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DatabaseProNews

  • The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    “What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies,” says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu. “The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data. The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world.”

    Pradeep Sindhu, CEO of Fungible, discusses how technology trends are driving us towards a data-centric world in an interview on CNBC:

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies. The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data. 

    The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world. It is time now to invent a new kind of microprocessor and this is exactly what we are doing. We’re inventing something called the DPU to improve the economics and reliability and performance of data centers. That’s what Fungible is doing.

    In Five Years 90 Percent of All Servers Will Have DPUs Inside

    Many, if not most, new applications are data-centric in that the amount of data that they ingest and they process is very large. As a result of this change in application, there’s a new workload that we call data-centric. In fact, the change that we see happening in data centers will happen in the redefinition of what we call a server. In five years we expect 90 plus percent of all servers to have DPU’s inside. 

    It will reflect in the way in which the networks are put together inside datacenter buildings. They’ll be much flatter, much faster, much lower latency, and with much more predictable latency. The DPU will enable that. Finally, the global architecture of the way data centers are built in the future will include Edge Datacenters in addition to these massively scalable data centers. The DPU is said to play a very important role in all three areas.

    It’s not a zero-sum game because of the emergence of this new kind of workload, which has been building now for 30 years. There’s been some 600 X change increase in the ratio of I/O to compute. This demands the invention of a new kind of microprocessor. We don’t have any direct head-to-head competition. We will work in a manner which is completely complementary to the existing two kinds of microprocessors which is Intel x86 and GPUs built by Nvidia. The DPU will be the third kind of microprocessor inside data centers.

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World, Says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu
  • Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    “We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month,” says Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom. “That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space.”

    Mark Okerstrom, CEO of Expedia, discusses how the online travel giant is using data and AI to power its pricing tactics in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    We’ve Always Been At the Forefront of Travel

    We’ve always been at the forefront of travel. We’ve been at this for 20 years. The one thing that has been consistent for 20 years yeah is this is an incredibly competitive industry. Despite all of the competitive forces that have acted on us, Expedia last year did a $100 billion dollars of bookings, multiples of the size of Airbnb and many of these players out there. We’ve got thousands and thousands of the top engineers and data scientists and product minds in the world focused on travel. That’s how we stay ahead.

    VRBO has been around for a very long time. If you go back in time, people used to talk about getting a VRBO for the weekend. It was the noun. s we went through and did a ton of research here in the US and also internationally about all of the different names we could call the new VRBO, VRBO was the one that actually resonated the most. So we decided to put all of our effort behind that brand. We’re pretty excited about rolling out globally in the coming years.

    M&A is always part of our playbook, so I would never say never (regarding more acquisitions). But we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got in alternative accommodations and we’re pretty excited about putting all our efforts behind VRBO.

    Global Travel Industry Generally Looks Pretty Healthy

    So far so good (regarding tariff impacts). It looks like a healthy travel environment to us. Recent research done by Expedia here in the US is 85 percent of people are planning on taking a trip this summer and 15  percent were for budget constraints. This is broadly consistent with what we’ve seen. Americans are traveling. The global travel industry generally looks pretty healthy. We’re fortunate that we are a global business.

    In good times and bad times we definitely see shifts in travel patterns but people often just take their trips. It’s like the last thing they cut. Maybe they’ll take a trip a little bit closer to home, they won’t take that trip overseas, but they travel. If you look at our results over the 2008-2009 period, for example, those were some of our strongest years.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data

    We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month. That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space. Honestly, we’re just getting started.

    We’ve been doing the one-stop shop before it was cool. We’ve been doing it for 20 years. Not only are we about search but we’re also about booking and taking care of people during the trip. No one else can do it.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO Mark Okerstrom
  • New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    “We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app,: says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience.”

    Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, discusses extensive new feature added to the Dropbox product from just a folder full of files to a living team workspace in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace

    We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app. It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. So G Suite, things like Google Docs, Sheets,  and Slides, really anything that you’re using. It also includes integrations with tools like Slack and Zoom. From within Dropbox, you can send people messages, you can start meetings, you can send things out for signature, or see your calendar. It’s a much more integrated workspace.

    We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience. We’re really excited about it and can’t wait to get it out there.

    The New Dropbox Experience Integrates Your Workspace

    New Dropbox Organizes and Simplifies Your Working Life

    Most, if not all companies, are going to have integrations. The opportunity we saw is to organize it, to really bring it into a well-designed coherent experience, and different from some of the messaging tools. What Dropbox allows you to do is within a native app you can have all your content in one place work across all these different ecosystems. Instead of the interface of just being a list of messages, you can see here’s what you’re working on. Here are our projects and here are the most important pieces of content. We think from a design standpoint it’s a pretty different approach.

    What we’re seeing is that users want choice. They are using all kinds of different apps for communication, for content, for coordination. What’s missing is a way to stitch it all together. That’s the role that we think we can play. It’s very similar to the role we played in the beginning with helping you get to your stuff from all these different platforms and operating systems. Now we’re thinking about how do we organize and simplify your working life and help stitch together all these different things.

    Second, I’d say a lot of what we’re doing is complimentary. You’re not going to stop using Slack or stop using these other tools. In fact, we’re making it easier for you to get to them. We find that a lot of our customers love using these different tools but they need a more integrated experience. Not having that means you’re always switching back and forth and there’s a lot of friction.

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO Drew Houston
  • There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    “There really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. “There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.”

