloud, right? And that, that transformation, you need people who are ramping up their skill sets, you know, being a part of one of the tools that I own is terraform at Wells that, you know, right now our priority is we're trying to ramp up the organization to learn terraform, right? We want people to learn, you know, this new syntax, this new, you know, HCL and it's, you know, people have been automating some of the stuff that they're doing in their day to day and now trying to learn something new so that they can contribute to this new transformation. >> So new functionality, higher value services? >> Yes, yeah. >> It brings tremendous opportunity for those folks involved in automation. >> Yes. >> or on so many levels. >> Yep. >> Last question, Noor for you is what, you know, as we are rounding out calendar year 2022, entering into 2023, that patience is, that we talked about is still not coming back. What's next for Wells as a technology company that does banking? >> I mean, you name it, we're working on it, because we want to be able to deliver the best for our customers. And I think right now, you know, our digital transformation strategy and, and moving into the public cloud and getting our applications re-architected so that we are moving into microservice driven apps, right? We're moving these workloads into the public cloud in a seamless way. We're not lifting and shifting so that we're not causing more problems into the environment. Right. And I think our, our, our goal is right, Like I was saying earlier, people and evolving with the technology that's coming out. We're not, you know, we are a part of the change and we are happy to be a part of that change and making those changes happen. >> People first. >> Awesome, awesome stuff. >> Automation first sounds outstanding and I will never look at Wells Fargo as a bank again. >> Yeah. (laughter) >> Perfect. Perfect. >> Yeah, that's awesome. >> It's been such a pleasure having you on the program, talking about how transformative Wells has been and continues to be. >> Yeah. >> We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. It was lovely being her. Pleasure here. Thank you guys. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE all day, I'm sure, live from Chicago at Ansible Fest 2022. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and John and I will see you tomorrow morning.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you by vmware and its ecosystem sponsors it's legal yeah everything's legal welcome inside walls here on the cube as we continue our coverage here at vmworld once again we're back or what is going to be an exciting three days here in Mandalay Bay and i'm joined by my partner in crime you might say mark farley the producer Vulcan cast a host of Vulcan cast and tell us about Vulcan kestrel quick mark well you've seen comedy in cars you've seen singing in cars with carpool karaoke this is discussions about technology and cars it's tech talk and cars I see it on you can see it on Vulcan cast calm what a novel name for a website I'm pretty you figure good all day coming up with that one didn't you yeah but it's cool you know what it's like to look for a name absolutely benefit but it's a neat neat concept Tech Talk comes the cars you're kind of like the the james corbett of tech there you go except we don't sing about it I'm more like the Jerry Seinfeld maybe that's the next time we're joined by a couple of guests who are they become partners to more or less here in the business and solutely with Vaughn Stewart who is the enterprise architect and chief evangelist I love that by the way of on a pure storage and that evangelist looked up you do have it you getting the whole thing today and kimbark is a CEO of cata logic software and gentlemen ulcers thank you for being here we appreciate that so if you would start off by telling us a little bit about your individual companies you know what you do and then the marriage you to have partnered up here for the past four months came together pretty quickly and what that's all about and if you would bomb what you go first sure so pure storage is recognized widely as being the number one independent all-flash storage vendor we've been recognized for three years as being the leader in gartner's solid-state array Magic Quadrant we've really allowed flash to be consumed by the masses by making it more affordable than traditional disk based storage arrays and deliver all the promise of of the performance of flash kent and in a nutshell cattle objects software's that spin out three years ago from the syncsort company and what we've got about twenty nine patents we're working hard what we did is we evolved our technology to this whole copy data management space which is very exciting and when you marry copy data management to flash technology you drive some really serious effects and catback savings for customers so it's kind of a peanut butter and chocolate on here right was together really really does right so let's talk about your relationship then this has only been four months in the making you've known each other for a long time but you put together your business venture here very quickly what brought it together so fast and how did it make that kind of sense that boom it just happened almost overnight like that to start going on with the Kent listen we were lucky enough that these guys actually found us that a trade show it was a mug event Vav mug event in Austin Texas they found some for a show they have been absolutely brilliant to work with in the business that we're in we're what's called in place copy data management and why that's important is because we get to pick our partners and it's a lot easier to build a technology if you have a partner that cooperates and these guys have been so cooperative that's what made this thing tick they saw a gap that we could fill they were kind enough they sent us a box up to work with the team culturally has been aligned I mean we we've kind of do things all up and down the stack the same way pricing I think we're very similar channel driven we're similar the way we we look at at working together is very similar say just been brilliant and that's kind of what it is it's a neat at the end of the date and to try to squeeze the effects and capex savings out for customers that's kind of the do yeah and we're also seeing a lot of requests from our from our customer base we have a large number of joint customers as well as customers that were interested in purchasing the other technology but we're waiting for a point of integration and so as we're seeing this shift in the the mid market and the enterprise to a more DevOps centric model more of infrastructure teams converging their their server and their compute management or application owners into