to your host, Susan Berger. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. We're really pleased that you've stuck in with us this long, and today we're going to have a really interesting webinar, as usual. If you need to contact me, my email is here. And I just want to go over quickly, and we'll do it at the end, too. I will need to have your assignments by November 26. If you're planning to get the Credly badge, so you need to do all your assignments, and you need to listen to all the webinars. There are a few people that have listened to the webinars but not done anything else, and I may send you an email just to ask you if you're in this for your own interest or if you want a Credly badge. So keep that in mind. And other than that, I'm going to turn this over to Mark Waimling, who's the course coordinator. And if you have any questions, put them in the general chat, and we'll collect them and make sure they get answered. So, Mark, go ahead. Thank you, Susan. Welcome, everybody. I'd like to introduce our today's speaker. Jamie Haskell has been a mountain maker for over 25 years, working in major institutions and private collections across the western United States of Canada. He learned mountain making while working at the University of Washington, Burke Museum. And his further studies and conservation have contributed to this holistic philosophy of exhibit, execution, and collections care. At this point in his career, Jamie has been working on the education and training of a new generation of museum professionals to help replace the outgoing stream of senior staff all over. He conducts workshops at Meltmaking Focus Studio in Seattle, as well as providing on-site instruction. I'd like to thank Jamie for joining us today. We look forward to your presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Susan and Mike. I'm very honored to be part of this process. Mountmaking is a really quite an interesting craft. Hard to kind of put it. It's hard to call it an art or a craft. It's a bit of engineering. It's a bit of everything, but it has held my attention for 25 years plus. So the goals for this webinar, I'm hoping to help you understand the purposes of mountmaking and learn to conceptualize how a mount comes together and works for the object. And then we'll talk about materials and fabrication techniques, how we use to build mounts. Now, before we start, I just want to talk about one quick thing, and that is the subject of safety. And I bring this up because our work is a difficult work when we're doing really kind of things that don't have necessarily an easy or a straightforward way to do. And so this order of priority to me is really pretty sacred, and that is that the first thing is that the safety of people is primary, whether those persons are building the exhibits or those visiting them. People are primary concern. The safety of the objects is the second concern. We are there to preserve the objects. This is about collections care. And so immediate and long-term object safety are both to be considered in our mountmaking. And then having the exhibit look great and get done on time is absolutely what we're after, but this has to remain subservient to the other two. Through good planning and design, we'll get it all done. Okay, so this mountmaking. Mountmaking is a preventive conservation practice, primarily in my mind. It's a technique for enhancing the display of objects, really making things shine. If you think of a mask that is sitting straight up and down, looking straight forward, it's very static.  So we're able, through proper mountmaking, to do things with the objects that give them the ability to tell their story better. And mountmaking is really a thought process because we're solving problems of support and of balance to go along with the aesthetics. And we're doing this in the museum environment where we are really trying to make this all integrate into a proper display. So what is a mount? A mount is a structure that can kind of supply appropriate support to an object and safely maintain it in that position. So this picture is of a very heavy native copper. This is at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau where I worked a couple of years ago. They built a brand new museum if you had a chance to go to Juneau and see it because there's a fabulous museum. We wanted this to look like this mannequin figure was holding the copper up, but it is being held by a mount that goes to the back wall. But we built the mount in such a way that we were able to adjust the angle, off-kilter to the back on the proper right side and a little rotation to the proper right, and now it really looks like the figure is holding it. The essential concept of a mount, you're probably all sitting on a mount. There are some mounts that are better for short-term use and some that are better for long-term use, like Victory Chicken, that is our mascot of our string band. So what are the common purposes of a mount? We build mounts for a whole raft of different reasons and there are different individual missions in each one. One is to stabilize a self-supporting object. This is at the Asian Art Museum in Seattle or within the original installation of the Asian Art Museum. This very large ceramic is very sturdy. It stands well on its own, but its base is fairly narrow and we wanted to stabilize it. So here there's a plexiglass blade. There's bound to be some sort of either monofilament or a cable around the neck on that. And if you look at the very bottom, there's kind of a half-moon that cradles the base so that it can't roll away from that blade. The blade is then screwed down to the display surface. One is to display or flow the structurally sound object