>> On January 17th, 2023 join theCUBE community for SuperCloud2 where we explore the intersection of cloud and data. One of our gold sponsors is ChaosSearch and I'm here with Ed Walsh, CEO of the company. Ed, why should people attend SuperCloud2? >> That's good question. Listen, Supercloud is a mega trend, just like you said, data and cloud, I would also add analytics to it and some companies but also some end user enterprise and some companies are using it for great, things you couldn't possibly do without this design principle. In fact, if you're doing anything around cloud, data analytics, you need to look at these things or you're not going to keep up with your data growth. >> Awesome. January 17th, go to SuperCloud.World and register. You don't want to miss the conversations with data mesh founders, Zhamak Dehghani, technologists like Bob Muglia and customers building super clouds like Wal-Mart. Don't miss it.

>>Welcome back to the cubes cover dot com. Splunk annual conference >>Virtual this year. I'm john for >>your host of the cube as always we're being the best stories. The best guest to you and the best guest today is the ceo Doug merit of course, Top Dog. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on to be seen. >>So nice. I can't believe it. We had a whole year without seeing each other. >>I love this conference because it's kind of like a studio taking over a full virtual studio multiple sets, cubes here. You have the main stage, you've got rooms upstairs, tons of virtual interactions. Great numbers. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Thank you. We were, we wanted this to be primarily live where we are live, primarily on site. Um, and we pivoted some private marketing team. How quickly they pivoted and I love the environment they've created as I know next year we will be always have virtual now we've all learned but will be on site, which is great. >>It's good to see kind of you guys telling the story a lot, a lot more stories happening and You know, we've been covering splint since 2012 on the Cube. I think longer than aws there was 2013 our first cube seeing Splunk emerge is the trend has been, it's new, it's got value and you operationalize it for customers. Something new happens. You operationalized for customers and it just keeps on the Splunk way, the culture of innovation. It just seems now more than ever. You guys were involved in security early 2015 I think that was the year we started kind of talking about it your first year and now it just feels like something bigger is right here in front of us. It's and people are trying to figure out multi cloud observe ability. We see that what that's a big growth wave coming. What's the wave that's happening? >>So uh the beauty of Splunk and the kind of culture and how we were born was we have this non structured backbone um what I would call the investigative lake where you just dump garbage into it and then get value out of it through the question asking which means you can traverse anywhere because you're not taking a point of view on the data it's usable all over the place. And that's how we went up in security. As we had the I. T. Systems administrators pinging that thing with with questions. And at that point in time the separate teams were almost always part of the I. T. Teams like hey can we ask questions that thing. It's like yeah go ahead. And also they got value. And then the product managers and the app dev guys started asking questions. And so a lot of our proliferation has been because of the underlying back bonus blank the ability for new people to come to the data and find value in the data. Um as you know and as our users know we have tried to stay very focused on the go to market basis on serving the technical triumphant the cyber teams, the infrastructure management, 90 ops teams and the abdomen devoPS teams and on the go to market basis and the solutions we package that is, we're trying to stay super pure to that. That's $90 billion of total addressable market. We're super excited will be well over three billion an error this year, which is amazing is 300 million when I started seven years ago so that 10 x and seven years is great. But three billion and 90 billion like we're all just getting going right now with those Corbyn centers. The were on top of what sean bison as we tell you about, hey, we've got to continue to focus on multi cloud and edge is really important. Machine learning is important. That the lever that we've been focused on for a long time that we'll continue to gain better traction on is making sure that we've got the right data plane and application platform layer so that the rest of the world can participate in building high quality reusable and recyclable applications so that operate operationalization that we have done officially around cyber it and devops and unofficially on a one off basis for marketing and supply chain and logistics and manufacturing that those other use cases can be packaged repeated, sold and supported by the people that really know those domains because we're not manufacturing experts. It's we're honored that portion BMW are using us to get operational insight into the manufacturing floor. But they lead that we just were there is the technical Splunk people to help bring that to life. But there are lots of firms out there, no manufacturing cold process versus the screed and they can create with these packages. They're appropriate for automotive, automotive versus paint versus wineries versus having that. I think the big Accelerant over the next 10 years response, we gotta keep penetrating our core use cases but it would be allowing our ecosystem and so happy Teresa Karlsson's here is just pounding the table and partners to take the other probably 90% of the market that is not covered by by our core market. >>Yeah, I think that's awesome. And the first time we get to the partner 1st and 2nd the rebranding of the ecosystem as it's growing. But you mentioned you didn't know manufacturing as an example where the value is being created. That's interesting because you guys are enabling that value, their adding that because they know their apps then they're experts. That's where the ecosystem is really gonna shine because if you can provide that enablement this control plane as you mentioned, that's going to feed the ecosystem. So the question I have for you is as you guys have become essentially the de facto control playing for most companies because they were using spring for a lot of other great reasons now you have set them up that way is the pattern to just keep building machine learning apps on top of it or more querying what's the what's the customer next level trends that you're seeing. >>So the two core focus areas that we will stay on top of is enriching that data platform and ensure that we continue to provide better at peace and better interfaces so that when people want to build a really interesting automotive parts, supply chain optimization app that they're able to do that, we've got the right A. P. S. We've got the right services, we've got the right separation between the application of platforms so they can get that done, we'll continue to advance that platform so that there's modernization capabilities and there's advertising capabilities and other pieces that they can make their business. The other piece that will stay very focused on is within the cyber realm within I. T. Ops within devops, ensuring that we're leveraging that platform, but baking ml and baking all the advanced edge and other capabilities into those solutions because the cyber teams as where you started with a You know, we really started reporting on cyber 2015, those guys have got such a hard job and while there's lots of people pretending like they're going to come in and serve them, it's the difficulty is there are hundreds of tools and technologies that the average C so deals with and the rate of innovation is not slowing down and those vendors that have a vested interest and I want to maintain my footprint and firewalls, I want to maintain an implant, I want to maintain. It's really hard for them to say, you know what? There are 25 other categories of tools and there's 500 vendors. You gotta play nicely with your competitors and know all those folks if you really want to provide the ml the detection, the remediation, The investigation capabilities. And that's where I'm really excited about the competition. The fake competition in many cases because like, yeah, bring it on. Like I've got 2000 engineers, all they do all day long is focused on the data layer and making sure that we're effective there and I'm not diverting my engineers with any other tasks that I've got a it's hard enough to do what we do in the day layers. Well, >>it's interesting. I just had some notes here, I had one data driven innovation you've been talking about since you've been here. We've been talking about data driven innovation, cybersecurity mentioned for many years, it's almost like the balance of you gotta have tools, but you gotta have the platform. If you have too many tools and no platform, then there's a mix match here and you get hung up with tools and these blind spots. You can't have blind spots, you can't have silos. This is what kind of everyone's pretty much agreeing on right now. It's not a debate. It's more like, okay, I got silos and I got blind spots. Well how do I solve >>the difficulty? And I touched a little bit of the sun my keynote of There are well over 60 and I was using 16 because DB engines categorizes 16 different database tools. But there's actually more if you go deeper. So there's different 16 different categories of database tools. Think relational database, data warehouse, ledger databases, graph database, et cetera over 16 categories those 350 vendors. That's not because we're all stupid in tech like a graph DB is different than a relational database, which is different than what we do with our stimulus index. So there's those categories that many vendors because they're trying to solve different problems within the swim lane that you are in which for us is this non structured, high volume difficult data to manage Now. The problem is how do you create that non broken that end to end view. So you can handle your use cases effectively. Um and then the customer is still going to do with the fact that we're not a relational database engine company. We're not a data warehousing company where we were beginning to use graph DB capabilities within our our solution sets. We're gonna lean on open source other vendors use the tool for the job >>you need. But I think that what you're thinking hitting on my like is this control plane idea. I want to get back to that because if you think about what the modern application developers want is they want devops and deVOps kind of one infrastructures codes there. But if I'm a modern developer, I just want to code, >>I don't want to configure >>the data or the infrastructure. So the data value now is so much more important for the developer, whether that's policy based innovation, get options, some people call it A I ops, these are big trends. This is fairly new in the sense of being mainstream. It's been around for a couple of years, but this time, how do you see the data being much more of a developer input. >>People talk about deVOps is a new thing when I was running on the HR products at Peoplesoft in 2000 and four, we had a deVOPS teams. So that is, you know, there's always been a group of people whether Disney or not that are kind of managing the manufacturing floor for your developers, making sure they got the right tools and databases and what's new is because the ephemeral nature of cloud, that app dev work and devops and everyone that surrounds those or is now 100% data driven because you have ephemeral services, they're popping up and popping down. And if you're not able to trap the data that are each one of those services are admitting and do it on a real time basis and a thorough, complete basis, you can't sample then you are flying blind and that's not gonna work when you've got a critical code push for a feature your customers demanding and if you don't get it out, your competitors are, you need to have assurance that you've done the right things and that the quality and and the actual deployment actually works And that's where what lettuce tubes or ability Three years ago as we roughly started doing our string of acquisitions is we saw that transition from a state full world where it was all transaction engine driven. I've got to insert transaction and engines in a code. Very different engineering problem to I've got to grab data and it's convoluted data. It's chaotic data. It's changing all the time. Well, jeez that sounds and latency >>issues to they're gonna be doing fast. >>I've got to do it. You literally millisecond by millisecond. You've got are are bigger customers were honored because of how we operate. Splunk to serve some of the biggest web properties in the in the globe and they're dealing with hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data per day that are traversing these pipes and you've got to be able to extract metrics that entire multi petabyte or traces that entire multi pedal extreme and you can't hope you're guessing right by only extracting from portions of it because again, if you missed that data you've missed it forever. So for us that was a data problem, which is why we stepped in and >>other things That data problem these days, it's almost it's the most fun to talk about if you love the problem statement that we're trying to solve. I want to get your reaction something if you don't mind. I was talking to a C. So in the C. I. O. We have a conversation kind of off camera at an event recently and I said what's the biggest challenge that you have? Just curious? I asked him, it's actually it's personnel people are mad at each other. Developers want to go faster because there are ci cd pipeline is devops their coding. They're having to wait for the security groups in some cases weeks and days when they could do it in minutes they want to do it on the in the pipelines, shifting left as some call it and it's kind of getting in the way. So it's kind of like it's not they're not getting along very well uh meaning they're slowing things down. I can say something what they really said, but they weren't getting along. What's your reaction? Because that seems to be a speed scale problem. That's developer centric, not organizational, you've got organizational challenges and being slowed down. >>So uh while we all talk about this converted landscape and how exciting is going to be. You do have diametrically opposed metrics and you're never going to have, it's very difficult to get a single person to have the same allegiance to those diametrically a virgin metrics as you want. So you've got checks and balances and the reality of what the cyber teams need to be doing to ensure that you aren't just coding effective functions with the right delivery timeframe. But that's also secure is I think going to make the security team is important forever and the same thing. You can't just write sloppy code that consumes, that blows your AWS budget or G. C. P budget within the first week of deploying it because you've still got to run a responsible business. So there are different dimensions that we all have to deal with quality time and feature functionality that different groups represent. So we, I believe a converged landscape is important. It's not that we're gonna blow it up and one person is going to do it all if you've got to get those groups talking better and you've got to reduce cycle times now we believe it's plunk is with a common data plane, which is the backbone and then solutions built from that common data plane to serve those groups. You're lessening the lack of understanding and you're reducing the cycle time. So now I can look when I'm publishing the code. If it's done properly, is it also secure And the cyber teams can kind of be flying in saying, hey, wait, wait, wait, we just saw something in the data says we're not quite ready. I'm sorry. I know you want to push, you can't push now, but there'll be a data driven conversation and not this, you shouldn't be waiting a week or two weeks, like we can't operate that scale and you've got to address people with facts and data and logic and that's what we're trying to get done. And you >>guys have a good policy engine, you can put up that up into the pipeline. So awesome. That's great, great insight there. Thanks for sharing. Final question. Um looking back in your time since you've been Ceo the culture kind of hasn't changed at Splunk, it's still they have fun, hard charging laid back a little bit and public company now, he's still got to meet the numbers, but your growing business is good, but there's a lot more coming as a big wave coming talk about the Splunk culture. >>So the core elements of culture that I love that. I think all of us agree you don't want to change one where curiosity driven culture, our tool is an investigative tool, so I never want to lose. I think that threat of grit, determination, tenacity and curiosity is paramount in life and I think literally what we push out represents that and I want our people represent that and I think the fun element is really the quirkiness of the fund, like that is one of the things I love about Splunk but we are a serious company, we are in the data plane of tens of thousands of organizations globally and what we do literally makes a difference on whether they're successful or not. As organizations, we're talking about walmart is example And how one second latency can have a, have a 10% drop off in fulfillment of transaction for wal mart that's like a billion dollars a week if you cannot get their system to perform at the level it needs to so what we do matters and the change that we've been driving that I think is a great enhancement to the culture is as we are now tip into the 50% cloud company, you have the opportunity to measure millisecond by millisecond, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour and that's a different level of help that you get. You can literally see patterns happening over the course of minutes within customers and that's not something we were born with. We were an on premise solution, we had beautiful tools and it was the C E O. S problem, the CSS problem um and their opportunity to get that feedback. Now we get that feedback so we're trying to measure that crunchiness, the fun, the cool part about Splunk with. We also have got to be very operationally disciplined because we carry a heavy responsibility set from our customers and we're in the middle of that as well as the world knows, we're halfway through our transition to be a cloud first company but I'm excited with the results I'm seeing, so I think curiosity and tenacity go with that operational rigor. Like we should all be growth mindset oriented and very excited about, Hey, can I improve? I guess there's some information that I need that I'm not getting that will make me serve my customers better and that is the tone and tenor. I want to cross all the Splunk of whether in HR legal or engineering or sales or we serve customers and we've got to be so excited every day about getting better feedback and how to serve them better. >>Doug. Thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing that inside. I know you had to cancel your physical event, pulled off an exceptionally strong virtual event here in person. Thanks for having the Cuban. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for being here and I can't wait to do this in person. Next >>to mary the ceo of Splunk here inside the cube cube coverage continues stay with us for more. We've got more interviews all the rest of the day, Stay with us. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm >>mm mhm >>mhm >>Yeah