    George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, discusses their IPO (today) and CrowdStrike’s unique position as the first cloud platform for security in an interview on CNBC:

    We Built The First Cloud Platform For Security

    We’ll let the market dictate the (stock) pricing. What we’re focused on is really building long-term value for shareholders and obviously making sure that our customers are protected. That’s the way we built the business, focusing on preventing breaches for our customers. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security.

    When you think about Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce, there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud platform for security. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security. That was one of our goals when Demetri Alperovitch and I started the company in 2011. This cloud platform has allowed us to stop breaches and to scale different modules that really hit a specific customer need. It’s been well received by our customers.

    A Big Part Of Our Platform Is Collecting Data At Scale

    CrowdStrike really runs on your endpoint or computer or your server or workload in the cloud. What we found with traditional antivirus, as an example, we do way more than that, is that signature-based technologies were just not capable of stopping breaches. So a big part of our platform is actually collecting data at scale. We collect a trillion events per week. We use that data to train our machine learning algorithms and we can identify attacks and breaches that have never been seen before at the speed of the network.

    This crowdsourcing aspect, which is the crowd in CrowdStrike, really has enabled us to identify these attacks that are causing the most damage to large and small organizations around the globe. They just haven’t been able to do that with traditional, I call fossilized, vendors that are in the market. This architecture has really changed the game for us.

    Obviously, security is an evolving area. Adversaries continue to change their tactics. The good part about AI is that you can evolve it to identify these sorts of threats no matter if it’s stealing intellectual property or credit card information or breaking in and destroying data on someone’s computer. What’s important to realize is that at cloud-scale, and the way we operate, we have the ability to take all this data, synthesize it, and provide the best protection and prevention methodologies for our customers.

    AI Is Great But It Is Not a Panacea

    It’s really all about the data. You hear a lot about AI and AI is great but it has to be used in the right ways. It’s not a panacea. So it’s easy to come up with an algorithm but it’s really hard to collect this data at scale and be able to train these AI algorithms. This is really one of the things that we spent a lot of time on, building a very scalable architecture to get this data in (into our Threat Graph), which is one of the most advanced security databases around.

    It really allows us to get better efficacy and lower false positive rates in detecting these breaches. In my view, it’s all about the data. We will continue to get more and more data. It’s that network effect. Our threat graph gets smarter the more data we actually consume.

    CrowdStrike Threat Graph

    We See The Tip of The Breach Being The Endpoint

    When we look at the threats, whether it’s a nation-state or whether it’s an e-crime group obviously, the threats are evolving and they’re rapid. There are hundreds of thousands of new pieces of malware that come out every day. It’s incumbent on companies to be able to protect themselves. It’s just been an area that’s been underserved because most of the existing technologies have focused on stopping malware instead of stopping breaches, which is again part of our core mission.

    If you look in the past, there’s been a lot of point product companies that have come out and try to solve a specific problem. But if you just step back, the problem that most companies are trying to solve is not being breached. Whether that’s network technology or endpoint technology, at the end of the day we see the tip of the breach being the endpoint. That’s where the data resides, the servers, the endpoints, the desktops, and that’s what we’re protecting.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security

    From that standpoint, if you look back in history there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud. There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s the ability to rapidly install our technology, just have it work, and be able to scale with us and use different modules with that single agent architecture. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz
  • Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce CEO

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce CEO

    “The third cornerstone of digital transformation is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company,” says Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. “There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. This is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together.”

    Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses their transformative $15.3 billion deal for Tableau, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations

    There are really three cornerstones of digital transformation. The first one is the customer. Of course, we do that in spades. We do that better than anybody else. The second cornerstone, we did that a year ago with MuleSoft integration. The ability to integrate all your data sources together so you can get a more holistic view or what we call Customer 360. But you’re really touching on the third cornerstone of digital transformation, which is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company. There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. That is what excites us as well.

    I was in Minneapolis just last week. When I was with one of our very largest customers, they’re doing some incredible work with their supply chain and the ability to connect with their customer in a whole new way. Of course, that’s what we do for them. But at the very end of the meeting, they’re talking about how they’re going to visualize and provide analytics and business intelligence on this incredible infrastructure that we’ve helped them build. They had chosen Tableau. Then, of course, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, wow, this is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together. Tableau is a company at scale. It’s an incredible company and putting that together with Salesforce just supercharges both of our organizations.

    Tableau Didn’t Want Our Cash, They Wanted Our Equity

    In terms of cash flow, I don’t know if you remember our quarter that we just announced last week but we had record cash flows. We’ve had phenomenal cash generation. Our business has done a great job in cash. But I have to be honest, Tableau didn’t want our cash. They wanted our equity. They know that the real value here is in the company that we’re creating together. We would have been more than happy to give them any currency they wanted but ultimately they want our stock.

    Hey, I can’t blame them. Look at how it’s performed over the last decade. It’s been incredible. I have a huge vision and so do they on what’s possible for the future. When you look at that we’re really looking at a company that’s going to fast track to $30 billion in revenue in enterprise software and there just isn’t very many of those companies out there today.

    We Can’t Build the Technolgy Fast Enough

    I’m a huge believer in innovation. It’s one of our core values. Our four core values; trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. Let me just talk about innovation for a second. I so strongly believe in not just organic innovation, and you’ve seen that of course, our core Sales Cloud, our core Service Cloud, and our core platform, but I also strongly believe that companies to be competitive and successful today have to also believe in inorganic innovation. You don’t have to look any farther than things like our Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud and our Integration Cloud as well. In these technologies, we were able to acquire great companies like ExactTarget, like Demandware, and like MuleSoft, that became the heart of our Customer 360.