to make it fly. So this strong dynasty horse is, again, in good condition, but it's not something that you set on the deck. So we made a mount that lets it be in this great running position and gives it life. Sometimes it's to support a flexible or an unsound object. So this native headdress, which is at the Alaska State Museum, is made of red trade cloth and baleen and feathers. The trade cloth is totally floppy. It needed support. So this mount has a metal ring that is here. There are magnets on the interior, and then it has a strut coming up that supports... There's the pointer. Strut coming up that supports the baleen vertical that is supporting the top nut of the feathers. And so through the use of the mount, we were able to give this the support that it needs to be on display for a long time. And then other is to be a structurally joined support unconnected broken or composite elements of the mount. So this Yupik whale mount has flippers and hands that were originally on the mask by pieces of quill. So at the base connecting the flipper to the mask itself, there is a piece of probably Dupur goose quill that is connecting those pieces, but it's not really very sound. So here we needed an actual structure to connect those pieces to the mainstay of the mask. We use mounts for sizing stabilization. This is, again, from the Asian Art Museum in Seattle. And this horse has a base and a set of legs that are very narrow. So if we tied the base down in a sizing convent, it would break off at the ankles. So this mount goes up and inside through a large hole that is in the belly as a part of these pieces. And those black masses are large padded inserts and each goes in one in the front, one in the back, and are tied together by the brass mount itself that comes down to the base plate. This controls the upper part. So in the event of a seismic event, it does not fall over and it is gently tied all the way to the bottom, but, again, should not break off at the legs. There are lots of different ways of being seismic stabilization. This happens to be one we could. And then security is another issue that comes up again and again with mounts. In general, in my opinion, I don't like to feel that mounts are a security measure. They're not really a good substitute for appropriate security systems and oversight. Retention mechanisms that are strong enough to keep an object from theft don't generally, we don't think of them as mounts. We will definitely use them, but I like to think of a mount as being a little more for the previous purposes that I mentioned. This is a good place to put the first hole. So I'm going to roll that in. So as we go on, we're going to be talking about the shape of objects. So now I'd like to talk about what are the components of a mount. So generally in a mount, there's some sort of main structure that is kind of the main part of the mount. From there, we have retaining mechanisms that keep the object in place and will be what's taking weight possibly or maintaining it onto the main structure if that's what's taking weight. And then we'll have an attachment structure that comes down to whatever the display substrate is, the deck or back to the wall or whatever. So there's these kind of three bits to most any mount. So then we like to talk about what are the missions of the mount? What is the mount trying to do? Well, the first mission really for the object is to provide support. And the level of support needs to be appropriate for the materials and conditions of the object. This is especially important for things like basketry and hide and wood. A lot of wood isn't as sturdy as it necessarily seems. Structurally compromised objects where you've got either damage or there's detached elements such as with the whale mask that need to be supported. When we're doing all this, we need to spread the load to accommodate the leverage and the balance that's part of the shape and the distribution of weight in the object. We would be avoiding point loads, places where the weight is concentrated on one little point of contact. We want to support the overall structure. Make sure that we're kind of cradling the object. There are things that we'll do just fine with lower amounts of support and there are things that need it. We'll choose those support locations to protect surfaces. We will be looking for friable surfaces or fugitive pigments or things like that. Edges that are damaged or sharp edges that we could get a concentration of pressure on. Other damage areas, cracks, places where the object just isn't really as strong as we want. We want the mount to help the object behave as a unit. We don't want to hold it at one end and the other end and connect to those pieces, connect to the mounts by using the object. We don't really want to make it so that we apply stresses to the object in its mounting. We're going to really try to work with that to help the object behave as a unit and that's especially important in a seismic situation. We're using the mount to enhance stability. This ceramic is the basic stability. It's a very narrow base. We don't want the object to be able to start rocking if there's any sort of forces on it. We want it to just sit right there. This is partly a seismic stabilization thing as well and seismic is not only earthquakes, but seismic in the larger sense is ambient vibration. There's trains going by, construction nearby, carts rolling across the floor. And then there's errant human forces as I'll refer to them, which I think of that as a eight-year-old child who's had a cookie and a Coke running into the exhibit furniture. An errant floor buffer that's going back and forth and hits the pedestal. Those are all things that we're using the mount