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the two covering AWS executive Something >>brought to you by Accenture >>everyone to the ex Center Executive Summit here in AWS. Reinvent I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by John. Match it. He is the managing director. Applied Intelligence, North America Attic Center Thank you so much for coming on the Q. So we're gonna have a fun conversation about a I today. We tend to think of a I as this futuristic Star Trek Jetsons kind of thing. But in fact, a i a. I is happening here and now >>it's all around us. I think it's intricate zoologist, sort of blood into the fabric girl of our lives without really even knowing about, I mean, just to get here, Let me lives took a new burst. There's a I in the route navigation. We may have listened to Spotify, and there's a I and the recommendation engine. And if you want to check the weather with Alexa, there's a lot of agents in the natural language processing, and none of that was really impossible 10 years ago. So without even trying, just wake up and I sort of like in your system in your blood. >>So as consumers, we deal with a I every day. But it's all but businesses are also using a I, and it's already having an impact. >>I think >>what is absolutely true it and really interesting is that information is just the new basis of competition. Like like you know, companies used to compete with physical objects and look better cars and blenders and stereos and, you know, thermometers. But today, you know, they're all like on a device, and so information is how they compete. And what's interesting to me about that for our clients is that if you have a good idea, you can probably do it. And so you're limited, really by your own imagination on. So I just as an example of like how things are playing out a lover classroom, the farmer space to make better drugs, and every every form of company I know of is using some sort of machine learning a I to create better pharmaceuticals, the big ones, but also the new entrance. One of the companies that we followed numerator really issued company. What they've been able to do is like in just just a massive amount of data like all day, like good data, bad bias on buying >>its ingesting, this kind of data the data is about. >>It's about like drug efficacy, human health, the human genome like like like doctors visits like all this diverse information. And historically, if you put all that data together just to have a way to actually examine it, there's no way that was too much. Humans can't deal with it, but but But machine learning can. And so what? We just all this date up and we let the robots decided sort of less meaningful. And what's happened is you can now deal with instead, just a very fraction that data, but all of it. And the result, like in pharmaceuticals. Is it wearable? Come with new HIV drugs in six months? It used to be years and millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. But now it's, you know, it's months, and so it's really changing the way humans live. And certainly the associated industries. They're producing the drugs. >>So it's as you said, I was already being used to reimagine medicine. So many of the high tech jobs openings today are not necessarily in technology there in pharmaceuticals and automotive's. And these and these involved artificial intelligence, their skills in artificial intelligence. What can you tell us about how a eyes having an impact? And that's what I think. >>This is a really good question. What is interesting is that industry she wouldn't think, or digital companies are now actually digital competitors. I'll give you two examples. One is a lot of clients make liquefied natural gas. Now that that is a mucky business. It's full of science, like geology and chemistry and chemical engineering, and they work with these like small refineries. But the questions like, how we gonna get better if you make you know Ellen G. And so what they do is they use a I, and the way they do that is likely have these small refineries. Each piece of equipment has a sensor on it, so there may be 5000 sensors, and each sensor has three or four like bots looking at it, and one might be looking at vibration heat and and what they're doing is they're making predictions. Millions of predictions every every day about you know whether quality is good. The machine's about to have a problem that safety is jeopardise something like that. And so So you've gone from a place where, you know, the best competitors were chemists to the best competitors are actually using machine learning to make the plants work better. You know, another entry. We see this really was brewing. You know, you don't think no one would think brewing is like a digital business like his beer? The Egyptians may be right, like so everyone knows how to do it. So But think about if you make beer like how you're gonna get better and again do what you do is you begin to touch customers more effectively with better digital marketing, you know? Hey, I tow target to understand who your best customers are, how to make offers to them, had a price head of both new product introduction, and even had a formulate new brands of beer that might appeal to different segments of society. So brewing, like they're all about, like ml in the eye. And they really are, like a digital competitive these days, which I think it's interesting, like no one would have thought about that, you know, is they were consuming beer on a Friday with their friends >>and craft brewing is so hot right now. I mean, it is one of those things. As you said, it is attracting new, different kinds of segments of customers. >>Right? And so the questions like if you are a craft brewer like, how do you go find the people that that you want? So what we're doing is we're way have new digital ways to go touch them very personalized offer like, if you like running, you know we can We can give you an offer like fun run followed by a brew. But we know who you are and what you like your friends like to do to get very specific A CZ we like examined the segments of society to do very personal marketing. It's actually fun, like, you know, it gives you things to go Dio we did one event where he looked at cos we we had a a beer tasting with barbecue teach you no instruction. So if you wanna learn how to cook barbecue and also do a beer tasting can get 20 people together and you have a social experience and you you buy more the product. But what's interesting is like, Well, how do you find those people? How do you reach them? How do you identify these of the right folks? That'll actually participate? And that's where a I comes into play. >>So this is fascinating, and you just you just described a number of different industries and companies beer, brewers, liquefied natural gas, pharmaceuticals that are using a I to transform themselves. What is your What do you recommend for the people out there watching and say, I want to do that? How could I get on >>board or what we advise Companies are clients to really get good at three things, and the first is just to do things differently. So you got to go into your core operations and figure out how you can extract more cash and more profit from your existing operations. And so that's like we talked about natural gas, right? Like you could produce it more profitably and effectively, but that's not enough. The next thing you do step to would be to actually grow your core business. Everyone wants to leave to the new right away, but but you're getting all your cash and your legacy businesses and so like like we saw in the brewing history. If you can find new customers, more profitable customers interact with them, create a better digital experience with them, then you'll grow both your top line in your bottom line. But for our from our perspective, the reason you do both of those things is cash. Then make investments into New Net new businesses on DSO. The last thing you do is to do different things, so find in adjacency and grow. And it's important to talk about the role of a I and that because that's the way you develop outcomes with speed, right? Like you're not gonna build a factory and we're gonna build a service or some sort of, you know, information centric offerings. And so what we like to do is talk about like the wise pivot from your old legacy businesses. We generate cash and you make selective investments in the new and how you regulate that is a really important question, because you're too fast and you start the Lexie businesses like to slow, and you're gonna be sort of left out of the new economy. So doing those three things correctly with the right sort of managing processes is what we advise our clients to focus on. >>So I see all of this from the business side. But do you because you're also a consumer? Do you ever see any sort of concerns about privacy and security in the sense of why does anyone need to know if I like to run or I like barbecue with my beer? I mean, how do you How do you sort of think about those things and and talk to clients about those issues >>too? Well, I think, you know, actually, for censure. Ah, large part of our focus is what we call just ethical a eye on. And so it's important to us to actually have offerings that we think that we're comfortable with that are legally comfortable, but also just societally are acceptable. And it's actually like there's a lot of focus in this area, right, how you do it. And there's actually a lot to learn. Like like what we see, for example, is there could be biased in the data which effects the actual algorithm. So a lot of times were the folks in the algorithm, you need to go back to the data and look at that. But it's something we spend a lot of time on. Its important us because we to our consumers and we care about our privacy. >>So when you talk about the wise pivot and the regulation, this is a This is a big question. There's a lot of bills on the table in Washington. It's certainly dominating our national conversation, how we think about regulating thes new emerging technologies that that present a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of risks. So how how are you, how you are you a tech center thinking about regulation and working with regulators on these issues >>way get involved with talking to the government. They seek independent counsel, so we participate when they're seeking guidance and we'll give our offer. So we're a voice at the table. But you know, what I would say is there's a lot of discussion about privacy and ask. But if you look at, like, at a national level, particularly government, I think there used to be more focused just on the parts that are incontrovertibly not problematic with privacy. So I gave you the example of working with liquefied natural gas. Okay, we need better, eh? I'd run our factories better. There's a lot of a I that goes into those kind of problems or supply chain planning. Like, how do I predict demand more effectively, or where should I put my plants? And A. I is the new way supply chain is done right? And so there's There's very few of the consumer centric problems I think, actually is. A society like 90% of the use cases are gonna be in areas where they don't actually influence for privacy and a lot of art. Our time is actually working on those kind of use cases just to make you know the operations of our organization's Maur more effective than more efficient. >>So we talked about the very beginning of this conversation about the companies that are disrupting old industries. Using a lot of these technologies, I mean, is this is a I A case where you need to be using this you need to be using >>you need to be using it. My view, my personal view is that there is going to be no basis of competition in the future, except for a digital. It just is going to be the case. And so all of our clients, you know, they're at some state of maturity and they're all asking the question like, How did I grow up? I don't get more profitable. Like certainly the street. Once more results on DSO if you want to move quickly in the new space, is you. You you you only have 11 choice. Really? And that that is to get really, really, really good at managing in harnessing digital technologies, inclusive of >>a I >>two to compete in a different way. And so I mean, we're seeing really interesting examples were like, you know, like, retailers are getting into health care, right? Like, you see this like you go into Wal Mart and they have our Walgreens. They have, like a doc in the box, right? So we're seeing. But lots of companies that are making physical things that then turn around and use the developing service and what they used to use their know how they take everything they know about, like like something you know about, like healthcare or how to like, you know, offer service is to customers and retail setting, but then they need to do something different. And now how do I get the data and the know how to then offer, like a new differentiated health service? And so to do that, you know, you have a lot. You have a lot of understanding about your customers, but you need to get all the data sources in place. You may need certain help desk. You know you need ways to aggregate it on, and so you probably need a new partnerships that don't have. You probably need toe manage skill sets that you don't have. You may need to get involved with open source communities. You may need to be involved with universities that where they do research, so you'll need a different kind of partnerships to move a speed then companies have probably used in the past. But when they put all those those eco systems together, onda new emphasis on the required skill sets, they can take their legacy knowledge that's probably physically oriented and then create a service that can create. They can monetize their experience with the new service. What what we find usually doesn't work is just a monetized data. If you have a lot of data, it's not usually worth that much. But if you take the data and you create a new service that people care about, then you can monetize your legacy information that that that's what a lot of our class they're trying to do, think they've very mature and now, like Where do you go? And where they go is something may be nearby to their existing business, but it's not. It's not the same legacy business of the path for years. >>I want to take a little deeper on something you brought up about the skills, and there's a real skills gap in Silicon Valley and in companies in this area. How are you working with companies to make sure that they are attracting the right talent pool and retaining those workers once they have? Um, >>well, so this is, I think, one of the most important questions because, like what? What happened with technology in the past? We would put in these like ear piece systems, and that was a big part of our business, like 15 years ago. And once you learned one of those things, that's a P or oracle or, you know, like whatever your skill set was good for 10 years, You probably you were good. You could just, like, go to the work. But today it just just go down to like the convention center. Look at this vast array of like like >>humanity, humanity >>and new technologies. I mean, half these companies didn't even exist, like, five years ago, right? And so you're still set today is probably only good for a year. So I think the first thing you've got to realise is that there's got to be a new focus on actually cultivating talent as a strategy. It's it's the way to compete like people is your product, if you wanna look at that way. But we're doing actually starting very, uh, where we can very early in the process, like much beyond a corporation. So we work with charter schools over kids, we get them into college, we work with universities, we do a lot of internship. So we're trying to start, like, really early on when you ask a question like, what would our recommendation to the government be were actually advising, like, get kids involved in I t. Like earlier and so so we can get that problem resolved but otherwise, once companies work. I think you know you need your own talent strategy. But part of that might be again, like an eco system play like maybe you don't want all of those people and you'd rather sort of borrow on. And so I think, I think figuring out what your eco system is because I think I think in the future like competition will be like my eco system versus your eco system. And that's that is the way I think it's gonna work. And so thinking in an eco system way is, is what most of our clients need to do. >>Well, it's like you said about the old ways of it was a good idea for a good product versus good ideas. And I just keep looking. Thank you so much, John, for coming on the Cuba Really fascinating conversation >>was my pleasure. Thank you so much. >>I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit

>> Narrator: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (music plays) >> Welcome back everyone. It's Cube coverage for the first inaugural multicloud conference, Escape 2019. We are here with at Bassam Tabbara who is the CEO of Upbound, hot start-up, has not yet released their product but they're working on it. Good friend of theCube, Cube alumni. Bassam, good to see you again. >> Thank you, glad to be back on the Cube. >> Well we know your guys are beavering away, digging away at the product, building it out. You have a very compelling background coming into the cloud world. You're here at the multicloud, first ever conference >> That's right. >> There is hybrid cloud, but this is like being billed as the first multicloud conference. A lot of technical people here. >> Lots of. >> Lot of industry insiders setting the foundation is one theme I'm hearing and then the other theme is data. >> Yeah. >> These are the two dynamics. What's your take on this multicloud conference opportunity? >> Look, I think it's really interesting, it reflects kind of what's happening. Multicloud's becoming a reality, more and more people are, whether they like it or not, are actually using multiple vendors and they're trying to figure it out so I think it's great that we are now a forum, I mean there are likely to be more. We're doing one of the Atlanta Gitlab at the next KubeCon which is kind of cool. But you know so getting all the right people in here, focusing on the data problem. Where we look at from a universal control plain standpoint. There are lots of people here talking about the economics of this and what it means for venture capital in the next five years and what it means for acquisition patterns and NMA. There are lots of really interesting aspects being covered today. >> Yeah it's a classic inaugural conference where with the organic communities here you have a range of personas. Entrepreneurs, founder, executive, venture capitalists, all kind of having those candid conversations. What to do next. >> That's right. >> Kind of all ger multiclouds here. Questions is, what's it going to be? >> What's it going to be. Well I think I was trying to figure that out. Honestly, anything that makes it easy for enterprises to do this massive lifting and shifting of infrastructure and being able to control their data, deal with multiple vendors, the world is increasingly heterogeneous. That's another way of saying multicloud is just dealing with the heterogeneity. And it's going to be more and more heterogeneous because if you look at the trends, it's hard to imagine that all innovation is going to come out of one cloud company. Right. So if that's not the case then you have people innovating, people creating all sorts of new platforms and infrastructure. Ways of dealing with data, ways of dealing with networking. Or ways of dealing with storage. Data bases and everything else. Now that you've got this innovation happening, whether it's open source communities or not. And then as an enterprise user, I want to consume it, well I have to deal with the heterogeneity. How do I consume it? How do I bring it together? How do I make sense of it? How do I get it all secured? How do I get it all under my compliance department? Those are the opportunities that are on multicloud and it is a reality. So at some level I'd be hard pressed to find someone that says I'm using Amazon or Google or Azure only and not say using a boutique cloud or another service or something else. Everybody's got some set of services that are... >> I mean multicloud and multivendor are two words that you go back to the history of the computer industry >> That's right. multivendor is a heterogeneous environment. There's benefits of that. But all that was based upon the lock-in fear. And you'll be hearing some of that here. So what's your view of lock-in because if value creation is the lock-in, the red hat guys giving a talk about Wal-Mart cloud versus niche clouds, it's all open source so where's the lock-in? >> Yeah I don't know if I would subscribe to this as solving the lock-in problem and every time you use a vendor at some level you're kind of relying on them. If they have a good service you're kind of tied to them right? But the more interesting aspect to me is having a choice. So being able to say I'm going to pick the best data based vendor out there. One that suits my problem and being able to do that without having to let go of the integration aspect of us. If I have to choose a data based SaaS service that I really like but the cost of doing that involves me creating a new vendor or doing some custom automation, custom integration, figuring out monitoring, figuring out logging doing billing, doing metering. All of that stuff so that I can actually just consume one amazing service. That's a really large hurdle to kind of step over. And so, I think part of multicloud is reducing friction for being able to use things that you choose to. >> Do you have any commentary or advice for other founders or other CEOs or even any younger developers because we have a classical trained software developers, they think a certain way. They either were pipe lining it different, not doing Agile, their trained at Agile, but now micro service is a whole nother ballgame. How do you get people to think microservices when they've been classically trained Agile. >> Like Waterfall you're saying? >> Or Waterfall, both, both. >> I think there's a lot happening right now. I would start with looking at some of the best practices around building modern services. Things like Kubernetes and others help. Microservice adoption and all that stuff. But start with, honestly starting with a bunch of open sources probably not a bad place to be. But then find vendors that actually can support in one what you want to do. >> Final question. Tell us about your company. What's going on with you guys. Give an update on Upbound. What's going on? It's going great. We're growing. We launched this project called Crossplain. Like earlier or late last year. It's doing great. We're getting a ton of adoption on it. We're super happy with it. And we're growing the company. We're almost tripled the company this year. Which is fantastic. And working on a SaaS offering that we're exciting about. Hopefully we'll come back here and talk about it when it's... >> And you guys hiring? Looking for people? What's the update there? >> We are. We're hiring on the engineering side, we're hiring on the product side. It's start up so. You never stop hiring. >> Not for the faint of heart. >> Definitely not. >> Bassam, thanks for coming out. >> Yeah absolutely. Always fun. >> Here at the multicloud inaugural event. Escape. Here in New York City. Escape 2019 I'm John Furrier with theCube. Back with more after this short break.