    We can’t build the technology fast enough to be able to deliver to our customers demand.  Now by doing that (acquisition of Tableau) we are able to create this complete Customer 360 platform that gives our customers everything they do to not only connect with their customer in a whole new way, not only to connect with every data source they have but also to be able to have the visualization data analytics and business intelligence to achieve their total success. For digital transformation, which is what’s happening right now, that is mission critical.

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff
  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • Enough is Enough – Tech Companies Values Need To Change, Says Marc Benioff

    Enough is Enough – Tech Companies Values Need To Change, Says Marc Benioff

    “I feel so strongly that we are at a point in our industry where enough is enough,” says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “We need to get the values straight with these tech companies. There are some things going on in regards to the manipulation of their consumers, the misuse of the data, and serious issues with privacy. Those values need to change and some of those companies need to be held accountable for what’s going on.”

    Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, discusses how he supports the government investigations into the tech industry in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    We Are At a Point In Our Industry Where Enough is Enough

    I feel so strongly that we are at a point in our industry where enough is enough. We need to get the values straight with these tech companies. There are some things going on in regards to the manipulation of their consumers, the misuse of the data, and serious issues with privacy. Those values need to change and some of those companies need to be held accountable for what’s going on. So I’m actually all in on this (DOJ review of big tech). I actually think it’s maybe too little too late. They should be more aggressive. We’re following behind what the European Union is doing.

    The European Union are the ones who are the leaders in this area. Not just in privacy with GDPR but with their European action against these companies when they misuse data, misuse privacy, or take advantage of customers. There are things that have happened in our industry that are embarrassing to me. So let’s clean it up and let’s get back to where Facebook is not the new cigarettes. That’s what I’ve been saying to everybody. Let’s make it all great again if you will. Let’s make tech have the values that we all want it to have and let’s take care of our customers and put consumers first. This is what I think is important.

    Absolutely, The Tech Industry Has Brought It On Themselves

    Absolutely, (the tech industry has brought it on themselves). I think that now is the time for them to basically clean it up. It’s not too late, it never is. That is what has to happen. You can see companies who have not made these changes and their executives have walked out. They buy these huge companies and you’ve seen them (top execs and founders) walk out. These people are friends of mine.

    I’ll say, why are you leaving this company? “Well, I don’t like the values. I don’t like what’s important to that CEO. That CEO said this to me so I’m leaving.” Wow. That’s amazing. Then you saw the customers leave and you saw advertisers leave. That has to change. I think that there needs to be corrective action and it needs to come from the government. I’m for the regulations that are coming in here.

    Enough is Enough – Tech Companies Values Need To Change, Says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
  • Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud

    “One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity,” says Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. “They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure.”

    Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, discusses how identity has become the central platform for companies to embrace the cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    We Have 6,550 Happy Customers Across the Entire Globe

    We have 6,550 happy customers across the entire globe. We come to work every day making sure that we make them secure, make them successful, and help them adopt cloud and transform their businesses. One example is Major League Baseball. We do a couple of very important things for MLB. The first is that we help their employees log into the applications they need in order to be productive at work. They can log in securely and with a very positive simple user experience.

    The second thing, which is more recent, is we are the login system and the security layer for MLB.com. If you’re logging in and streaming those baseball games you’re logging in through Okta to get to MLB.com. It’s really helpful for them because that they can take their awesome developer and engineering talent and focus it on building core parts of that application and that experience versus the security parts that we can do better.

    To Deliver Trusted Technology You Have To Start With Identity

    Zoom (a customer of Okta) is a great company with another great product experience. They’ve revolutionized a market a lot of people thought was really entrenched with a lot of competitors. They came out with a better product and its results are kind of speaking for themselves. What we’re seeing in our business and it’s really driving these results you’re seeing is that every organization from sports league like MLB.com to a university like Seton Hall to the largest enterprises in the world, financial institutions and governments, they all have to connect more closely and more securely with the people in their ecosystem.

    Whether that’s students or alumni or faculty or employees or customers, what’s at the center of all that interaction is technology. If you want to talk about trusted technology and delivering that to people you have to start with identity. That’s what we’re doing for all these organizations around the world and that’s what’s powering our results.

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace the Cloud

    It’s a really important role we’re playing. If you think about it, especially in the case of Zscaler, companies are moving away from the old world, which was they had a firewall around their network and everything inside was secure and everything outside was blocked. Now they’re moving to this world called Zero Trust which means they basically don’t trust anything. They want to verify everything. When you have to verify everything you have to have this passport, you have to have this digital identity, and that’s we’re providing. For a lot of companies, we’re turning a world that’s pretty daunting in terms of how you give this flexibility or this openness and making it secure and very simple to use.

    One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity. They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure. It’s that mindset and that consciousness in the market of the importance of identity as a platform that is really leading people to come to Okta and driving our results.

    Our businesses are global of course. We don’t have as much exposure to China as other companies have but in an indirect way, we’re helping companies of every organization across the entire world be successful with their businesses as well. We do think about powering business globally. So it’s in everyone’s interest I think to have as much free trade and as much economic commerce as possible. Indirectly, we do benefit from that, so we have a close eye on that as well.

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud, says Okta CEO Todd McKinnon
  • We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO

    “I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing,” says Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry. “The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.”

    Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler, discusses how Zscaler is disrupting old-school legacy security in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security

    I built this company starting in 2008 with a simple mission, let’s make internet and cloud a safe place to do business. I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing. We could work anywhere on any device. The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.