owning the entire stack there was this this need for taking the data management constructs that we had and allowing an end-to-end ecosystem enable meant so that dev teams could just you know at the push of a button and refresh their data sets move they move their development efforts forward and get rid of all the old legacy time centric based provisioning models yeah I mean I mean CDM has kind of become you know one of these hot buzzwords right all of a sudden as as our data storage just become more capable and has become cheaper we tend to hoard more stuff right now listen we're hanging on things a lot longer so what is the gap exactly you're talking about that you're filling and what's the need that you're addressing specifically then you have all this data at your disposal and and and I guess with Flash movie great question John so what what happens is when you first of all let's talk about what's driving the flash analogy right why why flash is so popular right now everybody that we've talked to is either moving to flash or thinking about moving to flash simply for their primary applications you know those are things like databases virtualization filers you know SharePoint right and as you start to move you get you get really good benefits around effects from using your flash because the speed and the performance particularly with what they do they've got some compression stuff that's unbelievable and then what we do is we overlay that so if you take CDM which was your question if you look at CDM what CDM does copy data management it allows you to deal with all of these copies in the in the world today you've got so many of the vendors that are taking different snapshots at different times and you end up at any given time I think IDC did a study what was it like 50 50 versions of an email that you've got floating around is any given time floating in your organization right so what Vaughn was referring to let's take one example in a test dev environment right we could drive home on that which they do a lot more than that but if you take the test stab and let's say you're a developer and you have an Oracle database that you really want to test the latest data right now without flash without CDM what happens is you make a copy of that database you move it to the developers and getting that copy if you're a developer getting that copy away from the internal IT infrastructure department can take you hours can take days go ahead we've we've got customers whose current copy data management process is it is is fulfilled by either a full-time employee or a staff that runs around doing arm and restores or restores from tape and development teams have to try to anticipate weeks in advance when a new copy of the data that model has been the the de facto standard in the industry for a decade or more and in what you're seeing from from all conversations around DevOps is agility it's time to how can I no increase the rate at which we innovate part of it is by bringing agility into your development process and so so this is a real nice pairing of technologies the performance capabilities within a flash a flash array allows you to scale a large number of instances the instant ability to clone the data set gives you gives you the agility but it's just an engine I still have to take care of the rest of the stack I got a role based access which users get to see which data do I need a datum ask the data or do they get direct access are they having a virtual copy or a physical right and best part can I make it a portal or can I make it right into their native workflow so they never hit the storage team or even the infrastructure team so let's talk about how customers are going to use this right pure has been a big leader not just in flash but and also digital efficiency capacity efficiency and you've had to be that right from the get-go people are saying well how am I going to be able to get the cost you know the effect of costs down of this flash well you have dee doop and you have compression and now you're adding this application layer or higher layer if you will another layer of the stack towards you know data density do you think this is going to have you done run the numbers on what kind of percentage or anything like that that customers will see absolutely kind of kind of absolute ken so I'm actually doing in the solution booth I think 430 tomorrow's solution a the vmworld booth we've got a customer six flags theme park operator that doing this test dev case we saved ninety percent affects efficiency for these guys so there's some really solid number again 90 90 90 / such a big number what's a huge number but it's what is what Vaughn was trying to say if you start marrying the workflow if you take their ability to make the storage and the moving the data more efficient and you'll ever their tool and then you overlay it with our api's we have rest api is that you can tie into a customer environment and then we've got to work flow this workflow engine that we call full stack automation the customer can start automating a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do and it's a home run yeah let's be let's be get a little bit in greater depth here but not too deep yeah these capabilities have existed in market for a long time yeah but the customers had to assemble and build their own scriptures in a fool's the phone and again we're not talking just copying of the data yeah we're giving you an efficiency in the copy data engine with it running on the flash array right what cata logic is doing is giving you a single interface either via portal or API for the entire orc for the orchestration of the entire stack the test Network the virtual machines the physical servers the volume managers all the way down to the copy of the data absolutely so I'm going to dive even deeper bond what kind of skill set be careful what did I get wet what kind of skill set does a customer need to have to take advantage of this solution so that's that's a beautiful question because it goes back to the synergy between our two companies right we're known for being able to set up storage in under an hour that requires no administrative skill set right nothing to tune much like very much like an iphone right kind of out of the box there's no manual right cata logics in the same boat you download an ova you're up and running in 30 minutes you're connected to the pure array in four at 40 minutes yeah you're connected ad and 50 and you're running you're off to the races right we don't have any boxes no appliance versus our competitors out there right we don't have any agents to install no appliances it's just it's the perfect match simplistic and we're running and through api's right we're getting we're getting consistent application consistent copies