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering you. I pat Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by you, I path Welcome >>back to Las Vegas. Everybody's is Day two of the Cubes coverage of you AI Path forward. Three. This is the third year of North American Conference, and second year the Cube is covered. This Anthony at Batista's here, Cuba. Lami was on last year from from Deloitte. He's a principal there, Anthony. Good to see again. >>Great to be here. Great. >>Yes. So it is. I mean, we've seen the growth of our P A. Generally you AI path, the whole automation were starting to talk about intelligent automation. A. I has its wings, and it's starting toe sore. But give us the update from a year ago. We talked about, you know, accelerating last year. I think it was you had a really good statements around looking, Yes, go on Fast is good, but you wanna accelerate the right things, you know, speeding up for bad processes. Paving the cow path, as I sometimes call it, is really not the way to go. But what's new? >>So I do think there's still some issues around getting programs t to scale and thinking about automation at scale, which has been a major theme here. The conference is still in front of us. People are still figuring out how the climate that curve well, I think is new is way Thought about automation before it was, it was a whore statement was that humans or automation is about going to replace the human on. I really think we've no lights. Always had a campaign about I t a. I that that we kicked off a couple of years ago and said, How do we have automation and humans interact with each other? And I don't just mean attended, attended bots, But how do we actually start to use automation as sort of the glue that hang together a much more rich experience to start to put the components there? So that leads us to the age of with, which is how we how we use technology along with humans, to change their role in there been some great talks. One of my partners earlier they was here with Walmart's, his client on. They talked about how they're redefining the HR processes at Wal Mart on that was That was a really good presentation because they changed the workers work. They didn't replace workers. >>So how was this concept of the age of with how is that different than attended? Boss, can you maybe talk about a possible use case or example? >>So if you think about a call center way, know who's coming in? We used to just look them up and say, Hey, do we know who's calling? Now we can say that we know is calling. Do they have a history with us? Way can use data, and that's another part of the width. Is Dave plus analytics with automation? And we could say, Well, what else do we know about this person to have a history of calling us? They have an open ticket. Have they had some issues or complaints in the past that we can deal with or get in front of on and basically start to put the intelligence in the front end? And that could be unattended, right? That could just be some screen pops around automation way start to introduce natural language. We start to introduce some advanced analytics, and that would be a simple, simple way of enhancing that process. >>So let me double click on that so normally what you would get this year in the other end of the line of the call center. And it's like, Hold on, I'm just reading the notes and you know, they're scanning these notes. It's like an eye test, you know, and they can't. They can't ever get to see. It's a faster for you to just explain. Let me tell you what what I'm imagining is in a different experience where this is happening in near real time, getting pop ups or some other messaging. Is that absolutely experience on how real is this today? >>This Israel. And you know, I I always like to say all them anything. All the main thing is easy if you just take the process, repave the cow path. But it's very real because the natural language components they work up front. Now you can ask some questions you could start to do pre searches on which materials might might help with that type of question. You also can train the process over time. So daily overtime. What's the call satisfaction? Did you actually complete what it was? The call got started about on how quickly you do that so you could train these models and start to use machine learning to actually improve that experience even further. So I think that's left again, back to the whip. It's adding these components. >>I like talking to folks with a consulting background because you know, when you're talking to the vendor community, they get very excited about our why and how you know, lack of disruption to install some software, right? And so that's one of the advantages, I guess, of our P A. As you can pop it into an existing process, good or bad, and get going right away. We've seen this time and time again in the industry. When you have when you have a big force people to change, you know it's slow When you can show Immediate Roo. I start to see these rocket ships at the same time as a consultant, you really want to have a bigger impact on business you don't want to just repeat in automate Bad process is. So how do you work with clients to sort of manage that that insatiable desire for quick R A y, and then the transformative components that. You know, I could maybe defend you from disruption or allow you to be an incumbent disruptor. >>So I think what's interesting is transformation. Use the word we were really good transformation program. So starting to say how that we think of automation first as we do a traditional transformation program is is very near and dear to us now. And instead of saying, Hey, we're gonna bolt the ear piece system and then figure out if we can get some improvement by automating later. We're saying, you know what? Let's sort of double go backwards. Maybe it's a little fashion, but what is this whole process look like? And can we put automation and launch not is a process improvement after lunch? So I think we think of these transformation programmes, But AARP programs for ready and they're doing at automation is now on the tip of the front end of the program rather than afterthought. Reporting used to be >>right, so I mean, >>you guys >>have to be technology agnostic in your business. I mean, we happen to be a U IE path conference, but there, you know, if our p a generally you iPad specifically, it's not a panacea for all problems. I mean, we've talked about a I we talked about other automation process automation capabilities. You've got existing systems. All this stuff has to work together. So so and people always say technology last people process first. You guys lived that, Um So how are you seeing automation evolved in in terms of adoption of the how people are dealing with existing systems and some of the other technologies that you're having to bring together. >>So I think the first thing is, the technology has to work. It has to be bulletproof, resilient. If you're going to put it in these processes and make it make it part of your work life reserving clients or that sort of thing. So first it needs to be bulletproof. That's becoming a given second. I'd like to think that's, well, architected more. Maura's. You bring in a I or other advanced components. You need thio. Be ready to have a changing ecosystem. You know, the best document processing right now might not be the best in six months. So starting to think of your automation solution is that the technical glue and this is allow you to swap out the trade components as you as you refined processes going forward or something new hits the market. So now we're working ecosystem, I think, for the r p a. Vendors that are having great success in a market like you have have they sort of give you that platform, and they give you the off ramps and the on ramps to integrate the other technologies. And like I said, I think that's table stakes in addition, being bulletproof. But the next piece of that is how we get various people involved in the value proposition of creating automation. So various tools and studios, some for the business user that might not be as technical, maybe self designed about it, eh? Process description level on, then maybe a more technical work bench for the technical body builder. So I'm starting to see that in the product suite and somebody announcements here this week. Hallie, we tailor the tools to different users and engage them in that process from one into the other. >>So you mentioned scaling before what the blockers, what's the challenges of scaling? Why's it seemed to be so hard? It's clearly an area of focus here at this event. >>So I think first of all, the technology is is still new to some areas. They're still back and forth with the business or I t led initiative. I think there are some scars and wounds over the last few years of automation where people might have gotten started on the wrong foot. There's even some reduced to learn from. So I think people are looking for the business case. They're getting more comfortable with it. So the job sizes, deal sizes, air getting bigger for the FDA vendors and for us. But I think it's just an evolution. And, like I said, there a lot of stubbed toes early on a nomination. >>What are >>some of the big mistakes that you've seen? People make >>people thinking that it's only a business tool, or only a technology tool or technology to the point that they get started on something that becomes either a real technology problem, a real business problem? Maybe you told the body out in the business, and you attach it to your ear piece system and you cause performance problems or you have security problems on. Then it becomes a real I t problem also seeing the reverse where you know, when I t group will start and say Let's do some automation And they pushed into some departments it might have a fully big business case, might now have good support, and it becomes a technology science project rather than delivery in the real value. >>I was tryingto a week sort of Think about analogies. Analogous ascendance sees in software. I use service now a little bit, but that was kind of a heavy lift. It started an I t. It was very clear. You know, I t You're seeing this massive rapid growth of you ai path fastest growing probably the fastest growing software segment in history and striking to me that we're just now starting to see Cloud come into the play here. If we just you iPad that big announced this week. It's got this new SAS capability, which you would think you would, you know, be born in the cloud. But people have explained why that is. Do you have concerns about the pace of growth and a company like you I path and its competitors their ability to sort of keep up and continue to deliver quality. I mean, a big part of what you guys do is sort of risk management. Well, so how do you manage that risk? >>So I think what you look for if you're going to be in the lion's partner, if you're going the work together and pursue things together first you have to have the basics. It has to be bulletproof. It has to work. When you hit bumps in the road, you have to have escalation pass. That makes sense. And there's growing pains in any firm, or any company that grows grows as quickly as you tap. On the other hand, the question is, your culture is the line. Do you know the fix problems? Do you put your customers first? I think that's what we look like. Look at in the lions, which is how we have a partner with. People have similar DNA about customers first, and you put everything else aside, roll your sleeves up and do the right thing. So that's what we look for in lines like This >>Way. Always talked about the buzzwords of digital transformation, which conferences like this, it is kind of buzzy, but when you talk to customers, they're actually going through digital transformations. And then a couple years ago, they started experimenting. They bought one of everything and they'd run things in parallel with, you know, legacy systems. But now they're starting to place their bets, saying, actually, we've got some use cases that are working. We're gonna double down on the stuff that, you know, we think works. Our p a in some cases fits there. We're gonna unplug some of the legacy stuff and try to deal with our technical debt. But I guess my question is, where do you see our P? A fitting in to that whole digital transformation? Major, I like to think of a matrix where you've got different sets of service is and you've got different industries that are tapping, you know, all data centric that that are tapping these new capabilities and formulating new businesses. News industries. That's how you see this disruption happening. And then the incumbent saying, Hey, we've got assets to we're gonna tap that same matrix and whether it's open source software or cloud or new security paradigms or data and analytics. So where do you see our P? A fitting into that matrix? >>So I think at the glue level. At the architectural level, it can be the orchestrator of the experience of taking a variety technologies integrating them, providing again on ramps and off ramps, doing with a human canoe, looking at screens, analyzing content so it could be the glue that orchestrates those processes orchestrates. Maybe some of the so it was used to be a void between legacy systems and new systems on darky A helps take all that away or level the playing field on. That s So that's has another set of eyes and ears for process integration, our technology integration. And I think that's what it's probably it's best place now. Are there good process tools there? Can we get, you know, community developments? A big discussion right now. I think some people have been successful at it, but it requires a lot of care and feeding and planning to have your community hand the rails or stay between the curbs and do useful things. So I think we're in the beginning of how far can we go with community development? I think the technology is really the glue. >>So community of elven terms of best practice sharing >>and users have developing their own bots. You know, what are the guardrails? Does the process? They're automating matter. Does it introduced a risk? Eyes going to perform. How do you make sure your bots are an evil that people are creating? It's a pretty powerful technology. >>Is their I p in there that you don't want it? We talked about this last year that you don't want to necessarily share with others. So, um, now your role used to have focused specifically in financial service is now you're more horizontal. But how does the light look at this opportunity? Is there is it an automation practice? Is it you cut across all industries with automation, or is it sort of broader than that? >>So my colleague here runs the offering, which is Do we have the people, the training, the tools that delivery centers in the know how to go out and do this kind of work? And we've scaled tremendously in the automation space. The second part is, how do we look to the Jason sees? So we work very closely with our colleagues in a I and ML when we say how we go do the next generation of this out of the gate, How we experiment, how we say, Do you want fries with that as we as we do some of this work. But then we look for the industry in the intersection, and that's where a firm like Lloyd we've got deep, deep industry expertise, way say, well, those intersections where we can go make something happen way come work with our partners are lions you know, partners in making making something happen at an industry specific level, or can we go solve a specific problem? So I think that's what we bring that unique. But we do it both ways. >>It's kind of off off the topic here, but I was talking about that matrix before and again. I'm envisioning technology, horizontal technologies and then vertical industries, and it used to be for decades if you were in it. And if you're in financial service is, you are pretty much stuck in financial service is you had a value chain that was specific to financialservices, and you knew it inside and out, whether it was product development or marketing or sales distribution, whatever it was. That same thing for automobiles on manufacturing, an education on and on and on, and you develop these industry areas of expertise and domain experts with in there. And you guys have built up a global powerhouse doing, But you're seeing a CZ digital. It's cos. Become digital. What's the difference in the business in a digital business? That's how they use data. Data is at the core, and you're now seeing organizations Company's tech company specifically traverse different industries. You're seeing Amazon, you know, in content you're seeing Apple and financialservices other companies getting into health care. >>How is >>that? First of all, you see that and what do you think it was driving that? And how does that affect your business? Or your clients asking youto help you traverse new new industries, get into new industries or defend against others? You know, these big tech companies tryingto with a duel, disruption agenda, trying to take him >>over, and the center of all that you mentioned a little. But the center of that is who the ultimate customers, and we'll experience that they want how they want that experience integrated, so it's not channel by channel anymore. It's which pieces fit together and how I want to buy things and how I want to be serviced. You're getting whole crossed economies around what the consumer wants, unable by technology. I think the other thing that plays into that is you start thinking of the Internet of things and how connected people are. And how do you use monetize and integrate data about particular people and how they want to be served to make that a better experience? I think the consumer ultimately is driving. A lot of that technology is in the billions. >>Yeah, is you think about that picture again. You'd like to use a metaphor of a matrix. I mean, I see our p a is just, you know, one piece of that. You know, there's so many others you mentioned. I o t We talk about a I all the time we talk about Blockchain. It's how you put those different capabilities together and apply them to your business. That really makes the difference. Not that RPG right now feels very tactical, but it's part of a much more strategic agenda. >>Absolutely on again. It could be the glue in an ecosystem of emerging technologies. I do see there's the eyes and ears. The fact that what you get out of the box from regular p. A vendor. Really? Integrate some really, really painful things. Looking at spreadsheets and thinking the guys with green visors column numbers. It's really good at that stuff as, ah, base task. >>Yeah, nothing wrong with tactical and quick. Roo, I So, Anthony, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Great to be here >>to welcome. All right, Keep right, everybody. We're back with our next guest. Day two from you. I path forward in Las Vegas. You watching the cue?