    The cloud is being adopted at a fairly good pace. It has taken a while but Office 365 adoption has changed a lot of things. All traffic of email is moving to the cloud. Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow are all on the cloud. As applications move to the cloud that drives the adoption of security to the cloud. We are seeing significant momentum where customers with CIOs are asking for security to be done right.

    100 Million Security Threats Blocked by Zscaler Per Day

    In fact, I was talking to a CIO who said, “I asked this question to my people. If something can be done in the cloud you can’t do it in the data center. If security needs to be done in the cloud, why are we buying these security hardware boxes?” I see the world rapidly changing. In the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen some vendors announcing earnings and acknowledging that security is moving to the cloud faster than they thought.

    A lot of the (100 million threats blocked by Zscaler per day) are (state-sponsored). The scariest ones we see are phishing attacks. Every day we see tens of thousands of phishing attacks. These are highly targeted. People are tricked to click into these things. They click on something and their credentials get stolen and then the botnet attacks out there. To really protect against all these things you need to sit in line to inspect traffic going in and out.

    Blocking the Bad and Protecting the Good

    Zscaler acts as a check post, almost like an International Airport. We’re inspecting everything that goes in and out of your device to make sure that we’re blocking the bad and that we are protecting the good to help people do good business. That’s why the biggest of the big companies like GE and Siemens and United Airlines all depend upon Zscaler to protect their enterprise.

    Okta is a wonderful company that’s in the identity business. Their job is to make sure that employees and the departments are properly listed for a given company. It’s like a phone book or a directory. They’re the source of information. Think of us as the airport. When I travel and leave the airport they scan my passport. When they scan the passport a call goes to the database of passports asking is Jay Chaudhry the right person? Can he travel? That’s what Okta does. Zscaler is in line to enforce policy.

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry
  • How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    “Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement,” says McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook. “Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.”

    Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s, discusses how the company is using technology to elevate the customer experience and accelerate growth in an interview on CNBC:

    Continue To See How We Can Elevate the Customer Experience

    As we’ve executed the growth plan we’ve spent the first two years, three or four years ago, turning the business around. Now we’ve had a couple of years of growth. We’re confident now that we’re beginning to identify further opportunities to further accelerate growth. That takes a little bit of research and development cost. It means you’ve got to bring some expertise into the business to help us do that. We’re still managing to effectively run the business. G&A is staying the same and we’re putting a little bit more into innovation.

    We continue to see how can we help continue to elevate the experience for customers. With this pace of change in the world and with different technology and different innovations, whether it’s around food, technology, or design, we’re seeing opportunities that we think can either make the experience more fun and enjoyable or smoother for customers. If we can find that we’re going to go hard at it.

    We need to continue growing. If where we are investing that money is helping drive growth across 38,000 restaurants then I think the shareholders and investors would be satisfied. We want to bring our owner-operators along with us as well. They’re investing their hard-earned dollars so that always means we got a business case. The owner-operators will want to see a return on their investment just the same as a shareholder would. We’ve got a wonderful check and balance in the system to help us make sure we spend that innovative money in the right way.

    Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement. It was our first acquisition for 20 years. It was an acquisition in a way that was different from the past. It wasn’t looking at different restaurant businesses to try and expand our footprint. It’s bringing a capability, an IP and some talent, into our business that can help us accelerate the growth model. We completed the deal mid-April and within two weeks we had that technical capability in 800 drive-throughs here in the U.S. It’s a very rapid execution and implementation.

    Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website we’re on these days will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. People who buy that tend to like these things as well. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. As customers are at the menu board, maybe they’re ordering a coffee and we can suggest a dessert or they’re ordering a quarter pounder with cheese and we can suggest making that into a meal. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.

    Mining All of the Data Will Improve the Business

    The best benefit for customers is we’re more likely to suggest things they do want and less likely to suggest things they don’t. It’ll just be a nicer experience for the customer. But yes, for the restaurant itself, because we can put our drive-thru service lines in there, for example, the technical capability by mining all of the data will be to suggest items are easier to make at our busier times. That’ll help smooth the operation as well. The immediate result will be some ticket (increases). But frankly, if the overall experience is better customers come back more often. That’s ultimately where the success will be, driving repeat visits and getting people back more often.

    Across the entire sector, traffic is tight right now and people are eating out less. They have been progressively eating out less for a number of years. Whether it’s the advent of home delivery, for example, which is something we participate in, but at the moment it’s just a little bit tight out there. It’s a fight for market share. Anyone who is getting growth, typically it’s because they’re adding new units. People are finding it hard to (increase) guest count growth. It’s something that we have stated as an ambition of ours. We think that’s a measure of the true health of the business. Last quarter, we did grow traffic and we’ve grown traffic for the last couple of years, but only modestly. We want to be stronger than that.

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth
  • IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    Major ocean container carriers CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) are joining TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM. With the addition of these carriers on the TradeLens platform, nearly half of the world’s ocean container cargo will be using blockchain technology to dramatically improve costs and efficiencies.

    Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain at IBM, discusses the addition of major ocean carriers to the TradeLens blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform in an interview on Bloomberg:

    Blockchain Technology Could Reduce Shipping Industry Costs By 20%

    Essentially we announced yesterday that with the addition of MSC and CMA on to the TradeLens blockchain more than 50 percent of the volume of the containers of the world’s shipping industry will be on a blockchain that we’ve developed in collaboration with Maersk. What this means is full transparency and a massive reduction of paper exchange. An average shipment takes about 200 document exchanges between the multiple parties; the freight forwarders, the shippers, the carriers, customs, and ports.