to stabilize and to hold on to it. There's an issue of visual stability and objects that vibrate or move can make people on music. I was just in an exhibit and a beautiful samurai helmet was supported by a mount that was just a little too light and it sat and bobbed just with the vibration of the building and there was nothing you could do about it. It just was there and it was not really a good. Also something that even if you have a very small post and a large object that is from an engineering point of view strong enough to support it still, sometimes that support is visually just too small and it isn't harmonious. Those are little things and they're stylistic things that we also want to think about in our mountmaking is we want this object to feel really just nice and solid. Mounts have to be noninvasive. They have to be totally reversible. This is the basic tenet of conservation. We can't do anything to the object that we can't undo. So we can't drill into the object. We can't nail into the object. We can't glue to it. There are some exceptions but these are usually the purview of conservation or the artist or other things. Holes are occasionally drilled into large stone sculptures for mounting posts. It's not something that we just do. It's usually with a living artist or if there's no other way to hold on to something. Reinforcements, Japanese tissue used to reinforce a textile. That's going to be conservation. That's mountmaking. Sleeves stitched to textiles unless you have people that are fully trained and very well versed in doing that. Again, I feel that's a conservation task. Sometimes we can make changes to bases and other elements. We can screw into them but that's a pretty specific caveat. Our mounts have to be force neutral and this is a term I came up with to kind of think about holding an object gently, pradling it. The mount mustn't apply any distorting forces to the object. The mount should hold it loosely enough to allow the movement of it, the expansion contraction with temperature and humidity, and just things like raw high, especially when I think of a plateau plains car flash or a quiver or something like that. They aren't really stable and so the mount needs to have just enough room so that they can move without starting to distort. The object must never be distorted to load it into the mount. This is one of those things that has traditionally been not really looked at quite as an important thing. You can go ahead and squeeze that little into the prons or the mount should never be distorted to load the object into it. You can pull the prons apart and snap them around that object. That's been a lot of damage to objects where there are tracks, where there are scratches and things like that. These are some of those things that as we've gone on without making, we've really tried to look at these modes of damage. Now we use removable retention elements that may be attached to the base of the main structure of the mount with a screw that's drilled and tapped into the base, something like that. So we really try to keep the mount from being distorted to do anything we wanted to just fit correctly from the get go. Finally, some appropriate materials. They have to be physically gentle and abrasion. We have nice soft materials. Always be what's in contact with the object. They have to be chemically compatible. The Audi testing, which is an accelerated aging test to show off-gassing and corrosive possibilities, is one of the important things that we work with. The AIC site that we are working with right now, they have a wonderful materials wiki which has Audi test results. It is a work in progress. It's sometimes a little frustrating to find things on, but it's well worth it. The materials need to be structurally sufficient for the task. There are sometimes that you can want to use one thing and realize that it just doesn't have the stiffness to provide the support, so we have to think of that in our choices. And then it has to be reasonably workable. It has to be available if you can't get something. It can't be really part of your toolkit, and part of that is cost. There are wonderful things. I've worked with medical plastics and stuff like that that are heat-formable, but they're just too extensive to be part of what we get to use. So these are all factors that we look at when we're choosing materials. So in speaking about materials and in speaking about those medical plastics, we as mountain makers are scouring the industrial realm for materials because there are all sorts of cool things out there. And so we look into our science and medicine industry and all these other places. The McMaster Car catalog is one of our valuable, huge catalogs for industrial goods. But there are some things that still come down that can be the standard materials that we use. And the first one of those is brass. Brass is just such a wonderful material. It's really quite easy to work with. It cuts with fairly standard tooling, drills easily. It has moderate strength. It's not super strong, but it's strong enough to do most of what we need to do. We join it with silver brazing alloys. You'll hear them referred to as silver solder. Soldiers are a low-temperature ally. Silver brazing is higher-temperature. But we're able to join it together with those like the mount that you see together. All of those connections are done with silver brazing alloys and a fairly straightforward torch system. And you can do amazing things with it. It's very forgiving to work with. And I just, after all these years, I just adore working with brass. It's great fun. Steel is what we use when we need higher strength. Any sorts of large mounts are almost all made of steel. And they can be