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> We're back with the Cuban active FiO Data driven day one day Volante with student a man you're watching The Cube. Steve Duplessis here is the, uh, let's see. Uh, I'm going to say benevolent. Dictator of Enterprise Strategy Group. Chief analyst, Founder Welcome. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thanks. Nice friend. Nice to be here, you fellows, and we don't Great. Congratulations. Newly newly closed. That's awesome. I want Yeah, thank you very much. >> Great. Looking good. You're here for your honeymoon. >> He said this is it? After a few marriages. This is the honeymoon. >> Yeah. That's good to know that the honeymoon's not over. So let's talk data, Tio. It's happening. >> That is a terrible question, Dave. >> So yeah, Data. Okay, everybody talks. Data you here, bro. My data is the new oil. Fate is a competitive advantage. And >> you like that. >> You do like what Data's in oil. >> So it's funny because we're I think I'm way older than you. You look better. >> God, no. >> But if you go back in time as long as we were doing this, it's been kind of hilarious, really. In retrospect, when you watch way watch these massive industries get created like the AMC just created because all they were about building bigger buckets to put data, zeros and ones. But no context, completely useless, just big buckets. So we valued Wow, you built a big fast bucket. Then IBM and her tachy whoever was gonna leap frog your next built a faster, bigger bucket. And that was with the world considered valuable. And it's now fast forward to the modern day and oh, maybe with the thing that's really valuable with those zeros and he's in contact. Maybe it's not really the bucket. It's, uh so valuable anymore. So >> So, do you think the with the bucket builders still bucket builders air they actually becoming data Insite creators? Or is it just still build a better bucket? That's cheaper. Faster >> till it's a great question. I think >> that we're first of all, you You still have to have the buckets, right? It's a relative who's going to make a smarter bucket builder. I don't know. >> You need someplace to put it, so >> you're gonna have to put it some place and you're gonna have to deliver it in the good news, you know, storage and or infrastructural say is the most brilliant business ever. From a capacity demand perspective, no one ever needs less, right. You always need Mauritz justa matter what you're gonna do with it, how you're going to address that. So it's we've propagated for 50 years and infrastructure business that build a bigger, faster bucket. Build a bigger, faster processor, build a bigger, faster. And every time you you solve one of those particular problems as long as data doesn't abate and it never does, is only is there's more versus Les. It's just every time we fix one problem way, you stick your finger in the dike and another poll springs out. So right now we're at the we've got more processing capabilities that week, ever possible. Use not true, right? We'll figure out a way to use it so that the last five years of and for the >> next five years waiting talk about analytics, wouldn't talk about io ti. We didn't talk about any of those things that are all just precursors to folk crap. We could make a whole bunch more NATO and do stuff with >> so So computers. Kind of a similar dynamic. It's sort of sensational. But is the relatively crappy business compared to storage rights? Storage is 60% plus gross margin. Business servers. I don't know. You're lucky if you get in in a low twenty's. Um, why is that? >> Hello, Number one. It's essentially monogamous. So 20% is wonderful if your intel and you get it. All right. Well, it sells. Got great gross margins, right? Everybody else's does it. You go down the supply chain. That's where you're gonna add value. So that's difficult for anything. Hard to get gross margins out of like spending. She had a box. >> So, Steve Yes, she's now 20 years old. >> I know >> when I think back 20 years ago. You know, short. You know this capacity price per dollar price per gigabyte. You know, all that stuff has changed a lot. The other thing, You know, I think back 20 years talk about automation and intelligent infrastructure. We were using those terms back that sure, one of things that they did. That that's right. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about is like, right back then when you talked about well, how intelligent wasn't what could it do? And automation was There was a lot of times, you know, I'm just building a little script. I'm doing something like that. At least you know, from what we see, it feels like, you know, today's automation and intelligence is light times away from what we were talking about. 20 years. Sure, and it's true. What do you see in that? Well, >> so remember where we came from When we were talking originally about automation and orchestration, we were talking about how to manage a box, how to expand a box, how to manage infrastructure. Now it's data operations. Right now it's that that's the whole point of activity. Right to be in with is all right, if you are good enough and smart enoughto have the data sort of everything. What kind of matters? There you've gotta have the data and what can you up? What can you automate an orchestra from a data out perspective? Not from a box, not from a Let's scale out or scale up or something like that again, that's just a bigger bucket. It's a better bucket, but to be able to actually take data and say, You know what? I don't even know necessarily what I'm going to want to use this for, but I know that I gotta have. It's gotta be You have to be able to go click, click, click and get it. If if and when I figure out who I want to find out how lowering the price of Sharman and Seattle at a Wal Mart is going to affect my revenue or my supply chain or whatever. >> So one of the things I've talked with you in the past about is the pace of change of the industry. And, you know, I've said, you know, we know things are changing rather fast, but the average company, how much were they? Actually are they good at adopting change? And you've called me on stupid enterprises slow getting any faster, you know? Are they Are they open to change? Mohr. You know, what do you see in 2019? Is is it any different than it was in, You know, two thousand nine? >> That's a great question. So thie answer is yes, they're getting better. We are finally getting better. Problem, though, is a CZ industry insider watcher or a Boyar is ur is you see it and know what should happen 10 years. It takes 10 years in general for the world to actually catch upto the stuff that we're talking about. So it's not really that helpful to the poor schlub that's running on operation that build sneakers in Kansas, right? That's not really that helpful that we're talking about. This is what you could be doing and should be doing. The pace of change is much faster now because and give the em where most of the credit. Because once that went into place, all of the sudden and that you gotta remember there, everyone thinks vm where was an instant home run? It was 10 years of the same cold sitting in the corner in a queue, a environment before. Finally, we ran out of room in the data center, and that's the only reason they were able to come out. But once it was there, and it enabled you to stop associating the physical to the to the logical once, we could just just dis aggregate that stuff that I think opened up a tidal wave of kind of what else can we do? And people have adopted now. Now it's pervasive. So VM where's everywhere? Now? We're moving in the next level of kind of woman. Why can't I just build a containerized app that I can execute anywhere? No matter of fact, I don't even want it in my data center on. No one has to know that necessarily. So as modernization exercises have started to take off, they just they pick up, they actually pick up steam. So what we know empirically is those that are are halfway down. Call it the transformation or the modernization curve are going three times faster than those just starting. And those guys are going three times faster than the ones that are sitting there in idle doing stuff. The same >> city with the inertia going on. What do you make of this Bubblicious Back up market. Let's talk about that a little bit. You got these big install bases? The veritas, Conmebol, Delhi emcee, IBM, Tivoli install base. Everybody wants a piece of that action. Well, I guess cohesive rubric also want a piece of each other. Sure, which is kind of, you know, they get that urinary Olympics going on. I'd like to say And then you got these guys, which is kind of, you know, playing. Uh, I said to Ashleigh kind of East Coast, West Coast, There's no no, it's not East Coast, West Coast, but there's definitely more conservativism on this side of the of the flyover states. What's your take on what's going on in the landscape right now? >> So back up is awesome from the again, still probably the single most consistently line item budget thing for five decades. It's a guaranteed money in and out, and by and large it still sucks. My general rule is still it's crazy that we haven't been able to solve that particular problem. But regardless, the reason that it's so important is, besides the obvious. Yeah, you need to protect stuff, case. Something goes away and something bad happened good. But really, it's That's the inn. Just point for everything you do, you create data today. I'm backing it up on our later so that backup becomes the injust engine and it also is kicking off point. So at tapioca it started as wow, this is a better backup, most trap for lack of a better term. But really what? It was is didn't matter what with was back up or something else. It's I need tohave the data in order to do other stuff with it, and back up is just a natural, easiest way to be able to do that. So I think what's finally happening is we're moving from Christophe Would would say it's really about intelligence intelligence more so than just capturing those bits and being able to assemble and put it back together. It's understanding the context of those bits so that I can say stew in test. Dev has a different use case than Dave in whatever analytics, etcetera, etcetera. But they both need a copy of the exact scene data, the exact same state at the exact same point in time, etcetera. So if lungs backup's going to be kind of a tip of the spear in terms of going from what I will say, production or live data to the first copy, there's almost always back up. It's gonna matter. >> Christoph, Christoph Bertrand want your analyst? And so we saw, uh, c'mon, Danni Allen put a slideshow $15,000,000,000 tam and back up being a big chunk of that, probably half of it um, how does that jibe with your gut feel in terms of the opportunity beyond backup Dev ops? You know, I don't know. Ransomware insights. So you think that's low? High? Makes sense. >> I think I could justify the number. And what history has taught me is that it's probably low because we we're only talking about a handful of use cases that we've all glommed onto. But there will be remembered, like 11 years ago, there was no iPhone. You know what? How bad that changed. Everything that we do over there. And when did you know at some point during that particular journey, the phone became Who gives a shit about the phone? Excuse. But it's a text machine and it's an instagram thing, and it's a video production facility and all these other things, and the phone's almost dead. I only use it when my mom calls me kind of thing. So, you know, really, it's difficult to imagine. I certainly don't have the mental capabilities to imagine what the next 10 things after Dev Ops and this that and the other. But it's still all predicated on the same you got Somebody's gonna have a copy of that data and you're gonna be able to access it. You've got to be able to put it where you need it for whatever the reason again, a disaster is an important thing to recover from. But so is being ableto farm That data for nuggets of gold. >> Well, I guess I asked the question because, you know, it's a logical question is, is the market big enough to support all these companies that are in, You know, that gardener thing that they do? And I hope so because we love competition. >> I think I >> can answer it >> this way. Everything. Even the oldest guard Veritas, for God's sakes, 1000 years old, t sm 1000 years old con vault code base, 1000 years old. You're all big companies, right? And they're not perishing anytime soon. And I don't run. Love the startup Love the active FiOS or the cohesive sees coming in. But what they're really trying to do is not, you know, they might have started, as in a common ground, backup is a common warzone, but because there's money there like this consistent money there go get. But they soon turn in Teo other value propositions. And that's not is true with the incumbent back up guys because of their own legacy, right? It's hard to turn 1,000,000 year 1,000,000 lines of code into something. It wasn't designed, innit? >> Yeah, and it's not trivial to disrupt that base. But I guess if you get, you know, raising I don't know how much the industry is raised, but it's well over $1,000,000,000 now. I mean, activity has raised 200,000,000 and that's like chump change. Compared to some of the other races that you've seen. Cody City was to 60 and their last rubric was even, you know, crazy, crazy, even >> count the private money that beam God is that, you know, that was half 1,000,000,000 >> right? Well, that's a That's an off camera discussion. All right, we gotta go. So, Steve, thanks so much for for coming. Thank you. Great to >> have you. All right. All right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You wanted the Cube from active field data driven from Boston, right on the harbor. Right back

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Dell Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> The one Welcome to the Special Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante breaking down day one of three days of wall the wall Coverage - 2 Cube sets. Uh, big news today and dropping here. Dell Technology World's series of announcements Cloud ability, unified work spaces and then multi cloud with, uh, watershed announced with Microsoft support for VMware with Azure are guests here theCUBE alumni that Seo, senior leader of'Em Where Sanjay *** and such a great to see you, >> John and Dave always a pleasure to be on your show. >> So before we get into the hard core news around Microsoft because you and Satya have a relationship, you also know Andy Jassy very well. You've been following the Clouds game in a big way, but also as a senior leader in the industry and leading BM where, um, the evolution of the end user computing kind of genre,  that whole area is just completely transformed with mobility and cloud kind of coming together with data and all this new kinds of applications. The modern applications are different. It's changing the game on how end users, employees, normal people use computing because some announcement here on their What's your take on the ever changing role of cloud and user software? >> Yeah, John, I think that our vision , as  you know, it was the first job I came to do at VMware almost six years ago, to run and use a computing. And the vision we had at that time was that you should be able to work at the speed of life, right? You and I happen to be on a plane at the same time  yesterday coming here, we should be able to pick our amps up on our devices. You often have Internet now even up at thirty thousand feet. In the consumer world, you don't lug around your CDs, your music, your movies come to you. So the vision of any app on any device was what we articulated with the digital workspace We. had Apple and Google very well figured out. IOS later on Mac,  Android,  later on chrome . The Microsoft relationship in end use the computing was contentious because we overlapped. They had a product, PMS and in tune. But we always dreamed of a day. I tweeted out this morning that for five and a half years I competed with these guys. It was always my dream to partner with the With Microsoft. Um, you know, a wonderful person, whom I respect there, Brad Anderson. He's a friend, but we were like LeBron and Steph Curry. We were competing against each other. Today everything changed. We are now partners. Uh, Brad and I we're friends, we'll still be friends were actually partners  now why? Because we want to bring the best of the digital workspace solution VMware brings workspace one to the best of what Microsoft brings in Microsoft 365 , active directory, E3 capabilities around E. M. S and into it and combined those together to help customers get the best for any device. Apple, Google and Microsoft that's a game changer. >> Tell about the impact of the real issue of Microsoft on this one point, because is there overlap is their gaps, as Joe Tucci used to say, You can't have any. There's no there's no overlap if you have overlapped. That's not a >> better to have overlapped and seems right. A gaps. >> So where's the gaps? Where this words the overlapping cloud. Next, in the end user world, >> there is a little bit of overlap. But the much bigger picture is the complementarity. We are, for example, not trying to be a directory in the Cloud That's azure active directory, which is the sequel to Active Directory. So if we have an identity access solution that connect to active directory, we're gonna compliment that we've done that already. With Octo. Why not do that? Also inactive Directory Boom that's clear. Ignored. You overlap. Look at the much bigger picture. There's a little bit of overlap between in tune and air Watch capabilities, but that's not the big picture. The big picture is combining workspace one with E. M s. to allow Office 365 customers to get conditional access. That's a game, so I think in any partnership you have to look past, I call it sort of these Berlin Wall moments. If the U. S and Soviet Union will fighting over like East Germany, vs West Germany, you wouldn't have had that Berlin wall moment. You have to look past the overlaps. Look at the much bigger picture and I find the way by which the customer wins. When the customer wins, both sides are happy. >> Tearing down the access wall, letting you get seamless. Access the data. All right, Cloud computing housely Multi cloud announcement was azure something to tell on stage, which was a surprise no one knew was coming. No one was briefed on this. It was kind of the hush hush, the big news Michael Delll, Pat Girl singer and it's nothing to tell up there. Um, Safia did a great job and really shows the commitment of Microsoft with the M wear and Dell Technologies. What is this announcement? First, give us your take an analysis of what they announced. And what does it mean? Impact the customers? >> Yeah, listen, you know, for us, it's a further That's what, like the chess pieces lining up of'Em wars vision that we laid up many years for a hybrid cloud world where it's not all public cloud, it isn't all on premise. It's a mixture. We coined that Tom hybrid loud, and we're beginning to see that realize So we had four thousand cloud providers starting to build a stack on VM, where we announced IBM Cloud and eight of us. And they're very special relationships. But customers, some customers of azure, some of the retailers, for example, like Wal Mart was quoted in the press, released Kroger's and some others so they would ask us, Listen, we're gonna have a way by which we can host BMO Workloads in there. So, through a partnership now with Virtue Stream that's owned by Dell on DH er, we will be able to allow we, um, where were close to run in Virtue Stream. Microsoft will sell that solution as what's called Azure V M, where solutions and customers now get the benefit of GMO workloads being able to migrate there if they want to. Or my great back on the on premise. We want to be the best cloud infrastructure for that multi cloud world. >> So you've got IBM eight of us Google last month, you know, knock down now Azure Ali Baba and trying you. Last November, you announced Ali Baba, but not a solution. Right >> now, it's a very similar solutions of easy solution. There's similar what's announced with IBM and Nash >> So is it like your kids where you loved them all equally or what? You just mentioned it that Microsoft will sell the VM wear on Azure. You actually sell the eight of us, >> so there is a distinction. So let me make that clear because everything on the surface might look similar. We have built a solution that is first and preferred for us. Called were MacLeod on a W s. It's a V m er manage solution where the Cloud Foundation stack compute storage networking runs on a ws bare metal, and V. Ember manages that our reps sell that often lead with that. And that's a solution that's, you know, we announced you were three years ago. It's a very special relationship. We have now customer attraction. We announce some big deals in queue, for that's going great, and we want it even grow faster and listen. Eight of us is number one in the market, but there are the customers who have azure and for customers, one azure very similar. You should think of this A similar to the IBM ah cloud relationship where the V C P. V Partners host VM where, and they sell a solution and we get a subscription revenue result out of that, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing. Our reps will get compensated when they sell at a particular customer, but it's not a solution that's managed by BM. Where >> am I correct? You've announced that I think a twenty million dollars deal last quarter via MacLeod and A W. And that's that's an entire deal. Or is that the video >> was Oh, that was an entirely with a customer who was making a big shift to the cloud. When I talked to that customer about the types of workloads, they said that they're going to move hundreds off their APs okay on premise onto via MacLeod. And it appears, so that's, you know, that's the type of cloud transformation were doing. And now with this announcement, there will be other customers. We gave an example of few that Well, then you're seeing certain verticals