    The World Economic Forum estimates that’s about 20 percent wastage from inefficiencies in the supply chain. The technology of blockchain allows all these multiple parties to immutably store the records and advance the records as the shipments move. This means less wait times. It means carriers and shippers know where the goods are. It basically means things can be cleared a lot faster, all leading to bigger inclusion in the shipping industry.

    Starting To See Blockchain Technology For Enterprise Really Scale

    The whole ecosystem will benefit so much in terms of the efficiencies. If you think about it, rather than having to interface 200 document times, it occurs once by putting your data on the blockchain. This is a situation when the ROI for every single industry participant is very strong.

    The second thing, which is really important and why we’re starting to see the blockchain technology for enterprise really scale in terms of what IBM has been building for our clients across numerous industries, is that there’s a level of security in here and there’s a level of speed and efficiency. It’s easy to actually set up these networks. The difference is that these solve problems that no one company could solve on their own.

    Blockchain Technology Reducing Costs

    The way that the system works is that all the participants pay a very small amount to belong to the blockchain. It is a flat rate but does change according to volume. It is a very de minimis amount and the real way that the blockchain works is by many many participants belonging to the network and by the fact that those participants have a reduced cost.

    Another example of this is we have a blockchain in the consumer and retail industry called Food Trust which tracks provenance and sustainability of food built in conjunction with the industry. It allows food to be tracked and recalled in two seconds versus six days. That has got such a strong economic and consumer value. The other big payback is that for many of our clients they’re looking at the idea to have trackable, sustainable, consumer presentations. So you can put diamonds on a blockchain and say they aren’t conflict diamonds. This is very powerful for consumer provenance and sustainability.

    Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform To Dramatically Reduce Costs
  • Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    “Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”

    Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:

    Without Data There is No Great AI

    The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.

    It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.

    Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own

    Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.

    In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.

    Metadata Is the New OS

    Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.

    When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
  • Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    “The reality is that attackers are targeting people,” says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele. “They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy.”

    Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, discusses how the migration of companies to the cloud is significantly impacting security in an interview on CNBC:

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud

    The reality is that attackers are targeting people. They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. So we’re excited about our announcement of an acquisition last week called Meta Networks. It gives us the ability to help companies control the access of their employees and it fits naturally with this broader cloud strategy that we’ve been rolling out.

    The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy. Traditionally it was the perimeter that controlled everything. Today there really isn’t a perimeter as more and more of these apps and workloads end up in the cloud. One of the things that we liked about this new acquisition of Meta Networks is that one compromised person can’t bring the whole network down. You can really control the access for every single person. That’s a natural complement of how we think about securing the cloud.

    Key Driver For Our Business is Broad Migration To the Cloud

    One of the key drivers for our business has been this broad migration to the cloud and specifically to Office 365. We’ve been benefiting as organizations reconsidered their on-premise strategy and think about the cloud. Office 365 is an important way for them to go and they need additional security controls than what Microsoft’s providing today and we’re helping those customers be successful in a Microsoft environment. It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot going on globally. The geopolitical environment is very much at unrest and when those times happen you see a lot more global threat activity. As a result, that bodes well for our business over time, unfortunately.

    Broadly one of the philosophies we’ve had as a company is to have a strong ecosystem to make it easier for customers to digest all that security infrastructure. It’s everybody from an Okta, which we announced a relationship in the Fall, to relationships that we’ve had for a long time like Palo Alto Networks. We have basically done the technical integration between our products to make it out-of-the-box easy for our customers. We have many customers running on the broader G Suite and we support that just like we support Office 365.

    Threat Actors Taking Over Your Email Has Phenomenal Implications

    The one big theme and we’ve been seeing it for a while now, it’s been almost a year, but it’s really important, is threat actors taking over people’s email accounts. Think about someone owning your email account being able to send email as you. That has phenomenal implications. So we’re helping companies today identify that, remediate those kinds of events, and be safer as they move to Office 365 or Google for that matter.

    The primary threat actor that we’re seeing there is a threat actor group out of West Africa. But we do see it broadly used and employed by a range of threat actors. Two-factor authentication is a good start (to prevent this threat). Then we can obviously help detect and remediate.

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele
  • HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray have announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash. “The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding,” Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow.”

    Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses the company’s intent to acquire  global supercomputer leader Cray, in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    I’m super excited about the announcement today. The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding. That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow. The need for high-performance computing is one element of processing that data faster. The combination of great technologies with Hewlett Packard Enterprise portfolio, which include both HPE Apollo and SGI, give us a unique set of capabilities to get us to the right business outcome from the data. What we are talking about is (improved outcomes) for machine learning, AI, as well as big data and intensive workloads. Cray brings these capabilities.

    Cray has two-thirds of its business coming from the government side and one-third from the commercial side. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the opposite with two-thirds from the commercial side and one-third from the government side. Obviously, the government has already requested for Cray to build Exascale computing. That’s on the basis of the foundation technologies that Cray has developed for some time which is what we call the interconnect fabric. For us, that level of innovation is important to scale our portfolio and continue to enter new markets like oil and gas, manufacturing, as well as academia.

    Thirteen Acquisitions Under CEO – All Very Successful

    I have done now thirteen acquisitions with this one. We have had an incredible discipline based on return on invested capital where we have acquired (important) intellectual property as well as bringing talent to the organization. Each of them has been very successful including Aruba Networks as well as what I call the SGI acquisition, Nimble Storage, and so forth. They have all been very successful.

    When you think about the type of business it has obviously been a little bit lumpy on the Cray side but that’s because it takes time to build the systems with CAPEX upfront and then acceptance for the backend to recognize revenue. We believe the combinational of Cray added to our scale which is significantly larger will smooth the transition from the revenue profit perspective. It will also limit the CAPEX investment because both companies have similar capabilities and now we can use both in a scalable way that we couldn’t do before.