silver brazed. But once we get to a certain point, those are fabricated with welding. It's more difficult to work with than brass because it's harder, so drilling, tapping, cutting are all more difficult, so it requires more specialized tooling. But the advantages are wonderful. And the other advantage is that it's actually quite a bit cheaper than brass. Brass is rather extensive. Sheet plastics, we use a variety of plastics in mount making. I personally don't use them as much as brass. I still find brass to be the overall winner. But when they're appropriate, they're great. They're a little lower strength, but they're fairly easy to work with. We can heat form most plastics. So they're suited to kind of particular uses. They're great for book mounts, and they're great for a lot of things. And they can be used in ways that we can really make very complex mounts. Acrylic plexiglass is what most people think of with plastic mounts. It can be as clear. It can be polished. It can be bent. It is really useful in many, many ways. Vivec is a softer plastic, which is out of the sign making industry. It's heat formable in a stretching. You can do a three-dimensional bend with it.  Cintra is a board that most of you will know from mounting photos on it. It's a foamed PVC. Cintra brand board tends to pass ID tests, but a lot of the others do not. So it's something that we use just kind of in certain ways. And then Gator board is a foam core board with a phenolic reinforced paper exterior that's very hard. It's great for underlying other mounts for structural parts and a variety of things. It's a very useful board product. And then multiple epoxy putties are something that we use a lot. And so down in the circle, on the lower portion of the camel slide, that is a set up for making a base for that camel that has been laid down, and I photographed it before going and covering it with a plastic saran wrap or something like that and then squishing the camel down into it. And as you look at it, it's laid out as a series of strips or kind of little snakes of this epoxy putty. And that's because it's fairly viscous. And when we press the object into it, now the epoxy putty as it takes the shape of the underside of the object has some place to go. It has some place to squish, too. If that was a solid slab, it'd place much more pressure on the object. So we're working when we're using epoxy putty. We need to be very gentle in the pressure that we're applying to the object. And so by doing it in this fashion, we're able to give a very complete support but not stress the object. The horse on the right, if you look at the black line at the bottom of it, that is a shim of epoxy putty that's attached to a mount system like the seismic mount I showed earlier that goes up and into that horse. And it just gives this nice black line that has been trimmed and painted and it forms this great plastic base. Epoxy putties in general pass audit tests and are mostly considered appropriate in contact with objects. If we're working with a sensitive object, we'll often take a layer of B72 resin over it and just give it one isolation layer that way. Addings and barriers. We use a lot of padding. We want to be having padding on the metals or on the mount anytime it is in contact with the object when we're building the mount or when it's actually installed. So we use acrylic felts, suede polyethylene, or also known as ultra suede. Those are both things that are just in common use and are both available through benchmark. Benchmark is a mount making company and supplier that is in New Jersey. And excellent folks. They've been in the business for years. And the nice thing is they have felts and weighted polyethylene that are in strips, pre-cut, and those have all been auto-tested. So those are really good for if you're working with sensitive objects or in production having to pre-cut strips is really useful. Each shrink tubing will use a lot. There are PVC each shrink tubing which we do not use, but polyolefin is the most normal. And again, benchmarks each shrink tubing is more supple than others which sometimes when you're trying to put it onto the mount is really important. PTFE or Teflon tubing are a higher temperature each shrink but they are really nice.  Molari is a fuse service polyethylene foam. I like to use it for bench padding but then also for padding mounts. Paralloy B72, you probably all know it from its uses. Varnishes, it's used as coatings, it's also in pick form, it's used as matices. 3M415 and 465 are pressure-sensitive matices that we often put on fabrics to make them adhere and so those are really nice. And with all these things I have to totally give you the question that current audio testing is really necessary when you're using things with sensitive materials as all these are commercial products and the formulations do change and so we need to just always keep aware of it. The Audi testing, the MEPC has been doing a large Audi testing program right now and so I'm really hoping that it all kind of stabilizes. We use lots of foams, fabrics at the foam, again, volara, polyester batting, stockinette is really useful for covering things, stretch knits like are covering those hat mounts. It should be washed first but otherwise, again, it's generally really good. Ultra suede, I just love how ultra suede works so there's a whole range of things that we use in that. I want to talk a little bit about the Mountmaking Workshop and our ways of working. This is a picture of Mountmaking Focus Studio set up for one of the workshops. I feel that the object deserves a defined clean zone on the workbench and so this, I've put down a layer of volara that is fresh and clean and I put it down with blue