that are picking as yours. We want those two also be happy. Our goal is to be the undisputed cloud infrastructure for any cloud, any cloud, any AP any device. >> I want to get your thoughts. I was just in the analysts presentation with Dell technology CFO and looking at the numbers, the performance numbers on the revenue side Don Gabin gap our earnings as well as market share. Dell. That scales because Michael Delll, when we interviewed many years ago when it was all going down, hinted that look at this benefits that scale and not everyone's seeing the obvious that we now know what the Amazon scale winds so scale is a huge advantage. Um, bm Where has scale Amazon's got scale as your Microsoft have scales scales Now the new table stakes just as an industry executive and leader as you look at the mark landscape, it's a having have not world you'd have scale. You don't If you don't have scale, you're either ecosystem partner. You're in a white space. How do companies compete in this market? Sanjay, what's your thoughts on I thinkit's >> Jonah's? You said there is a benefit to scale Dell, now at about ninety billion in revenue, has gone public on their stock prices. Done where Dellvin, since the ideal thing, the leader >> and sir, is that point >> leader in storage leader inclined computing peces with Vienna and many other assets like pivotal leaders and others. So that scale VM, Where about a ten billion dollar company, fifth largest software company doing verywell leader in the softer to find infrastructure leader, then use a computing leader and softer, defined networking. I think you need the combination of scale and speed, uh, just scale on its own. You could become a dinosaur, right? And what's the fear that every big company should have that you become ossified? And I think what we've been able to show the world is that V M wear and L can move with scale and speed. It's like having the combination of an elephant and a cheetah and won and that to me special. And for companies like us that do have scaled, we've to constantly ask ourselves, How do we disrupt ourselves? How do we move faster? How do we partner together? How do we look past these blind spots? How do we pardon with big companies, small companies and the winner is the customer. That's the way we think. And we could keep doing that, you'll say so. For example, five, six years ago, nobody thought of VMware--this is going before Dell or EMC--in the world of networking, quietly with ten thousand customers, a two million dollar run rate, NSX has become the undisputed leader and software-defined networking. So now we've got a combination of server, storage and a networking story and Dell VMware, where that's very strong And that's because we moved with speed and with scale. >> So of course, that came to an acquisition with Nice Sarah. Give us updates on the recent acquisitions. Hep C e o of Vela Cloud. What's happening there? >> Yeah, we've done three. That, I think very exciting to kind of walk through them in chronological order about eighteen months ago was Velo Cloud. We're really excited about that. It's sort of like the name, velocity and cloud fast. Simple Cloud based. It is the best solution. Ston. How do we come to deciding that we went to talk to our partners like t other service providers? They were telling us this is the best solution in town. It connects to the data center story to the cloud story and allows our virtual cloud network to be the best softer. To find out what you can, you have your existing Mpls you might have your land infrastructure but there's nobody who does softer to find when, like Philip, they're excited about that cloud health. We're very excited about that because that brings a multi cloud management like, sort of think of it like an e r P system on top of a w eso azure to allow you to manage your costs and resource What ASAP do it allows you to manage? Resource is for materials world manufacturing world. In this world, you've got resources that are sitting on a ws or azure. Uh, cloud held does it better than anybody else. Hefty. Oh, now takes a Cuban eighty story that we'd already begun with pivotal and with Google is you remember at at PM world two years ago. And that's that because the founders of Cuban eighties left Google and started FTO. So we're bringing that DNA we've become now one of the top two three contributors to communities, and we want to continue to become the de facto platform for containers. If you go to some of the airports in San Francisco, New York, I think Keilani and Heathrow to you'LL see these ads that are called container where okay, where do you think the Ware comes from Vienna, where, OK, and our goal is to make containers as container where you know, come to you from the company that made vmc possible of'Em where So if we popularized PM's, why not also popularised the best enterprise contain a platform? That's what helped you will help us do >> talk about Coburn at ease for a minute because you have an interesting bridge between end user computing and their cloud. The service is micro. Services that are coming on are going to be powering all these APS with either data and or these dynamic services. Cooper, Nettie sees me the heart of that. We've been covering it like a blanket. Um, I'm gonna get your take on how important that is. Because back Nelson, you're setting the keynote at the Emerald last year. Who burn it eases the dial tone. Is Cooper Netease at odds with having a virtual machine or they complimentary? How does that evolving? Is it a hedge? What's the thoughts there? >> Yeah, First off, Listen, I think the world has begun to realize it is a world of containers and V ems. If you looked at the company that's done the most with containers. Google. They run their containers in V EMS in their cloud platform, so it's not one or the other. It's vote. There may be a world where some parts of containers run a bare metal, but the bulk of containers today run and Beyonce And then I would say, Secondly, you know, five. Six years ago, people all thought that Doctor was going to obliterate VM where, But what happened was doctors become a very good container format, but the orchestration layer from that has not become daugher. In fact, Cuban Eddie's is kind of taking a little of the head and steam off Dr Swarm and Dr Enterprise, and it is Cooper Navy took the steam completely away. So Senses Way waited for the right time to embrace containers because the obvious choice initially would have been some part of the doctor stack. We waited as Borg became communities. You know, the story of how that came on Google. We've embraced that big time, and we've stated a very important ball hefty on All these moves are all part of our goal to become the undisputed enterprise container platform, and we think in a multi cloud world that's ours to lose. Who else can do multi cloud better than VM? Where may be the only company that could have done that was Red Hat. Not so much now, inside IBM, I think we have the best chance of doing that relative. Anybody else >> Sanjay was talking about on our intro this morning? Keynote analysis. Talking about the stock price of Dell Technologies, comparing the stock price of'Em where clearly the analysis shows that the end was a big part of the Dell technologies value. How would you summarize what v m where is today? Because on the Kino there was a Bank of America customers. She said she was the CTO ran, she says, Never mind. How we got here is how we go floors the end wars in a similar situation where you've got so much success, you always fighting for that edge. But as you go forward as a company, there's all these new opportunities you outlined some of them. What should people know about the VM? We're going forward. What is the vision in your words? What if what is VM where >> I think packed myself and all of the key people among the twenty five thousand employees of'Em are trying to create the best infrastructure company of all time for twenty one years. Young. OK, and I think we have an opportunity to create an incredible brand. We just have to his use point on the begins show create platforms. The V's fear was a platform. Innocent is a platform workspace. One is a platform V san, and the hyper convert stack of weeks right becomes a platform that we keep doing. That Carbonetti stuff will become a platform. Then you get platforms upon platforms. One platforms you create that foundation. Stone now is released. ADelle. I think it's a better together message. You take VX rail. We should be together. The best option relative to smaller companies like Nutanix If you take, you know Veum Where together with workspace one and laptops now put Microsoft in the next. There's nobody else. They're small companies like Citrix Mobile. I'm trying to do it. We should be better than them in a multi cloud world. They maybe got the companies like Red Hat. We should have bet on them. That said, the end. Where needs toe also have a focus when customers don't have Dale infrastructure. Some people may have HP servers and emcee storage or Dell Silvers and netapp storage or neither. Dellery emcee in that case, usually via where, And that's the way we roll. We want to be relevant to a multi cloud, multi server, multi storage, any hardware, any cloud. Any AP any device >> I got. I gotta go back to the red hat. Calm in a couple of go. I could see you like this side of IBM, right? So So it looks like a two horse race here. I mean, you guys going hard after multi cloud coming at it from infrastructure, IBM coming at it with red hat from a pass layer. I mean, if I were IBM, I had learned from VM where leave it alone, Let it blossom. I mean, we have >> a very good partisan baby. Let me first say that IBM Global Services GTS is one about top sai partners. We do a ton of really good work with them. Uh, I'm software re partner number different areas. Yeah, we do compete with red hat with the part of their portfolios. Relate to contain us. Not with Lennox. Eighty percent plus of their businesses. Lennox, They've got parts of J Boss and Open Stack that I kind of, you know, not doing so well. But we do compete with open ship. That's okay, but we don't know when we can walk and chew gum so we can compete with Red Hat. And yet partner with IBM. That's okay. Way just need to be the best at doing containing platform is better than open shifter. Anybody, anything that red hat has were still partner with IBM. We have to be able to look at a world that's not black and white. And this partnership with Microsoft is a good example. >> It's not a zero sum game, and it's a huge market in its early days. Talk >> about what's up for you now. What's next? What's your main focus? What's your priorities? >> Listen, we're getting ready for VM World now. You know in August we want to continue to build momentum on make many of these solutions platforms. So I tell our sales reps, take the number of customers you have and add a zero behind that. OK, so if you've got ten thousand customers of NSX, how do we get one hundred thousand customers of insects. You have nineteen thousand customers of Visa, which, by the way, significantly head of Nutanix. How do we have make one hundred ninety thousand customers? And we have that base? Because we have V sphere and we have the Delll base. We have other partners. We have, I think, eighty thousand customers off and use of computing tens of millions of devices. How do we make sure that we are workspace? One is on billion. Device is very much possible. That's the vision. >> I think that I think what's resonating for me when I hear you guys, when you hear you talk when we have conversations also in Pat on stage talks about it, the simplification message is a good one and the consistency of operating across multiple environments because it sounds great that if you can achieve that, that's a good thing. How you guys get into how you making it simple to run I T. And consistent operating environment. It's all about keeping the customer in the middle of this. And when we listen to customs, all of these announcements the partnership's when there was eight of us, Microsoft, anything that we've done, it's about keeping the customer first, and the customer is basically guiding up out there. And often when I sit down with customers, I had the privilege of talking hundreds of thousands of them. Many of these CEOs the S and P five hundred I've known for years from S athe of'Em were they'LL Call me or text me. They want us to be a trusted advisor to help them understand where and how they should move in their digital transformation and compared their journey to somebody else's. So when we can bring the best off, for example, of developer and operations infrastructure together, what's called DEV Ops customers are wrestling threw that in there cloud journey when we can bring a multi device world with additional workspace. Customers are wrestling that without journey there, trying to figure out how much they keep on premise how much they move in the cloud. They're thinking about vertical specific applications. All of these places where if there's one lesson I've learned in my last ten twenty years of it has become a trusted advisor to your customers. Lean on them and they will lean on you on when you do that. I mean the beautiful world of technology is there's always stuff to innovate. >> Well, they have to lean on you because they can't mess around with all this infrastructure. They'LL never get their digital transformation game and act together, right? Actually, >>= it's great to see you. We'Ll see you at PM, >> Rollo. Well, well, come on, we gotta talk hoops. All right, All right, All right, big. You're a big warriors fan, right? We're Celtics fan. Would be our dream, for both of you are also Manny's themselves have a privileged to go up against the great Warriors. But what's your prediction this year? I mean, I don't know, and I >> really listen. I love the warriors. It's ah, so in some senses, a little bit of a tougher one. Now the DeMarcus cousins is out for, I don't know, maybe all the playoffs, but I love stuff. I love Katie. I love Clay, you know, and many of those guys is gonna be a couple of guys going free agents, so I want to do >> it again. Joy. Well, last because I don't see anybody stopping a Celtics may be a good final. That would be fun if they don't make it through the rafters, though. That's right. Well, I Leonard, it's tough to make it all right. That sounds great. >> Come on. Sanjay Putin, CEO of BM Wear Inside the Cube, Breaking down his commentary of you on the landscape of the industry and the big news with Microsoft there. Other partner's bringing you all the action here Day one of three days of coverage here in the Cubicle two sets a canon of cube coverage out there. We're back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back as we continue our coverage here on theCube, of Dell Technologies 2018. Big show going on here in Las Vegas, we're at the Sands right now, 14,000 people strong in attendance. This is day two of three of live coverage right here on theCube. Along with Keith Townsend, I am John Walls and we're now joined by Matt Liebowitz who is the Global Lead of Multi-Cloud Infrastructure at Dell EMC Consulting. Matt, thank you for joining us here on theCube. >> Happy to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. (laughter) >> John: Alright. You're on the phone, Matt go. (laughter) And Vijay Kanchi, who is the Global Innovation Lead of IT Transformation at Dell EMC. First time listener as well, Vijay? >> Yes, absolutely, and delighted to be here, thank you. >> John: Or long time listener, first time caller. >> Matt: Got to get that terminology right. >> John: Matt in New Jersey you're on, go. Let's talk New Jersey Devils. Let's talk first off about the way your two units intertwine. Just so we set the table here a little bit and understand how the two of you and the people with whom you work, how you interact at Dell. >> Matt: It'd maybe make sense if you start Vijay, and then I'll... >> Yes, so we're part of Dell EMC's consulting organization, and within that consulting organization, Matt and I work together to focus on IT transformation programs. So we design and develop services for our consulting services organization, to go deliver IT transformation programs. >> John: Okay. So, digital transformation you know, thrown around quite a bit these days. >> Vijay: Yeah When you look at it from the macro picture, from an organizational standpoint, from their perspective. What does that mean, if you will, how do you get organizations to buy-in? Because I'm sure the IT professionals with whom you work, they're in large part, they're there, I would guess. But they've got to bring along an entire organization with them, and that's a tall task, Matt. >> Matt: Yeah, there's no doubt that when it comes to Cloud, and especially Multicloud, Like you said, the whole organization needs to come along for the ride. It's not something that IT can do in a vacuum, and we've seen when they try to do it in a vacuum, they're often unsuccessful. So get those stakeholders involved, outside of IT, executive level, bring them in, show them, share with them your KPI's for success. Show them what success looks like, and then bring them along for the ride. That's ultimately how you get success with Cloud. >> Keith: So let's talk progression. What are the most successful projects, at least what is the data points you see out of the most successful projects when the C-Suite says you know what, we're going to do digital transformation, IT go execute. What are the critical points of information IT needs to collect, so that they can come to Dell EMC Consulting to help execute on that strategy? >> Matt: Well it's a long list. How much time do we have? (laughter) You know again, I think success criteria, what success looks like is really important. Because I think what you said is what often happens. You know IT leaders or leaders of the organization say we need to transform, we need to change our business to adapt. >> Keith: Yeah, what is transformation, what does that even mean? >> Right. That's up to the business to define what the next stage looks like. And so that could be anything from just being able to operate like a Public Cloud, provision quickly, iterate quickly on new software and new development tools. Or it could be a major transformation of the whole business, where they're entering a new market and they need to operate a little differently. >> Keith: So what... >> Vijay: Just to add to what Matt just said, you know from a digital transformation perspective, it's all about getting velocity of application, functionality out to customers, users, and stakeholders. When a C-Suite leadership comes and says we need to go transform all our business, then they really look to IT as a significant player to enable that. And one of the biggest issues that you have in driving capability to market fast, is being able to go build infrastructure or environment pretty quickly. Most IT organizations are, you know, dealing with technical debt that's been around for at least 25, 30 years. It starts with, you know, Legacy critical systems that are potentially Mainframe, Client Server, all the way through, you know, digital platforms that they've built up. And so in order to be able to go make that work, I think the one key important thing that we always talk about is, you need to go get automation of your code delivery process, and then you need to go in and build infrastructure and environment so that you don't have as much queue time versus run time. Cause ITs have historically been in the request-response business. I'm sure in your world as well, if you need a fix to your computer, the first thing you have to do, call up or send a request that goes to somewhere, somebody is sitting behind the queue and they're processing it. And so the whole objective to make digital transformation, is to be able to reduce and eliminate the queue time eventually, and enable the run time. So that's kind of the first thing, from an operational perspective, and then from an outcomes perspective, it's about sitting down and bringing a cross-functional team of folks from Marketing, Business units, IT, Security and Compliance, and bringing them together to figure out what sort of outcomes they're looking to achieve, what does that journey look like timing-wise, from an outcomes perspective, and then work to bring everybody together to establish a shared purpose, and a shared objective. So those are some of the key things that we find that almost every single time you engage with customers, you've got to have those conversations first in order to be able to go dig under the covers to figure out where the issues are, and then start to unclog the jams where they exist. (coughing) In the plumbing of IT. (laughter) >> This is part of that people transformation Michael talked about on stage today, yesterday, and then was brought up again on stage today. Having that conversation, for someone who's usually head down, maintaining AIX, maintaining new infrastructure for a digital, we're not equipped to normally have that conversation. Where are you seeing the gaps in skill, and how do organizations close that gap so they can even come to you guys and say, you know what, we can see clearly we need to automate our CICD process, help us through that, which is where you guys excel. >> So go ahead Matt. >> Well I think that it's a challenge because sometimes they don't even know what they don't know. >> Keith: Yeah, don't know what we don't know. >> Right. And so they'll come to us and give us a request like that. We need to modernize our infrastructure, we need to automate, and deliver IT as a service. They don't really know what that means. And so they're going to need to re-skill some of their folks. And I think that's operationally very scary for individuals who work in IT. But the reality is, and you know we see this over and over again, if you want to attract the best and the brightest in IT, you need to be working with the latest technology. And so folks shouldn't be afraid of that change. They should embrace it because ultimately it's going to drive their career forward, and when they're working on the latest and the greatest, they're going to deliver