    HPE CEO Antonio Neri: Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    Also Read:

    Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven, Says HPE CEO
    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO
  • Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    “Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day,” says Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley. “Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.”

    Patrick Morley, CEO of Carbon Black, discusses how their company uses AI and machine learning to analyze in real-time 500 billion security events daily in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    China is the Number One Nation Driving Cyber Attacks

    As a cybersecurity company, we have an interesting relationship with certain nations around the world. This is particularly true with those that are very active from a cyber standpoint. China, in particular, has statistically been shown to be the number one nation across the globe that is driving cyber attacks. So our relationship with China is a different relationship than many other public companies across the globe. We don’t actively sell into the market because we are helping many companies actually protect themselves from attacks that are generated out of China.

    As I tell all of our employees we are building a company for the long term. Our stock is going to be impacted by things we control and many things we don’t control. When I look at my app and I see red everywhere it’s certainly disturbing. Obviously, that will impact companies that are going to buy my product eventually. If that has an impact on other public companies and private companies, it will impact us eventually.

    Cyber is One of the Most Interesting Spaces in Tech

    We gave (investors) a consistent outlook in Q2. Analysts reacted positively which is good. Again, we are building for the long term a company that matters in cyber. I think cyber is one of the most interesting spaces in tech right now because of everything around us. We come back to cyber again and again.

    If you look at all the news about Facebook cyber is in it. If you look at some of the geopolitical issues in Europe and in the U.S., cyber comes in. It’s an important area and we are a new guard of companies helping to change it and make it better and more effective for companies. We are building value around the company.

    Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Security Events Per Day

    Some of those (competing) providers (such as Cisco and Fortinet) work in a different part of the market than we do. It’s a big market. It’s a $100 billion market that’s going through fundamental change. We do provide a platform that does compete (directly) with some of the traditional players such as Semantic and others. The way we compete is we are based on one core principle. If you look at where the long term trend of where the world is going you need to leverage the power of data in order to figure out what’s happening. We leverage data in a way that allows us to see and to stop the adversary in ways that traditional products can’t.

    Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day. Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events
  • Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    “The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud,” says Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell. “It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction.”

    Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, discusses how it has become a critical technology platform for its customers in an interview with theCUBE at Dell Technology World 2019 in Las Vegas:

    Data Has Always Been at the Center of How the Technology Industry Works

    We feel great. Our business has really grown tremendously. All the things we’ve been doing have been resonating with customers. We’ve been able to restore the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success of the company and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking into a now $91 billion company growing at double digits last year. Certainly, the set of capabilities that we’ve been able to build organically and inorganically, with the set of alliances we have, the trust that customers have given us, we are super happy about the position that we’re in and the opportunities going forward. I think all this is really just a pregame show to what’s ahead for our industry and for the role that technology is going to play in the world.

    Data has always been at the center of how the technology industry works. Now we just have a tsunami, an explosion of data. Of course, now we have this new computer science that allows us to reason over the data in real time and create much better results and outcomes. That combined with the computing power all organizations have to reimagine themselves given all these technologies. Certainly, the infrastructure requirements in terms of the network, the storage, that compute, the build-out on the edge, tons of new requirements, we’re super well-positioned to go address all that.

    Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud. It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction. That’s what I see. Maybe nobody’s predicting that just yet, but let’s come back in ten years and see what it looks like.

    Really what we’re doing is we’re bringing to customers all the resources they need to operate in the hybrid multi-cloud world. First, you have to recognize that the workloads want to move around. To say that they’re all going to be here or there is in some sense missing the point because they’re going to move back and forth. You’ve got regulation, cost, security, performance, latency, all sorts of new requirements that are coming at you and they’re not going to just sit in one place.

    This is All Super Important As We Enter This AI Enabled Age

    Now with the VMware cloud foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly across now essentially all the public clouds. We have 4,200 partners out there, infrastructure on-premise built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered also for the edge. All of this together is the Dell Technologies cloud. We have obviously great capabilities from our Dell UMC infrastructure solutions and all the great innovations at VMware coming together.

    Inside the business, the first priority was to get each of the individual pieces working well. But then we saw that the real opportunity was in the seams and how we could more deeply integrate all the aspects of what we’re doing together. You saw that on stage you know in vivid form yesterday with Pat and Jeff and Satya and even more today. Of course, there’s more to do. There’s always more to do. We’re working on how we build a data platform bringing together all of our capabilities with Boomi and Data Protection and VMware. This is all going to be super important as we enter this AI enabled age of the future.

    We’ve Created an Incredible Business

    I think investors are increasingly understanding that we’ve created an incredible business here. Certainly, if we look at the additional coverage that we have as they’re understanding the business, some of the analysts are starting to say hey this doesn’t really feel like a conglomerate. It’s a direct quote. If you think about what we demonstrated today and yesterday and will demonstrate in the future we’re not like Berkshire Hathaway. This is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants. This is one integrated business that fits together incredibly well and it’s generating substantial cash flows.

    I think investors over time are figuring out the value that’s intrinsic to the overall Dell Technologies family. We’ve got lots of ways to invest, we got VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, and of course the overall Dell Technologies.

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud


  • Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    “What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from,” says John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle. “One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information.”