tape to define this zone that belongs to the object. We then have foam blocking or tubes of Tyvek with peanuts, foam peanuts or even sand or something in it so that you have things that you can block up the object with. Those two pieces of foam pipe insulation that are there next to the mask, they have a nice smooth surface and they help keep the horns on that up off of the bench when I flip that over and it gives me a nice careful support so when I go to measure and template it, it's nice and stable. The tools and supplies that I'm working with, they stay on the bench itself and having this blue tape line gives me this visual thing of that's the object zone, things don't go there. We also don't tend to, when we're picking up tools, we don't ever want them to go over the object just because we do drop things. So if they're going from one side to the other, they always try to go around the blue zone. Gloves are an important part of mount making and I've come to have the preference for using nitrile-palmed knit gloves for object handling. Specifically like these, Shoah or Atlas brand number 370 White Assembly Gloves. They have a fused nitrile palm and a knit back.  They're all yucky and you don't want to touch anything with them. So the biggest problem is in mount making is that we're going back and forth from working with the object to then working with the metal, working with the tools, working with machines. And what this brings up is it's a great opportunity for cross-contamination of getting up and not wanting to take your gloves off and oh, I'll just drill a hole, but there's only a little bit of oil on the drill press and you don't notice it and you come back and we've now contaminated the object with just a little bit of oil. With the nitrile palm knit gloves, it's easy to take them off and go to the machine with our bare hands or with another set of gloves that we put on to go do that work. And the gloves come off and they go down on the white, Malara, they stay within the object zone. So once again, we're keeping kind of this object zone at both what's on our hands, what's on the bench. The nice thing about these gloves is that they're washable for many re-uses. I'll wash them up to eight or ten times before the palms start to harden. There will be a certain point where you'll notice they'll start losing their grip. They'll also get stained a little bit, but overall, they really have a great ability to be used again and again and again. I buy them in bulk, keep them, and whenever I see contamination on them, I switch to a new pair and those go into the batch to be wandered. So here's my old hound dog, I had a heading looking for essential tools for mouth-making. I had to put her in just for a little comic relief. We use a lot of hand-tooled pliers. I have more types of pliers than anybody you know, and they are the extensions of my hands and holding on to metal and bending things. It just is really, you work through and you find all these things that you gradually get to know. Files, cutting tools are all part of it. We have templating tools. We have flexible curves and contour gauges. So here I'm taking a contour of the inside of that mask that I was showing earlier. I'm then also using a two-ply mat board to use as a way of visualizing the mouth. So I'll go and I'll take that piece of mat board and I'll lay it down inside the mask. And one of the things I'm doing with it, besides just giving myself a tool for visualizing the mouth, I'm using it as I lay across these odd shapes and it helps me find where there's a simple path. There's a two-dimensional curve, not a complex curve. And that's one of the things when we're working with flat stock in brass mouth making that we want to find simple curves as opposed to complex curves so that we keep the level of complexity of the mouth to a minimum. So the mat board assists with that. It also is an empirical measurement tool. I can go and lay it across.  Those are the angles of the edge of the mask and those are what I'm going to join my next retaining mechanisms to. And they may either screw on or they may be silver braids directly onto that. I'll take that flexible curve and I'll chart the curve of that upper one and then I'll go to a piece of graph paper and I will trace that curve onto the graph paper labeling it right, properly left and that then gives me the ability to take my metal and bend it to that curve and not to the inside of the mask. These are techniques that are especially important when we are working with an object that we have to template the object and then go away to another shop to be able to actually work and build the mount. Because sometimes we're able to work with the object on our bench. Sometimes we have to go and chart and design the mount in collections and leave the object in collections and then go to the shop and work on it there. So the mountboard templating is just the way that I've worked out to be able to do those things and it's a really useful technique for me. So as far as stationary tools, the Ribbon Sander is really the one tool that I just find I can almost not do without. So this is a one inch belt by 42 inch long for this large one and an eight inch disc and this is useful for cleaning up the end of a piece of brass or the edge of a piece of plexiglass or kind of all these different things where we want to go and crew up a surface. That belt has a metal platen in the lower half of it so we get a nice hard surface there but then it isn't supported in the upper surface so that we can kind of round things up there. It's a great way to do the rounding for the final finish on it. The bandsaw is used to cut things to length, cut shapes out and is a very versatile saw. This one specifically is really nice because it's a two speed saw that has a very slow speed for cutting steel and that's something that I've wanted for years and finally was able to find an auction. You'll also notice next to the sander there is a vacuum cleaner and that vacuum is set up on the sander both to exhaust the dust from the sander but it's actually connected in such a way that this is a vacuum equipped with a relay so that when you turn on the sander it turns on the vacuum and then the vacuum stays on for another couple of seconds after the sander is turned off to evacuate the hose. This is made by Fine at the IN. It's a German company and they're wonderful. Wheel press is another thing that just helps so much.  