of the data sets right and we're orchestrating through the built in infrastructures that that already exists whether we're looking at vSphere or the rest of the ecosystem so say a customer does their own development and they've got they've got people that know how to use api's program for api's will they be able to will they be any faster be able to do more with it or does it really not what it does this gets back to the effects issue right so so with our REST API they can tie it in and we've already got a lot of things that are tied in like some of the development tools out there chef puppet bluemix from IBM I mean these are all things that we we can kind of work with to complete the environment and allowed them to lever is amazing platform does that answer your question I think yeah so what about the market for this right it a happy data management took a while to take off right it's one of those things in data management has always been a tough thing and it takes a while for customers to sort of get a what what I'm going to say a group think and the critical mass of people thinking about it it looks like you've had some help in the last year with other vendors getting in well and popularizing it you know EMC has theirs and commvault I think is doing something in my response is talking about it now you know 18 months ago those of what he did but what started it mark and this is and that's a great question is what I was alluding to earlier once flash comes on the scene and particularly flash vendors that can do what they do that have got a huge cat-back saving or opik savings for the customer then you can start working in their workflow in their processes and saving them even more money so it actually is copy data management with flash storage can becomes almost to have to have versus and the other things that we were doing a year ago it was a nice to have what i call a nice to have right because if you start looking at how to save yourself money from an effects perspective you might as well look at how to go all the way and sometimes you can triple to 10 times your savings geometrically by adding see the right CDM what i call enhance CDM what our customers sometimes say is they call us a CDM on steroids copy data management on steroids that's energy is a big thing if you've looked at the industry historically what you've seen as storage vendors put out their own homogeneous right automation walls right point bond and then you've seen a number of heterogeneous vendors to play their tools but they don't want to have any correlation with any hardware vendor right right and so and so as a storage provider right and customers are looking to say well look I don't wanna get locked in a particular storage provider and right so that's one aspect as a storage vendor we're sitting there saying we'd like to have greater integration your ecosystem so we can bubble up our value cattle logics kind of hit that sweet spot and said we're going to be heterogeneous we're going to be multi-platform and we're going to leverage leverage the channel right hundred percent channel driven and we're going to leverage the API and the data management ecosystem the storage vendors so they've kind of got a perfect storm going on in terms of a technology and market momentum if you like ok so let's talk about how the solution is going to be delivered you sell it do you sell it do you sell into pure accounts you talked about channel we're getting we're going to meet in the channel okay we're also talking about doing some more creative things possibly up for right now it's a meet in the channel we think there's enough enough good networking the teams are in touch with each other you know the value proposition proves itself right if somebody when's it going to be available in another month or so so there are demonstrations available both in the cat illogic and in the pure storage booth here at vmworld I so we would we would encourage those who are interested in seeing the power of this this solution to stop by either booth at any time we're going to speaking sessions in each others as well this week absolutely up and we are currently targeting for somewhere between mid to end-september for a ga release right and I need to say one other thing going back to this the reason this works is because these guys have but one care and they are customer driven right they don't have an ego they are driving to the customer and fulfill the needs because as he said it's sometimes hard for a heterogeneous vendor that controls a lot to be welcomed as much as we've been welcomed with this group it's because they know they want to drive it through the customer get the best solution in the world of the customer so on the customer side you've talked about the perfect storm of services and products who's the perfect customer who's the optimal customer something like this that I i think the low-hanging fruit is any development team that has as some requirement where they are taking copies of their current data set and are developing off of that platform I think that's the low-hanging fruit I think at a more macro level any organization that says they have a DevOps initiative and particularly they want to turn key DevOps platform to be riding with and launch launch ahead versus a try to acquire talent to build their own this is rate rate within your wheelhouse good deal no brainer and if people aren't looking at that right now you know they're not they're not in this century right because everybody's moving to flash for the primary all the projections are going forward to going off the charts in terms of the growth of flash of what's gonna happen at any what's changed with flash right where four years ago sure had to kind of get over the hurdle of the price berry for flat right we did that with industry-leading data reduction that's still two x better than the rest of the industry but as flash prices keep coming down not what you're seeing as a pivot around around value is around making multiple data sets I mean if you get into a depth use case and I'm making ten copies of a data footprint that's already reduced by x 5x and you're getting to a price point that you just you can't you can't meet with with this because you couldn't drive enough performance either death actually that's not possible yeah well before I let you go I want to tell you it's just disappointing to us that you're not more enthusiastic so and super a little it's really impressed today we had a long night life maybe tomorrow things will pick up but congratulations on the business venture and wish you the best of luck down the road thanks for being well thank you thank you guys for having us on really enjoyed it appreciate it thank huh thank you back with more from vmworld right after this here on the cube