    John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle, discusses how technologies such as AI and blockchain are now helping companies manage huge volumes of IoT data in an interview with technology influencer Ronald van Loon:

    Companies Are Moving Toward Selling Products as a Service

    I think that (manufacturers connecting all the processes digitally) is the way that will differentiate them. It’s really the only way the companies will be able to survive into the future. There are all these business models and it has become significantly more competitive than it has been in the past. Companies have to work faster and they have to be more responsive to what their customer needs are. The only way really of doing that is to connect the various aspects of the business. They can’t work in silos anymore. That really will give you the whole value of the business.

    One area that companies are moving away from is selling products. They’re going into selling more services which we’ve actually seen for some time. But what they’re now getting into is these new models where they might be selling products as a service. If you think about how do you sell a product as a service and the ability to support that it is a lot different than it was before. Connecting to that product and being able to anticipate activities, anticipate needs, anticipate failures, and to be able to monitor how it’s performing, how the customers use it and are able to expand on that to be able to provide a better outcome for the customer are important components.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value

    What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from. One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information. You can correlate with the data that might be in your ERP and your MES and other sources of information and actually provide some real value and provide the real outcomes. It can now do some predictions where it would be actually physically impossible for people to do the same type of calculations that they’ve been doing in the past with this huge volume today.

    The second area where there seems to be a little hesitation at the moment is around blockchain. But the technology is there and people have been trying to identify how best to use it. Some of the use cases that are coming out now are going to be quite impressive. I think the little bit of a lull was deserved. People who looked at it anticipate a little bit more than what was possible and now they’re really starting to develop some good use cases. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in that area.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP John Barcus


  • How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide

    How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide

    “We open 15 to 20 buildings a month,” says WeWork CTO Shiva Rajaraman. “Anything we can use to automate or augment a person through machine learning we’re taking all that data in one central place and starting to create an engine around that. That’s key to successful scaling today. When we think about enterprise we sort of step back and say what’s our Google Analytics for commercial space?”

    Shiva Rajaraman, Chief Technology Officer of WeWork, discusses how WeWork is using technology to revolutionize office space worldwide in an interview on Bloomberg:

    How Do We Offer Space As a Service?

    There are three capabilities when we think about WeWork. One is how do we offer space as a service? If you just think about it’s really basic. Are you looking for what location do you need? Where do you need it? How long do you need it? Are there different pricing models for it? One of the things we’ve done is effectively taken all of this space and put it into a big database and we start to shape it based on what we see out there in the market. Some of that is just pricing automation at the end of the day. Some of it is how do we automate that supply chain of delivering a building?

    We open 15 to 20 buildings a month. Anything we can use to automate or augment a person through machine learning we’re taking all that data in one central place and starting to create an engine around that. That’s key to successful scaling today. The biggest technically challenging thing is operational scale. If you step back you don’t want a lot of variability. You want to step back and say, “Hey, can I deliver this building on time at quality as people need it?” That’s where you need operational technology that really works in a way that normally construction has not worked in the past.

    What’s Our Google Analytics for Commercial Space?

    One of the key things on the strategy side is that as we see this demand and we start to get critical mass in different areas can we disrupt the business model a little bit? Let me give you an example. If you take someone like GE Health in Seoul, South Korea, they had underutilized real estate. We redesigned that so they can use it in a more flexible way. We also created a new membership called the City Pass which gives all of their employee’s access to WeWork throughout Seoul. Now they can go where they’re more productive. One of the key things we’re looking at right now is what’s a density that translates to interesting memberships that allow people to be more productive?

    Let’s talk about the M&A that’s created a fabric that we can start to offer to enterprises. When we think about enterprise we sort of step back and say, “What’s our Google Analytics for commercial space?” Can we help these enterprises create a good workplace experience through things like room booking (service) all the way to understand how they use space so they can come and use WeWork on demand if they need it. We can also help them grow in the future if they’re looking at new markets to expand into.

    How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide


  • SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    SAP CEO: We’re the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    “We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space,” says SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, discusses SAP’s amazing growth over the last quarter, especially in cloud, in an interview on CNBC:

    Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space

    This is a good start to the year. It’s what the capital markets have been waiting for. They’ve been getting all kinds of revenue growth. We’re the fastest growing cloud company in the enterprise software space. They wanted to see the multiples on the margin. As we raised our full-year guidance we committed to improving the operating margins by one point per year for the next five years. Now after a $75 billion investment in innovation for our customers, our shareholders are saying wow, this is the moment I get the multiples on the margin and therefore the leverage in the share price.

    Our cloud gross margins can improve to 75% between now and 2023. We’re hiring the absolute very best people in the world in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, all the areas that our customers want us to go. It’s not the number of people, it’s getting the absolute very best people. If you hire right, you manage your cloud gross margins right, and you have a highly inspired customer base where you’re growing with high renewal rates, you get tremendous leverage on the operating margin.

    The Company Really Is On a Roll

    What we’re doing is when we did restructure, and that was announced in Q4 and we executed it in Q1, we basically said we’re going to take about 4,400 people from areas that were not part of the new economy and hire to those tremendous standards. We’re bringing in the best data scientists in the world, best machine learning individuals out there, best enterprise application software coders around the world, and we’re developing in China, Israel, the United States, and in Europe. The company really is on a roll.

    We’re almost done (with the restructuring) in the sense that we accounted for most all of it in Q1. We are finishing it up in the next quarter right now. For example, it’s being executed in Germany, but the majority of it has been handled. The stock today (is way up). We grew total revenue by 16% and grew cloud 48%. Let me just put this on the line. When you grow cloud 48%, that’s 80% faster than Salesforce.com, that’s 30% faster than Workday. So when you have a franchise that’s growing your core business in double digits, the cloud faster than anybody out there, and you’re progressing the margin one point per year between now and 2023, I think that’s why the shareholders have the stock up 8%.