It is a great tool. Fire tables for the classes I have two and they are equipped with an evacuation system over it so that the fumes from the flame and from the flux especially are drawn away from the person and this situation just goes out a window but it just takes it away from the operator. The torches on the right are what I use. The yellow torch is a very common plumbing torch. It is a Burns-O-Matic or this one is a Shurefire brand. They are a trigger start plumbing torch that uses map gas which is a proprietary gas mixture that comes in yellow canister. These are available at most hardware stores in the U.S. and they're about $60 for an outfit. They are very hot. I can actually, especially with two of these, I can silver brace quarter inch steel but you'll find one of those. We'll do all the silver brazing on breath that you can imagine. It is a fairly large physical flame and so it takes a little bit of work to get to know it but there's a learning curve on that. The other one is an oxygen and fuel torch called a Niko Midget which is a lovely little torch. I'm using it with propane as my fuel. That is a very hot torch and a very precise flame. It has multiple tips that you can really tailor to what you want. This is a Dual-Mite Bender Oxford General Industries. It has a clamp that holds the breath and then a lever arm that you're able to make really nice bends. You can see on the right that it is 1 inch by 8 inch steel that I'm cold bending with it and can do very precise and repeatable bends. There are a whole series of mandrels so you can bend in all sorts of different sizes and lots of different attachments. It's an excellent tool. They're on the expensive side. There is a Chinese knockoff of it that I keep and talk about because it's the direct theft of the technology. This is a good place for pulling the torch. I'm not paying attention to my poles. The final things that I really feel we need in the shop are machine advice. A lot of times you really need to hold onto the material for drilling and tapping and things. Then on the right we have a heat gun which we need for shrinking heat, shrink tubing, but also for bending the acrylic. The components of the mount-making process, really mount-making starts with object assessment. We have to look at the conditions of the object, structural integrity, where the weight in the center of gravity are and what the physical size is and the opportunities that that object gives us. Condition, the structural integrity, we're looking at fugitive surfaces, pigments, fragile edges, inherent weaknesses of the object. Then what the overall integrity is, how much are we going to have to support this? What is the robustness of the object itself? What do we need to provide? We need to estimate the weight. This is a sandstone jolly from Mughal India that I just worked on. It had broken and we needed to repair it and then support it, so we needed to estimate the weight of it. What I did was look at, try to figure out how much cubic material there was, so multiply the width and depth of the whole frame area and figure out how much cubic material there was in that and then look at the interior lattice and do the area of that and then multiply it. I did by 35%, which is what I figured was how much stone there was in there and then add those two together to get a cubic layer of how much material there is and then I multiplied that by the material weight of 145 pounds per cubic foot, which is what sandstone is, things like granite and stuff I usually think of as 160. But that gave me a figure of about 200 pounds for that and that's what we needed to know because we were going to be picking it up and everything else. Where is the center of gravity and what is the balance of the object? This is a template of that copper that I showed earlier and the distribution, it's wider at the top, it's denser at the top and so the center of gravity is where I put that cross. It's up higher. That's where I'm going to need to attach the mount to it and I want to attach the mount just above the center of gravity so that there is more weight below it. You get pendulous weight and it makes it all stable. The closer to the center of gravity we are, the more you are able to rotate it and the weight stays even. But this center of gravity is something that we really need to look at and most of the time when we're working with objects, they're a size that we can pick up but a lot of times you're estimating where that is and then the size and actual weight of the object are what are going to determine the strength and stiffness of the structure that's holding it up. So this copper has a really large socket on the back wall and a piece of, I think, one inch stock that is the post that is holding it to the wall and then a large socket on the back of the mount. So all of those things were determined by how heavy the object was. Often with a heavier object you also want to use two posts and so those are the decisions that we're making when we're