value for the business instead of just keeping the lights on. >> John: And that's kind of the challenge. So it is, I just figured this out, right, (laughter) and all of a sudden, that cycle exponentially, I mean capabilities increase, your skill set is lagging, and now you've got to play catch-up as an IT professional. >> Keith: I just learned how to spell Kubernetes yesterday. (laughter) >> If you could teach me, that'd be great. >> Capital K. (laughter) >> I mean it's true though. I've been working with virtualization for a long time, and it's funny to see the progression back in 2001, 2002, where everyone just thought this thing is crazy, nobody's going to do this. You know, we get to the point where we're having conversations around virtualization-first policies, and now we're talking about Cloud-first policies. So technology and the pace of change waits for nobody. And so we have to help organizations be ready to adopt that change. >> John: What is it right now? What's the big leap you think that on the client's side, that their teams have to make? >> Vijay: So there's probably three areas that I see that they have to make some changes. So from a business perspective in IT, they need to trust IT and integrate their needs and requirements into a process where, businesses really often times don't know what specifically they want from IT. They know and they have some vision of what they want to achieve. And so they need to go sit with, in a collaborative way, that the IT teams and often times the security teams, the CISO teams, to build together, I'll call it a cross-functional team, that can really come together to tease out, and brainstorm their way through to figure out what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. What is the strategy, and what do they need to look like in three years from now, and then work their way back. So that's one piece, this cultural shift in how IT engages with business. The second part is around how do organizations get better? We've been hearing about the DevOps changes that drive, but DevOps is as much a tools and technologies conversation as it is a cultural shift to get the people that were authors and critics, coders and operations folks, problem creators versus problem managers and maintainers. So those roles have been very cantankerous for the last 20 years, because the operations folks are responsible in driving for stability, reliability, and availability. Whereas coders are focused on driving new innovation. So fundamentally different objectives. So in order to make that shift, you need to go in and create another environment and culture of shared pain and shared objectives and shared rewards. So that's another key chain. And then from a skills perspective, what we're finding is that, when we get to the technology and infrastructure part, the folks who used to be storage, administrators, network administrators, computer administrators, et cetera, they now have to go broader, not as much deep in silos, and they need to look at convergence, for example, infrastructure. They need to be thinking about stitching that together with security and DevOps and Cloud SecOps. And so those are the key differences. From an administrator perspective, you need to go in and take your existing skills, and expand to be more broader, versus silo. There are some new skills that are needed to enable all this. I kind of look at the third part being the new skills are, you need folks that never did this type of stuff before to go start doing Cloud Administrative, Multi-Cloud Management and Operations. You need to be able to go do what Google calls Sight Reliability Engineering, and what Cloud Foundry calls Platform Operations and Platform Engineering. So those are... >> Keith: So, even before we get there, >> Yeah, yeah >> From a brefa capability for the Dell organization, consulting organization, the requirements and demand on the organization has changed. It went from, you know I help design, install, and operationalize a VMAX and VMR infrastructure to help me enable a DevOps practice, which is two completely different sets of skill. From a practical perspective, >> Vijay: Absolutely two years ago you look at Comcast's DevOps team, that whole team is now at Wal-Mart. >> Vijay: Yep. >> How do you guys create and nurture the skill set needed to even deliver the capability from a services side? >> Well I mean, that's a great question because we have to transform too. >> Right. >> Because we have to transform and meet the needs of our customers. That's primarily the responsibility of the consulting organization, to stay on top of technology, and move into those new areas of skill. You know if you look back just a couple of years ago and you saw the kind of work that our consulting organization was doing, you know a lot of things like helping customers migrate Exchange Servers and SQL Servers, we don't do a lot of that anymore. We're helping them design and create a transformation roadmap for Multicloud. So it's really important for us to keep our folks as skilled and looking six, 12, 18 months in advance, so that we don't have the problem you just described, where our entire team moves from, you know, one organization to another, our customers need something from us and we can't deliver it. That's a high importance for us. >> Viajy: And from a consulting organization perspective, as Matt said, we are having to reinvent ourself probably at least two or three times in the last five years. That's because of the pace of change in the marketplace. And so we have a shared responsibility to help drive some of our thinking around this transformation, internally ourself. One is to be able to go figure out what other types of services we need to go build, to deliver transformational programs to our customers. So define the what. And that's primarily my responsibility. And then I work very closely with Matt to figure out, what are the skills we have in our organization today, what are the next new skills that we need to go build, and then what are the skills that we have today that we can extend to support these new things that we see coming. Such as taking infrastructure administration and management, to providing and transforming that into providing it in the context of micro services, for example. Or infrastructure as code, storage as code, security as code, et cetera. So those are some of the things that we try to make. And then from a business perspective, we are trying to build-out skills to look at what types of organizational changes do we need to make. What other types of transformational programs and transformational metrics that you need to track, so if you have an 18 month transformation program, or a nine month transformation program, that you're not going to go wait for 18 months to see if you've achieved your outcomes. We've identified KPI's for the transformation program, where you look every 90 days to say are you achieving that. So we have two teams. We have a team of what we call Discipline Leads, folks like Matt, who are championing and evangelizing our organization to say here are the things that you guys need to change to, and find training enablement, to go drive that globally around the world as part of our consulting organization. And then there are going to be skills that we don't have that we go and acquire in the marketplace. But to your point, it's not like they're sitting around waiting to be plucked off the marketplace. (laughter) So you know, part of it is finding the right people who have a little bit of the aptitude that can make the pivot, and then learn fast. So it's a little bit of everything, and it's as much an art as it is to science, to cope with that. >> Matt: It's funny too again, if you look back at our organization just a few years ago, we didn't have a focus on Public Cloud, and now we've got folks that are trained and certified and some of the best in the world at Public Cloud technologies, because we have to change and we have to transform just like our customers. >> John: You know we talk about being nimble and agility. >> Oh yeah. >> You do too, right? >> Yeah. >> You have to walk that walk as well. >> I'm less nimble the older and older I get. (laughter) >> Aren't we all, Matt? Aren't well all? >> Organizationally you're absolutely right. >> Well listen gentlemen, thanks for being here. We appreciate the time. No longer first-time callers. >> That's right. >> Alright. >> We'll be back soon. >> You're now Cube veterans. Thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for the time. >> Back with more here from Las Vegas. You're watching theCube coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage live from the Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. We've had a really exciting day talking about commerce and how it's limitless and changing dramatically. Joining me next is Sucharita Kodali, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. Sucharita, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> So commerce is limitless. We've been hearing this thematically all day. You primarily are working with retailers on their digital strategies. And you've been doing this for a long time. Let's talk about the evolution that you've seen in the retail space with everybody expecting to have access to whatever they want to buy in their pockets. >> Right, right, right. I would say, so I've been working in the retail industry for the last two decades. I've been an analyst for the last 10 plus years. I've really seen a number of changes. And if I had to just summarize the biggest changes, one is just the inventory across different retail channels. So, that's definitely been a huge huge one. It's like, how do you, how do you order online, but then fulfill the item from a physical store or fulfill the item from another store? So those are, that's basically the digital transformation of retailers. Those are investments that companies like WalMart and Target have really been doubling down on and focusing on. The second big change is Amazon. And they single-handedly have transformed the retail industry. They have increased consumer expectations. And what Amazon's also done is reinvented retail as a business model. Because it is no longer about just selling product and being profitable selling that product. Amazon actually is not profitable with a lot of the items that it sells. It makes money in other ways. And it is probably what I would describe as America's first retail conglomerate. And that becomes a really interesting question for other companies to compete, do you have to become a retail conglomerate? Then, the third big change is just brand selling direct to consumer. I remember when I started at Forrester, my very first project was with a large consumer electronics company that asked, Well, should we even sell directly to consumers? There's channel conflict and issues with our distributors. And now, that's not even a factor. It's sort of table stakes you have to sell direct to consumer. And that's probably where we'll continue to see a lot of retail sales in the future. >> So the Amazon model, we expect to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it shipped to us either at home or shipped to us so we can go pick it up at a store. It's really set the bar. In fact, they just announced the other day that a hundred million Amazon Prime members. I know people that won't buy something if it's not available through Prime. But I think this morning the gentleman that was on main stage from Amazon said at least 50% of their sales are not products they sell, they're through all of the other retailers that are using Amazon as a channel as part of their omni-channel strategy. If you think of a retailer from 20 years ago, how do they leverage your services and expertise and advice to become omni-channel? Because as today, you said essentially it's table stakes for companies to have to sell to consumers. >> Yeah, yeah. There are so many questions that really require, I call it destroying the retail orthodoxies. And retail has historically been about buyers and merchandisers buying goods. There's the old expression in retail, You stack 'em high and watch 'em fly. And that is just where buyers would, Take a company like Toys R Us, they would basically take what Mattel and Hasbro told them to buy. They would buy a ton of it, put it in stores. And because there was less competition back in the '80s, consumers actually would buy that merchandise. And unfortunately, the change for retailers is that consumers have so much more choice now. There's so such more innovation. There are small entrepreneurs who are creating fabulous products, consumer tastes have changed. And this old paradigm of Mattel and Hasbro, or kind of fill in the blank with whatever vendors and suppliers, pushing things is no longer relevant. So, there was just an article in the journal today about how Hasbro sales were down by double digits because Toys R Us is now going to go out of business. So those are the kinds of things that retailers who did not adjust to those changes, they are the ones that really suffer. They don't find ways to develop new inventory, they don't find new channels for growth, and they don't protect their own. They don't build a moat around their customers like Amazon has done, or they don't find ways to source inventory creatively. That's where the problems are. >> You think that's more of a function of a legacy organization; having so much technology that they don't know how to integrate it all together? What do you think are some of the forcing functions old orthodoxies that companies that don't do it well are missing? >> Yeah, it's a lot of it is just in the old ways of doing business. So, a lot of it is being heavily dependent, for instance, on buyers and merchandisers buying things. I mean, one of the biggest innovations that Amazon realized was that, look you can sell things without actually owning the inventory. And that is, their entire, what we call the third party marketplace, and that is just so simple. But if you were to ask a buyer at a major retailer a decade or two ago, "Why do you have to buy the inventory?" their response would be, Well, you have to buy the inventory, that's just the way it is. And it's like, well why? Why don't you try to find a new way to do business? And they never did. But it took Amazon to figure that out. And the great irony of why so many retailers continue to struggle is that Amazon has exposed the playbook on how to sell inventory without owning it. And so few retailers to this day have adopted that approach. And that's the great irony I think, is that that's the most profitable part of Amazon's business is that third party marketplace. And every retailer I've talked to is like, Oh, it's really hard. We can't do that. But, the part of Amazon's business that everyone is looking to imitate is their fast shipping. Which, is the most expensive part of their business. Amazon is only able to afford the fast free shipping because of the third party marketplace. Other retailers want to get the fast free shipping without the marketplace. And it just doesn't make any sense. And that's really the heart of the challenge is that they just don't think about alternative business models. They don't want to change the way that they've historically run their businesses. And some of this could mean that merchants are not as powerful in organizations. And maybe that's part of the pushback is that, there could be a lot of people who lose jobs. The future will be robo-buyers and financial services you have robo-advisors, why not robo-planners in retail? >> So one of the keys then, of eliminating some of the old orthodoxies for merchants is to be able to pivot and be flexible. But it has to start from where in an organization from a digital strategy perspective? Where do you help an organization not fall into the Toys R Us bucket? >> Yeah, I think a lot of it does have to start with merchandising and putting in some interesting digital tools to help merchants be more flexible. So, you want to flex to supply and demand. And some of that comes with integrating marketplaces into your own experience. Some of it can be investing in 3D printers that can make things that are plastic or metals based on demand. That's something that I always wondered why Toy R Us didn't, for instance, make Fidget Spinners on demand. Why did you have to get them with a six month leave time from China, it never made any sense. You can scale service, so use technology to match great store associates with a customer who may have a question. And you don't have to be in the same store. It can be a Facetime call with somebody who is far away. But very few retailers do that. And finally, the last bit is really to look at new alternative business models and finding new ways of making money beyond just selling inventory. >> That's really key because there are so many oppurtunities when companies go omni-channel of not just increasing sales and revenue, but also reducing attrition, making the buying process simple and seamless. Everybody wants one click, right? >> Right. >> Super seamless, super fast, and relevant. It's got to be something if you're going to attract my business, you need to be able to offer something where you know me to a degree. >> Absolutely. >> Or know what it is I might have a propensity to buy. >> Absolutely. And that's the entire area of personalization. And that personalization can be anything from a recommendation that I give you. It can be proactively pushing a recommendation. That's what companies like Stitch Fix do is I tell you what I want and then they send you a box in the mail of things I think you would like and oh, by the way are your size and within your budget. It can be customization. One of Nike's most successful parts of their business is their Nike ID program which allows you to customize shoes according to colors and different sort of embellishments that you may like. And that's exactly the kind of thing that more retailers need to be looking at. >> What are some of the trends maybe that a B2B organization might be able to love or some of the conveniences that we have as consumers and we expect in terms of-- Magento, I was looking on their website the other day and a study that they've done suggests 93 percent of B2B buyers want to be able to purchase online. So, new business models, new revenue streams, but it really is a major shift of sales in marketing to be able to deliver this high velocity low touch model. What are some of the things that a business like a Magento, could learn from say a Nike with how they have built this successful omni-channel experience? >> Well, interestingly I think one of the most important things to recognize is that every B2B buyer is also a B2C buyer. And their expectations are set by their experiences in B2C. So, if you have everything from all of the information at your fingertips, all of that information is optimized for mobile devices. You have different ways to view that information, you have all of your loaded costs, like shipping, or tax, or if there's cross-border. All of the information related to the time to ship, any customs and duties, all of that needs to be visible because in any experience that you have with say a site like Amazon, you're going to get that information. So, the expectation is absolutely there to have it in any situation whether it's B2B or whether it's buying components or kind of very long tail items. That's basically the cost of doing business at this point, is that you have to deliver all of the information that the customer wants and needs. And if you don't, the customer is just going to opt to go purchase that product at whatever destination offers it. >> Somewhere else. >> And somebody will. That's the challenge when you have 800 thousand Plus eCommerce sellers out there selling every product imaginable in the both B2B and B2C landscape. >> So, on the data side there's so much data out there that companies have any type of business to be able to take advantage of that. I know that there's, BI has so much potential. Are you hearing retailers start to embrace advanced analytics techniques, AI machine learning, Where are they with starting to do that? I know that some eyeglass companies have virtual reality augmented reality type of apps where you can kind of try on a pair of frames. Where are you seeing advanced analytics start to be successful and help retailers to be able to target buyers that might say, oh, I can't try that on? No, I want to go somewhere that I can touch and feel it. >> Yeah, well, it's emerging still. I mean, retailers have a lot of data. I think they're trying to figure out where is it most useful. And one of the places where it is incredibly useful is in the backend with fraud management. So, after retailers were forced to put in chip cards as a payment form, what you started to see was more of the fraud shifting to eCommerce. I just had two credit cards that had to be shut off because of E-commerce fraud. But that is where you see the fraudsters going to. And what you see as a result of that is some innovators in that space technology companies really leveraging machine learning, AI, other advanced data techniques to identify fraudulent transactions and to better help retailers eliminate or reduce the percent of transactions that have to then be charged back. So, that's probably one of the most promising areas. There are others that are emerging. We're seeing more visual recognition technologies. House for instance, is excellent at that and Pinterest too. If there's part of an image you like you can click on it or you can tap it and see other images like that. And that's incredibly difficult. And it was even more difficult 10-15 years ago, but it's becoming easier. There's the voice element, voice to text or text to voice. I think that the best applications they're often in customer service, there are so many interactions that happen anywhere in a consumer facing world. It doesn't even have to be within retail. You can think about the complaints to the airline industry or to a bank. And a lot of it falls into a black hole. You always hear that oh, This call may be recorded, but it is really difficult to go back and transcribe that. And to really synthesize that into major themes. And what ML in particular can do is to basically pull out those themes, it can automate all of that, and can give insights as to what you could be doing, what you should be doing, what are the opportunities that you may not have even known existed. So there are definitely emerging places. I mean even a visual recognition, so we talked about House and Pinterest. Another great example is the computer vision that you have in the Amazon Go stores. And there's a robot that the Wal Mart stores are now testing to go find if there are gaps in the inventory that need to be filled. Or if something is running low or out of stock. So there are definitely some interesting applications, but it's still early days for sure. >> So last question, we've got to wrap here, but, we're in April 2018, what are some of the, your top three recommendations for merchants, as they prepare for say Black Friday coming up in what, six or eight months. What are you top three recommendations for merchants to be successful and be able to facilitate a seamless online offline experience? >> Well, we always have kind of imbalances between supply and demand, and that's where I do think things like third party sellers, third party marketplaces are huge. So to be able to leverage that is certainly one opportunity. Another is to think creatively about promotions. In Japan they have these promotions called Fukubukuro promotions, and it's basically like grab bags of like all the left over inventory. But then they basically put it into mystery bags where you can buy it for half off. And consumers line up around the block at stores to go buy these grab bags. Because they also have also like a gamified approach where, you know, one of out 10 of the bags will have like an Ipad or some really high value item. So people really like these things, and they have trading parties. So just new ways of having promotions beyond just the typical door busters that retailers think about. And then kind of third I think is just try to pace out the demand. One of the big issues in E-commerce has been just the burst in demand that always happen in December. And that creates a lot of problems from the standpoint of actually shipping the orders. So the more that you can pull those transaction forward into November, the better off you are from a fulfillment and supply chain standpoint. >> Alright Sucharita thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE >> Thanks Lisa >> And sharing your insights on the trends and what's going on in the commerce and E-commerce space. Really enjoy talking with you. >> Nice to talk to you too. >> We want to thank you for watching. You're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2018, I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back, everyone, we're here live with theCUBE in Mountainview, California, heart of Silicon Valley, for live coverage of theCUBE with Devnet Create, Cisco's developer conference for cloud-native and all things really DevOps. This is not the core DevNet normal Cisco development world. It's really more of the forward, progressive view of cloud computing. Cisco has their own Devnet networking development conference. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney. Next guest is Jared Rhodes. He's an MVP from Azure, with QiMata, that's his company there. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us. >> Good to be here. So you're here to learn Cisco. Yeah, you know Microsoft, kind of bring it together. Cloud really has brought together a whole other level. You know, speed, agility, all that good stuff. But when you start getting into like microservices, Qiber, Netease, it really is an exciting times, so I want to get your perspective as someone coming in, learning cisco, what's on your mind, obviously your hands are involved in the Microsoft side. What are some of the things you're looking at? >> So for me personally, my focus is a lot on, I call it cloud mobile and edge. So I look at cloud computing, edge computing and mobile computing. And that edge and mobile space is where I'm looking to really if see the Cisco products have a lot of use for me. So we have clients, let's take some industries where things don't, I won't say don't move as fast, but they want to. So, oil and gas, right? Oil and gas you got pipelines running all over the U.S., and they put the oil and gas pipelines down sometime in the 80's, and liquid gold actually flows through oil pipelines. So they don't shut them down, they don't change them, they don't touch them, until now. Now they need that innovation, they need that knowledge coming off the pipeline all the time. So, I'm looking for Cisco to have that, for me personally, I'm looking for Cisco to have that technology to bridge that gap of taking that physical and helping me bridge it to the digital into the cloud. >> And what specific things about a network edge or gates that are good for you but also are blockers, where are the, where's the pros and cons of the Edge right now? You look at I O T, for instance, What are the challenges and what are the opportunities? >> The challenges and opportunities, so, getting started for a lot of people is tough. Which, when you're trying to building out a project team, you know, that can make it tough. I mean, if it's a new space, there's not a lot of people in it, and if you got to hire for it, you got to find somebody so you either train 'em, or you find something you can buy off the shelf to get everyone started. What was the other part of the question? >> The opportunities and challenges. It is technical? Is it business? Is it more? >> It's all of the above. >> They laid pipeline, they had connectivity, power >> They have, so it's a mixed bag. When you roll out something like a pipeline, it's so expensive, so they'll actually just roll fiber right along with the pipeline. Even back in the day when they didn't know they would need fiber, but also it's a fiber line that sat out for 30 years, so someone came along with a dump truck and ran right over it, and cut it in half, and then they haven't looked to fix it because they never did anything with it. But they also don't what they don't know. So, you know if we talk about the amazing Edge capabilities using Cisco and Microsoft, we can do crazy things to where we can take pressure changes throughout the pipeline to do preventative maintenance so that we can see, hey we've got an air gap problem here and we can go ahead and fix it before there's anything that would cause them loss or government interference in moving that product. So, they don't know that that exists. They don't have an idea that this is available to me, or that someone can provide this. We have one case where someone took a drone and they would just fly the drone over eight hours of pipeline and try to check for any defects. And until they see that in action, to them, they just don't know it exists. So it is business and the opportunity is showing them this and helping them integrate into their systems. >> That's great, and I think you talked about Edge too, Can you talk a little bit about some of those use cases? >> Sure. So, let's say that we have an oil pump, and that if there's a sudden pressure drop, we got a nice explosion, oil goes everywhere, no one's happy, right? So if I want to take that rating, we got two things we need to run on the Edge: one is, oil pipelines, oil pumps, don't really go where people are, so they don't really run network cables out to the oil pumps. And right now, one of our clients, they have an old RF tower, so they actually have fiber, satellite, and an RF tower, make sure they've covered everything, and well then one day someone cut the fiber line while there were clouds overhead, so we had to use the old radio tower. So, one problem is you have to use the, one problem that Edge solves by being able to move the logic that you run in the cloud to the Edge, one problem that it solves is just that if, I mean, if clouds can take out my infrastructure, I don't have good infrastructure, so having that in place running on the Edge, or I shouldn't say infrastructure, I should say solution, if my solution can be taken down by some clouds coming in, it's not a good solution. So, having it run on the Edge instead of in the cloud means that we can do the pressure sensing for the oil pump and the shutdowns locally. Another problem that is solves is, even if I do have my RF backup, there's a latency thing going on there, where it could be really slow, and if it misses that windows to shut down the oil pump, again, it's just a bad solution, so the Edge platforms really help us when we need things now. And I use the oil pipeline, but my actual client, what they're doing, is they're doing driverless cars. They're getting into that space, and you can't, if someone runs out in front of your car, I can't send it up to the cloud to run it through some data process. It needs to know it now. >> Tell me a little bit about the company you guys do. What kind of engagements do you have? Is it more consulting, you writing any code, is it cloud? >> The one I run is, it's a consulting firm, so we do custom solutions. Our current engagements are, one is security systems, it's a nice company called Tellular. They got into the market and made all their money back in the day when landlines went away. >> Lauren: Oh, yeah >> So they, you pay a million dollars for a security system, and all of the sudden it runs on a landline, can't run without it, do you get a new security system? No. You go ahead and you buy somebody who lets you plug into the wall, and so they made a lot of money on that back in the day, and they've been slowly but surely staying in the industry doing upgrades to security systems, cameras, everything, so that's one of our clients. Another one is the one I was talking about, MetroTech, they do multiple things in the driverless vehicle space. They do traffic analysis, LIDAR detection, they actually take the old, you remember the traffic cams that everyone hated? If you got too far into the intersection it would send you a ticket automatically, >> Unless you go like this >> Right! So, a lot of those cameras actually still exist after the politicians had to pull 'em back, and so they're retrofitting those cameras so they can actually detect traffic in the intersection, is there a crash, do we need to have emergency responders and that kind of stuff. And then our final engagement is with a company that does another set of security systems for, they're called Rin Solutions, they do security systems for big box stores, Wal Mart, Target, they do things that I wouldn't even think of in those kinds of stores to get analytics and to keep stuff from walking away. >> Yeah, I mean they're hardcore in the analytics. Talk about architecture. I mean in the old days, you had a web server, you had middleware, you have storage and compute, application front end, now with cloud, you have a lot of more, opportunity, but also architecture's changing. You got on-premise concerns, whether it's security, how you manage cloud and Edge. Anything that you're seeing that you can share in terms of success, approaches, general rules of thumb? >> It's made things easier. So, one of the holy grails in architecture years ago was an event-based architecture systems, so, if you think about a lot of the computer processes we have, we really care that something just happened. In an architecture concern. You care something just happened. Someone just logged in, someone just walked past a thing, a system goes down, a system goes up. You just want to know that things happen. And in the cloud, it's actually made that a hundred times easier. Just to detect this thing has happened, but not just this thing has happened, but to expose it to everyone within the organization and then let them do whatever they'd like to. So, everything from a systems is up to hired a new employee and they're in the system. >> Or also, and also I think also interesting I'd love to get your thoughts on this is that an event just happened so you can capture it, but also you can actually put some synthesis around it with other data. You can actually extract some meanings, hence the predictive analytics trend, and prescription analytics, so, interesting challenge. >> It is What you can do with data now in the cloud is interesting. I can talk specifically for the Microsoft side. It's really at the point to where when I talk to clients about what they want to do with their data, it becomes like, how much money do you want to throw at it? We can get insights, nearly unlimited insights, they way the machine learning is coming forward now into the fold, you see people doing things like facial detection, speech recognition, just out of the box, you just buy it. Right? And so, the customized solution for those, for customers' data, it seems to be unlimited on what we can train those models to do and predict now >> Just good timing, right now, good environment. >> It is. I mean, it basically it just wasn't possible 10 years ago. And now you can just, whatever you want, as long as you can just pay for the computing power. >> I want to ask you a question. I'll get your reaction cause it's an interesting conversation. I was riffing on this at one of the block chain events I was covering. In the old days, technology decision was the big decision. Everything was enabled based on the technology decision. But now with all of this stuff going on, business decision-making's critical because there's so much you can double down on, you can spend on whatever. I mean if insights are potentially almost, well, not unlimited, but, you know, plentiful, you really got to focus on what's more important, so this is really more the business model logic is now the risk piece. Technology can always move around, so your thoughts and reaction to that, and how do you rationalize that and how do we get people educated on this new world order? >> A lot of sales engagements now really are a menu. It really is a menu. You're putting it in front of a CIO and you're going "Here, I want you to look through this and tell me what you want." 'Cause we can do pretty much anything and then they can start picking, and they'll be like "No cheese on that hamburger." >> Yeah, yeah >> You can give them just the menu and say, "Do you want your"- >> Here, have sides >> Yeah, do you want this on the side, what do you want? When you talk about technology now, it's really about just telling them, "If you want all of your mobile apps enabled to have speech recognition, facial detection, if you want unlimited data storage, this is just it, this is how much that costs now, and you can just go through your menu and just pick and choose when and how you want it." >> So service catalog has become big deal, then, at this point, for customers with all on-boarding, dashboards. Roll up cuber-netting, is that in your world right now, and the Istio conversation that we're seeing here, I don't know if you've been following that here. >> So, Kubernetes isn't necessarily my world, but the containers are, so the way that Microsoft does the Edge computing, is that they actually, you'll write an Edge module, and it's just a container, and that container just ships down to whatever device is running on the edge, and it can use that instantly. And the only reason Kubernetes doesn't really get involved in my world that much is I do serverless, so we don't even look at the Kubernetes. It's behind the scenes. >> Got it. We just write code and it just runs it. >> Yeah, it's orchestrating all that, cool. And serverless is certainly, I love that term, serverless, because it implies no servers, but there's servers somewhere. It's in the cloud. Great to have you. Thoughts on this event? What are you trying to get out of learning here at the Cisco DevNet Create? Obviously it's cloud, it's developers, it's building solution. >> For me, specifically, I really want to see what kinetics has to offer in the IOT smart city space. And I want to see how that integrates with Microsoft. I want to find out where we can meet infrastructure to the digital and make that integration as smooth as possible. >> Jared, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insight. The practitioner trying to synthesize and make sense of it doing some cutting edge things IOT business impact all happening in real time right here on theCUBE. More after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Gene Chao is here as the Global VP of IBM Automation and Jason Kelley, Cube Alum, is the GM of Blockchain Services. Gentlemen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> Great to see you. >> You guys, I call you heat-seeking inefficiency missiles, so, Jason's... Just a shout-out, take it from there. What are you guys up to, what are you doing? How are you helping businesses? >> Well, we're driving trust into transactions. The elusive things that we've been trying to-- >> Gene: Whoops, there goes heat-seeking. (laughing) >> Exactly. Or we're seeking the heat. It's coming after us, as soon as we say trust, someone wants to attack you. And so what we're bringing into business is that thought that, if I can add trust into transactions, I don't need a third-party to validate it. I can now say, look, you are who you are. We both know each other. All that we do, we go way back. We know each other, and what we're about to exchange is known as well. So if I can keep that validation from happening, I'm going to remove cost, labor, time, out of it. And I'm also going to then maybe avail new market opportunities of those who could not enter the system before because we didn't trust their identities. Or we didn't trust that their goods were their goods, and they were trying to exchange it. So think of that heat-seeking missile, we're trying to bring that capability and that heat is the energy in the system now going bigger, better, faster because there's trust. >> And your role is to bring those Blockchain services to market, is that right? >> That's correct, bringing the services as a whole, because see, Blockchain isn't a product. Blockchain, you know, I don't have under the table a bucket of Blockchain. >> Dave: Let me see your Blockchain. >> Sorry, no Blockchains here. So, if in fact, we're bringing this capability to the market, there's all types of services from what's the business value design? First, what's your outcome? Why say Blockchain? Believe it or not, it says it on my chest, so it means I get paid to do it, but maybe you don't need this? And so, quite simply, maybe you need to do something else. So the first thing is, let's understand the outcome that your business is running toward, and then let's understand if it's a Blockchain, and then can we bring some automation with Gene and team? >> Okay, that's the set-up for you Gene, so you're the automation piece of the puzzle. Explain. >> So, I love the commentary around the better, faster, but we're also bringing more scale. So automation has scale. What does that mean? We're really focused on two things, guys, the first thing is around taking advantage of the new technologies to enable what I'll call software-based labor. So there's a new concept of the digital workforce model that enables how transactions or how work gets done. Coupled with that is how that workflow or process, business process, IT process, whatever it is, how does that workflow fundamentally change through these technologies. Why that's important is as we look at Blockchain, as an example, as a pivot point for trusted transactions, I need to build trusted automation around it. Trusted ways to leverage these technologies in that workflow so those transactions are easily scalable, works at machine time, and runs through very quickly. >> This is fascinating stuff, 'cause look. The way that we like to characterize the big change in the industry is we say, for the first 50 years of computing, there was no process, accounting, HR, et cetera, on known technology. How do we implement? What technology do you choose to implement? The implementation choices are becoming clear. Cloud, et cetera. What's less known is the process. The unknown process, unknown technology. Now it's unknown process, known technology. And what you guys are talking about is one of the challenges when you think about processes. Who does what? Can we verify that we've done it? Did they do it right? Did they meet to do what they said they were doing? Et cetera, the whole range of issues. And the contracting process is extremely complex, but if you set it up in a Blockchain form, you've got a simple contract, a simple definition of who is trusted, simple definitions of roles, and now we can dramatically accelerate new process creation and then automate it. Have I got that right? >> I think you got it, when you think about dramatically, dramatically accelerated, you say that it means something different to everyone. But let's think about my friend Frank Yiannas at Wal-Mart, for example, where they're working on food trust. They're trying to make sure that from farm to fork, we know where that food came from. One-third of all food that's processed goes to waste. Because we lack food trust. Food is guilty until proven innocent, right? To keep that from being-- >> Spoiled. >> Spoiled, I'm... The humor is killing me. (laughing) So, no pun intended, food trust, right? So, Frank and team wanted to understand how fast they could move this thought of tracking, tracing, with transparency, this food through the system. Just as you said, there's certain contrast, think of the handshakes from getting, in their case, a mango from a farm all the way to your home, Well, it used to take them seven days. Actually, six days, twenty-some hours, in order to figure out that process. Put it on the Blockchain? 12 seconds. And then once they cured the lag and the technology, 2.2 seconds. So think of that. Now you're shrinking this to seconds versus days, what does that do to the process? What do you do when you say, now my system can go that fast. My people can go that fast. What do you do? Think of the automation that you're bringing in now, and things that you will now have to automate, out of not just necessity, but things you will say, wow, we've opened up a whole new ecosystem of possibilities in order to do business in a different way. >> Well, so let me build on that for a second. 