    What’s On My Mind is Where the Customer Needs Us To Go

    All competition is on my mind. But what’s really on my mind is where the customer needs us to go. We weren’t losing to them. What the shareholders wanted, and we surveyed them, we had a capital market stay in New York and we used Qualtrics to survey them, they said we love your revenue growth we know you’re gaining share we just want more operating margin leverage out of the company. That’s what we gave them this quarter. It took us ten years and $75 billion in R&D and M&A to get to the point now where we have everything we need. We don’t need to do any more big M&A, we just need to perform well and spin-off margin and free cash flow for our shareholders and the stock goes on a run.

    They (our customers) know we’ve given them so much innovation. It’s coming at them so fast that now they’re saying help me integrate it, help me fully leverage it across the enterprise and get the value from it. Interestingly, the customers and the shareholders are both in the same place. They’re saying you’ve done unreal things, now let’s dig in and drive real value from all the things that you’ve done. We bought an $8.3 billion dollar company called Qualtrics. We now took over a new category called experience management where we can actually tell the consumer experience inside or outside the company in real time. We have data now.

    So think about this, if you’re running a company and you want to recruit to retire process in your company, how do my people feel when I recruit them? How did I feel when I trained them? Am I coaching them? Am I teaching them? Am I giving them everything they need in their compensation plan? We know this all now in real time with the Hana database built into the human capital management process. We do things that no other company can do.

    SAP CEO: Were the Fastest Growing Cloud Company In the Enterprise Software Space


  • Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    PagerDuty began trading on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time this morning and is now trading at more than 60% above their IPO price of $24. That gives the company a market capitalization of more than $2.7 billion. PagerDuty offers a SAAS platform that monitors IT performance. The company had sales of $118 million for its last fiscal year, up close to 50% over the previous year.

    The company uses machine learning to inform companies in real-time about technical issues. “Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time,” says PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.”

    Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, discusses their IPO and how machine learning should be used to deliver great brand experiences in an interview on CNBC:

    It’s Gotten Harder for Human’s to Manage the Entire IT Ecosystem

    If you think about the world today, it’s an always-on world. We as consumers expect every experience to be perfect. Every time you wake up in the morning, you order your coffee online, you check Slack to communicate with your team, and maybe you take a Lyft into work. Sitting behind all of that is a lot of complexity, many digital and infrastructure based platforms, that don’t always work together the way you’d expect them to. As that complexity has proliferated over the years and because developers can deploy what they like and can use the tools that they want it’s gotten harder for human beings to really manage the entire ecosystem even as your demands increase.

    You want it perfect, you want it right now and you want it the way you’d like it to be. PagerDuty is the platform that brings the right problem to the right person at the right time. We use machine learning, sitting on ten years of data, data on humans behavior and data on all these signals there that are happening through the system, and it really helps the developers that sit behind these great experiences to deliver the right experience all the time.

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences

    Going public is the right time for us right now because there’s an opportunity for us to deliver the power of our platform to users all over the world. We are a small company and we weren’t as well-known as we could be and this is a great opportunity to extend our brand and help developers and employees across teams and IT security and customer support to deliver better experiences for their end customers all the time.

    At PagerDuty we take customer trust and user trust very seriously. We publish our data policy and we will not use data in a way other than what we describe online. We care deeply about the relationship between our users in our platform. Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time. PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.


  • All of Our Customers Will Move to the Cloud, Says Oracle CEO

    All of Our Customers Will Move to the Cloud, Says Oracle CEO

    “We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move (to the cloud),” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.”

    Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, discussed the huge growth in the cloud applications market and he expects Oracle to lead that market in an interview on Bloomberg:

    Cloud Applications Will Become a $400 Billion Market

    The apps market is about a $125 billion market. It has two pieces to it. First is back office, which is what we call ERP. This is basically your financial systems, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain, and HR. That is really 70 percent of the applications market or around $85 billion. Second is the front office market which includes marketing, sales automation, service, etc. add up to $40 billion. A very interesting phenomenon is that as the on-premise applications market moves into SAAS it actually grows exponentially. Now the applications market is doing all of the server work, all the operating systems, and all the database work. It’s the data center, it’s the people. So the market will actually grow from $125 billion and probably triple just as it moves to SAAS because it’s taking share from the other parts of the IT market. The applications market I predict will actually become more like $400 billion as it goes forward.

    We think it is an amazing opportunity. We are growing our applications market over the last 8-12 quarters more than double-digit. The market itself is growing and we are gaining substantive share. We are the leader in ERP. If you go back to Gartner, IDC, and the analysts we are leading in HR now as well. These are very attractive and robust markets. Our customers want to modernize, want to spend less, want someone else doing the work, and they want someone else assuming the risk. We are extremely bullish about our position in the market.

    All of Our Customers Will Move to the Cloud

    We have rewritten our application base for the cloud, for SAAS. We have been doing this for years and we’ve invested a lot of capital. We are deploying our capabilities all across the globe. We are extremely excited and bullish about not just our current position. There is going to be a leader in this market and there is no one today with more than 50 percent market share. In fact, the highest application percentage of any company in any segment is sort of mid-20s. This generation will see a leader that is much more material than that and I volunteer us to do it. In most segments, the leader has 50 percent plus.

    We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move to the cloud. In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move. They are all going to move on their time frame. We don’t actually put an end of life. We have a competitor that does that, but we don’t do that. We want them to move at their pace and we want them to feel good about it. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.

    >> Watch the full Bloomberg interview with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.