planning our mount. And then we want to look at the opportunities. This is a dodo bird circus wagon ornament and it happened to have a whole mounting system from when it was on the circus wagon and so we were able to use some of those holes and the things that were already attached because they were nice and sound and really well seated. But a lot of the time we're looking for where can we reach around it, where can we take the weight of the object and then we need to identify a method to capture that object and so a set of retainers or grabbers that come around the top and they have to be in opposition to that thing on the other side, that weight bearing below you can oppose with the grabber above so the object can't kind of sneak out of the mount. And then sufficient contacts are important for proper support. So a lot of mounts are made from round stock whether it's rod or wire. This is best for things that are lighter or are very sturdy because a round contour like that has just one line of contact. It doesn't have a great area to spread load. I tend to like flat stock for my mounts because it has a greater bearing surface that the load can fall on, but they're both really useful. Round stock is nice because you can bend it in multiple directions really easily where flat stock really is best for simple dimensional contour, simple bend. I throw this in because this is a mask but I just saw it is, sadly, it has insufficient surface area and it isn't very good and I just made me notice it. Obviously from all the insect damage it's a very compromised piece but there in the circle you can see one of the two prongs that take all the weight and that prong isn't contacting except it's back on the very corner. I would be worried that when this would come off display there'd be a very small dent back there from taking that weight. Luckily it's a fairly light object so it still may be okay but if that prong was bent up just a little bit it now would be in contact and you would get much more weight bearing out of it. You also wouldn't notice it nearly as much because you see that space between the prong and the object and it makes you notice it. Receiver systems are something that I've actually written on for the Journal of the American Civil Conservation and receiver systems are just some sort of fitting that can go on the mount that then makes to the support structure that goes to the deck or to the wall and the nice thing is that a receiver allows you different ways of installing the object with the socket that is in the middle of this mask mount. I can install this on a post going down to the deck or I can have a post coming back to the wall with a slight upward turn that that socket's onto and then there's a set screw an Allen headed screw that tightened against the post and firms up that connection. The nice thing about it is that by not having a post on it it has to be put into the wall with the mount on it. We aren't putting the object onto the mount while it's in position in the case and having to actually have some little screw or do something. And we're not having to put the post into the wall while the object is on the mount and I've seen that many a time. This allows us to put the mount onto the object on a nice padded bench where we have control of everything, put the connecting post to the wall or to the deck and then bring the two together and easily put them together actually the set screw and everything is nice and secure. Ideally what I want is I'll put that post in the deck I'll be able to bring the object over to it connect it to it and without even tightening the set screw I can take my hands away because it is stable it is not going to fall over and then I tighten the set screw and it makes it all firm and solid. So this is a method that I have come to really believe in as being a major safety method when it comes to installation. The other thing about it is that not only does it make your installation easier it makes de-installation very fast and this is important in an emergency situation. I've been watching the fires in California and I would think that if I had a fire coming at my museum well one, you save yourself people first but having receiver systems to be able to de-install really precious things would be really useful. And then there's aesthetic tactics we want to work in the visual shadow put things behind the object make it so that we really can't see what all is going on give things slippery shapes I like to make the ends of my my mount holders that are in the visual zone to be kind of rounded so that the eye slides off and we work to harmonize those pieces with the contours of the object and then I'll usually paint the mount to be a neutral color that will go with the object so that it doesn't draw the eye I don't favor painting out the object to where it is like if there's a stripe on the object I don't paint a stripe on the mount because I don't want it to be mistaken for a part of the object I just want you to just look at it and go oh yeah that's the mount and look at the object so that's where I say it's better to be a matter of fact than a little too tricky on your mount this is a quick case study of the Yupik whale mask here we go and we assess the weight and balance the condition, the desired position and the aesthetics, the opportunities and then the needs of the object here I show the templating with the matte board we take contours with the software rulers profile gauges again we try to work with simple curves the matte board has shown me where I can lay down those curves where I'm not getting a twist I want the design path to be as simple and as straightforward as possible and then I'm looking ahead for what I'm going to