'Cause one of the things that potentially means is that because you can handle more complex, newly designed, process, better, faster, more automated, that you can start to expand the scope of participants in a transaction? The range of characteristics of the transaction, or the type of work? That's how you build up to new businesses and new business models, right? >> Sure. >> Right, right. >> If I can jump in on that one. There's a concept in this one, and this is where Jason and I are connected at the hip. You know, we think in terms of a smarter product, we think in terms of a smarter contract, or transaction, that the guiding principle that we're using is the old way of thinking, and I carry this narrative all over with me is, the old way of thinking is you have people following your creating process, supported by that technology. So the things that you talked about, unknown technology, unknown process, continuously sourced by people? Fundamentally changed. We're now working in a world where the process is run by the technology and supported by the people. It's not that the people are going away, it's a fundamental retooling of the skills and understanding of how to support it, but that scalability, the ability to get to that exponential growth, is because the process is the king. At the top of the food chain, now. And that technology lets it expand. >> But we could do levels of complexity in that process and the number of participants in that process, unheard of! It's scale and scope. >> Yes. >> But doesn't that force... Look, we've had some conversations, Dave and I have had some conversations, with a number of big user organizations about this stuff and we keep coming back to the issue of that they can't just look at the technology, they have to focus on the design. That one of the most crucial features of this process is the design of the Blockchain. We got that right? >> You heard me use the phrase at the very beginning, if you didn't, I'll say it again, I said, business value design. Because in fact, that design is not just a UI or UX, but let's make sure that the business and technology are doing the right thing to get to the outcome. As we say, design doesn't stop until the problem is solved. And guess what, the problem's never solved. So design happens... Many people say, "Oh we're going to do some "design thinking at the beginning. "We did that," check the block, and then they run off and do something else. For us, design's like an infinity loop. You continue to do it. From the beginning all the way to the end, and then, what you're able to do, and hint-hint, this is something that we do in our services, we start with our clients, we get them started so they understand, then we help them accelerate, and then innovate. Three steps: start, accelerate, innovate. And that's a design process in and of itself. So if you start at, you know, the days of Blockchain tourism were a couple years ago, everybody wanted to kick the tires, and then last year was PoC PoV, this year's the year of production. And people are quick in saying, "How do I quickly start "production and keep moving?" >> So let's talk about some other examples. You mentioned Wal-Mart, we heard Plastic Mag this morning, I introduced somebody, I think Evercorp was the name of the company, Diamond Providence. Others that you're excited about, that have made a business impact. >> Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Mike White and others at our JV with Maersk. And you know, you think of that, where you have the classic thought of a supply chain, this linear steps in the process, you know, these handshakes that have to happen. Now what we have is we have this process of thinking how we can bring transparency into all of that, and it's not just a supply chain, but a value chain. So you have where 80% of whatever you all are touching or have owned right now, with the shipping line. But not only through a shipping line, but then there was also ground and air, and ultimately to a retail location. Then you consumed it. Well, think of all of those processes now having the transparency where you can see from point of consumption all the way back to origin. Think of the supply chain visibility, that elusive thing called supply chain optimization. Now you can do that, but not only the supply chain, but the value chain. Someone's paying invoices under that big thing called a value chain. Someone's doing trade promotion management in that value chain. Now, if you have that visibility, what do you enable? How many more packages can go through the system? How much more shipping? And the estimate is 5% increase in GDP if we're able to get all of this shipping into the Blockchain. You start talking GDP? It opens eyes. >> Right now you're talking growth, right? >> Yes. >> Real growth. >> So, it's 20% of the four trillion associated with shipping? Is bound up in paperwork? >> Yes. >> So we're talking about 800 billion dollar change. >> And returning capital into the system. Returning capital. You think of this thought of opening up new opportunity, And I'll throw another example, another client, so we're not just talking, but you think of what's happening with We.Trade. Nine banks in Europe who compete. You think of Santander Bank and a Deustche Bank and those are now, they're all coming together, saying "How do we now share data and information "so that we can let small to medium size enterprises "into the system?" So now you're getting not just savings of cost and time, but now you're opening up markets. Getting greater throughput. High waters raise all boats. And that's what we're seeing in a lot of these examples with, it's not just taking out those old things, you're thinking of new processes running the business a different way. >> And Jason's a great lead guy. You asked for an example, our friends at DBS Bank. They are fundamentally looking at changing the business models within the bank across all different divisions of the bank, whether it's credit transactions, mortgages, personal wealth, and the way they approached it was, we know these new technologies are going to allow us to fundamentally look at the workflow and change it. But here's the question: Who will be looking at changing these things? What's going to enable these model changes, the workflow changes may not be human capital. It may be working alongside this sort of man plus machine element or formula-- >> Peter: Patterns. >> Right, to allow the technology to tell you where your efficiencies could be gained. Allow the technologies to make the correlations in those disparate business models, to fundamentally change how you do business. So that's happening today. >> So, phase one is what is this, phase two, POC, now you're sort of in real production, but you obviously doing a lot more POCs, you're scaling out. Where do you see this going over the next three or four years? >> Well, I think last year was a year of the PoC PoV. I think this year's a year of production. And when you think of some of the examples that we've given, we've talked about consumer trade with Wal-Mart, we talk about shipping trade with Maersk, we talk about trade finance with We.Trade. Each of those individual networks, where do we see it going? We see these networks becoming a network of networks. Where each one of them have their own ecosystems and they come together. And they come together with trusted data, with trusted information, access that's unparalleled. So that's where we see it heading. And you have to say then, okay, it sounds really simple in the way you've just described it, so where's the challenge? The challenge is going to be doing this from a business and technology perspective. There's a lot of things that have to be figured out here. How are you going to make those processes work at that speed? What do you rightfully automate and what things don't you automate? That's more than just a technology. You can't plug a technology in and solve this. It takes an end to end capability. And that's what we're seeing, becoming more of a differentiating capability for our teams, where they can say, "Gene, Jason, "can your teams talk to us together?" 'Cause, of course, they work together. That's a differentiating effect of moving at scale and at speed, and that's where we see it going. Scale and speed. >> So what Jason and the Blockchain frame does for us, is it's an accelerant. Okay, we talk about knowledge worker, automation, we talk about different areas of software-based labor, but that accelerant is doing one big thing, is it's forcing us into what I'll call vertically integrated processes or workflow. Gone are the days of segmentation of, "Oh, that's back office," or "That's front office." We now have to take that workflow and pivot that to vertical integration. Why? That accelerant is moving at the speed of light for trusted transactions, I have to make the systems supporting that. The process, the people, I have to keep up with that pace of change. If I don't vertically integrate those processes inter and intracompany? This doesn't work. It falls down. So that's our marriage. >> Tough to go to market. How do you go to market? >> How do we go to market? We go to market as fast as we can, and we go joined at the hip, with clear and simple understanding. >> Where's the Blockchain for going to market? >> Yeah, right? >> And is there partner ecosystem that... >> Absolutely. So we talk about a Blockchain, Blockchain's a team sport. And it is a true demonstration of Metcalfe's Law, you know, the network drives the value. And so we do. We go to market with this thought of, who's going to play in that network? And we have networks where its obvious value may have a founder network, like Wal-Mart, where you say look, we see the ecosystem, we have the ecosystem, we're the founding partner, or you have a consortium such as We.Trade, where they come in and they say, "Look, let's pull all this together "'cause we see the value." So we go to market with that ecosystem, knowing that they have to partner, they have to work together. >> Outstanding. >> There's three distinct chapters in our go to market strategy. One is the services architecture, the second one is software ecosystem, and the third is around platforms, like a Blockchain. So when we start-- >> No design? >> Sorry, say again? >> No design? >> No, there is absolutely design. Absolutely design. So at a service architecture's perspective, there is fundamental workflow design happening. At a platform level, that's an even further advancement of design, because of the frameworks and blueprints happening inside a Blockchain, inside the different next-gen technologies happening. So I have to be two things, I have to be an automation-led environment where I'm providing the way to do these things, differences in RPA versus other technologies, but I also have to be an automation-attached. I have to be attached into the Blockchain framework to make sure we're coupled in the different elements of that framework. So that's how we jointly go to market. >> Peter: RPAs, I'm sorry? >> I'm sorry, Robotic Process Automation companies, so these are the relatively new technologies that enable software-based labor components. They're replicating human activity. >> Software robots? >> Software robots. >> You have a path to automation anyway. >> Exactly right. Exactly right. >> And it's funny when you ask, you know, no design. Design's in there. And this is the way we work at IBM, I mean, we're past that calling it out. So if someone's calling it out, it's like you're going to buy a phone and say, "Oh yeah, we included the battery." Like, it's there now, right? So that's how we run. So is it in there? You mention IBM, anything that you're going to consume from us? Includes IBM design. By practice. >> Wow, you guys, today was Blockchain day. I mean, you must have been thrilled to see all the main tech-- >> You mean every day's not Blockchain day? >> Dave: Well, at IBM, thinks every day... >> Okay, alright, I was just checking. >> You guys sucked all of the air out of the morning. And we heard-- >> And by the way, I certainly hope not. (laughing) >> You hope not what? >> That every day is Blockchain day. >> I hope so. Jason here. >> Makes me not have to buy a new wardrobe. >> If every day's Blockchain day, it ain't working. This is going to be one of those technologies, the less we know about it, the more successful it's been. >> I agree, I agree. >> Well, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure. >> Thank you guys. >> Thanks very much. >> Appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 2018. Be right back.

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2017, the second year at this event in downtown San Francisco, downtown Pier 27 out on the water. Beautiful day outside, and we're really excited to have the CFO of this fast growing company. He's Steven Gatoff, as I said, CFO of PagerDuty. Steven, nice to see you. >> Right on, thanks. Good to be here. >> Absolutely. So you've been with the company since January, so relatively new and yet you've been here for a funding round, things are moving. We've just had Jennifer on, she's just always full of energy. So first off, welcome to the company. And what attracted you to PagerDuty? >> A lot, particularly the whole disruption, the whole notion of driving change. If not even defining a new industry. The ability, and kind of from a financial standpoint also of seeing a company and a product evolve from a very cool software tool to an operations platform. And that is something that I was lucky enough to do at my last company, at Rapid7, where it was a similar journey and value creation exercise of moving from tool to platform, and disrupting an industry. And we did it there in the security space, in cybersecurity, and it was a great run. And then I got lucky enough to get connected with Jennifer and the team here, and realized there was a similar journey, similar value prop, albeit in a much larger TAM across all of operations. >> It's funny the kind of stepping function of: Is it a feature or is it a tool? Or is it an application? And of course everybody wants to get to the platform play, but nobody's got a line-item that they need to purchase a new platform in Q4, 2017. So you really need to have that application focused to lay the groundwork for the platform play, but if you can make the transition, obviously a huge opportunity. >> So that's a great, we should have you engage with customers because that is spot on, particularly here, and I think that's some of the excitement about the summit, because it's really the first coming out, if you will, for us of digital operations management, where we have been so successful in the past at the tool level, with the practitioner, with helping make their lives better, and all of that value-creation around what they do, and then a little bit of the context, it's sometimes better to be a little lucky than smart with some hard investment and input that we've done in the product that has evolved to the platform notion, but as you you've heard and talked with people, it's starting to come to fruition. With the whole notion of decentralization of operations, of the whole disappearance of centralized command and control across organization. It's kind of a modern-day digital ops analogy to software rules the world. It's really digital and cloud rules the world. So people need to do their job, and they need to focus on what creates value, whether it's marketing or finance, or software development, and with all of the influx of tools that they use, whether it's applications or infrastructure, we have this neat little niche where we're able to provide people the visibility and the knowledge to know what's going on and how things are working so they can focus on what they do, and that's pretty cool. >> So everybody's a software company now, right? Everybody's delivering software wrapped in some type of product or service. We hear that all the time, but I'm just curious to get your perspective from a CFO. Obviously public company CFOs have very specific tasks that they are given based on regulations, governments and stuff, but you're not there yet, in terms of the company, so what are some of the things that a CFO does in this stage of a company where you can really impact the growth. What do you do day-to-day besides just filing quarterlies and these types of activities. >> Hopefully someone else is going to be focused on that. The most fun about the role and the real value-add is really providing support and insight and visibility to the rest of the company. So kind of an Uber service provider to our stakeholders, to our exec team, to our employees, to our board and investors, and what we're really trying to do is provide a CFO, provide visibility to what happened, how have we done, what has the performance been, what did we think it was going to be, and why did that happen, and then visibility going forward. What is the road ahead look like, financially? Where are we growing, how are we growing, how are we investing our funds, what kind of returns are we getting from a profile of investment of cost versus what it generates in revenue and yield. That's the fun part about bringing people along on that journey. Whether they're in finance or marketing, that people understand what we're investing in, what they're investing in, what the returns are from that, and how we grow in scale. >> Growing and scaling is really interesting, right? Because growing and scaling is a good thing, but there's also some bad parts of growing and scaling. There's the joke like B to C guy. Guess what: you just got to order from Wal-Mart, good news. Bad news: you just got to order from Wal-Mart. You better start building stuff. >> Be careful what you ask for. >> Managing growth is an interesting dynamic, because you don't want to get too far over your skis, and yet, especially here in Silicon Valley, where it's all about growth. You're not a big throwing-off-dividends, cash company, AT&T back in the day. So when you look at some of the factors, what are some of the things to think about that maybe people don't really think about when you're trying to map out your growth. You guys are going international, just put a few extra bucks in the bank. >> I'll tell ya, one of the most significant things that is very difficult, very easy and obvious to say and talk about, is the whole dynamic of introducing the ability for a company to scale and do things well in large format at low costs, low friction, and not become a bureaucracy. So not to introduce too much process, too much control, too much front-end prevention, while at the same time, making sure people are doing smart things, that you're doing smart business, that people aren't getting too far out over their skis on committing capital, or committing the company to do something. You want to support people by putting in the big three: people, process, and technology in a way that the company can grow without hindering growth. You see that in so many different areas as you grow and you start building up your finance functions and you put in ERP systems, so you don't want it to be too cumbersome. Similarly, you bring functions like legal in-house. In some companies I've been at, folks get really nervous. Like: Oh no, now we're going to have a no person killing deals. The nice thing that I've experienced here at PagerDuty is that the sales folks have really yearned and craved that input and leadership, saying "hey, when are we getting "a new head of legal, when are we getting a team "to come help us craft deals and drive things forward?" So it's a little bit of an art, less a science insofar as bringing in resources, putting in processes, putting in systems to help marketing, sales, engineering-- really those three, do their craft and do it well with less friction and without more bureaucracy and too much oversight. >> One more question. As you've seen the growth of open source, and API economy, and a platform versus an application where you get much more value by opening up the API to a broader community, and yet at the same time maybe you're not protecting quite the same level of IP protection which, before, everything was kept in-house. We had no open source projects, and it was all of our IP. But really, the former is proving to be a much more valuable way to go to market. As you've seen that evolve, what's your take on it? Obviously you got a good ecosystem that is developing here. There's a big expo hall upstairs. It's a very different way to build value. >> It is, and in my humble opinion, it's really based on the user, and for me that's the most significant metric of value creation. At the end of the day, how many users do you have on your platform? And if you look at it from that perspective, the driver to getting users to come into the platform is an open, high integration, user-based focus on what they can use, not a walled garden approach. So the value comes in what you're able to do, not the propriety of your code. In that regard, having a high integration-- the whole PagerDuty text stack is about integrating with 200+ different applications and pieces of infrastructure so that users can, therefore, get the greatest value from everything else they're investing in and spending on. So you've created a valuable company like RedHat and other folks have, based on the ultimate of open source, where you provide a valuable service that is not necessarily the propriety of your code-- to your point, intellectual property, Albeit, there's a pretty decent amount there, it's really the competitive advantage, the time to market, the heavy lifting and steep curve on being able to integrate everything that's out there, correlate what's out there, too, which is a difficult task and takes a lot of time and money to learn and get good at, and that in and of itself is a tremendous amount of value to users. >> Well, Steven, great insights and enjoy your journey. I'm sure Jennifer will keep you movin' and hustlin' down the road. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Steven, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2017 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)