need to do so like the two vertical members on the sides those are there so that I can attach the pieces that will hold up the little flippers in hand then I build the center part and then we go and build and connect the exterior grabbers again we build from the matte board template we confirm the contours as we go and bend any time that the metal is going to come in contact with the object to confirm a curve it has to be padded and I always walk around and try to let my fingers feel the amount and make sure there aren't any sharp edges I want to just make it so that I just don't have the possibility of scarring the object I don't bend metal walls in contact with the object and this is the problem with like T-mounts and stuff people tend to bend them around an object I've seen denting, I've seen scraping so just a rule you don't bend metal walls in contact with the object and then we design the additional elements as they're needed and here there's a holder for the little beluga whale that's being eaten by the larger whale and that goes on with the screw and there's the quill or the fin and hand holders to support those original quill attachments and so we've got the happy whale and this might be a good time for the third poll Have you ever built an object mount before? And then finally I want to give a quick word on mount documentation and this is something that doesn't happen enough but mounts are often installed as a person other than the mount maker and they also often require a specific sequence of assembly the main part goes in with a little twist and a little go around and what we've realized is that in the days now of cell phone cameras and everything ideally if we take just a a 10-20 second flip of how this goes together that could actually be downloaded and included in the accession records for use in future installation or just in the installation of the object more and more we see there being an iPad or a Microsoft Surface or something else it's part of the installation process and this would be really useful also just a basic paper template of the object just the footprint visually that can be taped to the wall that we can say okay there's where the post goes that facilitates the installation it's also a good place to put person in detail on and that can be included with the mount so mount documentation is something well worth doing few final mount examples this is actually a plexiglass based mount that holds the octopus bag and it goes down to the support post it's holding up the the ermine parka this is Alaska State Museum acrylic blade with nylon line it's just a very simple stabilizer for the vessel on the left on the right there's a dual bladed support mount that is really a much better capture and is truly a seismic stabilization measure here we've got again this acrylic mount for this very high gloss object on an offset base and this is a real example of how you're harmonizing the material with the material of the object the brightness of the the light gathering of the plexiglass doesn't work well with dull objects but with a shiny object it gets lost in the shine the other thing I like is that the offset base this associates that support from the object it lets the object come forward and you get a real emphasis of the object here's a subtle support it's hard to see but it runs up from the base up along the rim of the bucket up in the left hand support to the top and hooks that top handle and this holds the handle up which would flop down and takes a little bit of weight but gives it a really nice aesthetic without showing very much so this is both preservation and aesthetic effect our hat mounts with carved out the foam and batting with fabric covering are a real normal thing I have included in the handout a very new design for a hat mount from Becky Dunin who is a conservator in the Netherlands that was just presented at the mount making forum in London that uses stockinette stuffed with polyester batting and then red that's gone through around that can be tightened and change the shape and the size of it it's a groundbreaking mount look at those and think about that sort of way of building mounts and what we can do with it because you are all going to be part of building the next wave of mounts here's a texel mount using magnets that are embedded in a gator foam board that mounts the wall on the right the two black lines those are the gator foam and magnet board the steel goes on the front of the object the magnets go on the back it gives a very even support to the object it pinches it along a great length of it and the nice thing is it's very easy to put up and easy to take down very kind of the object and occasionally we get mounts that imitate art this is one I did a number of years ago for this Moche Peruse ceramic vessel it's great fun to have it and I still it's the most sculptural thing I've probably ever made and with that we finish this thank you for participating and now we can talk about the questions that have come up and so I'm looking in the parking lot of questions and one is do I know a good source of archival gray black at the foam and I do not I have gotten at the foam from a local packaging place that is black and I have no idea if it's archival Rebecca Fury asks can you explain more about how I attach the support to the back of the whale mask the back of the whale mask has a socket that is braised on that is a 3.8 inch outside diameter socket or piece of brass tubing that has an 0.49 inch wall which the secret to that is it's under a 16th of an inch so that the under dimension is slightly larger than a quarter inch so the 0.49 wall tubings are kind of my secret for receivers it gives you that ability to have a nice socket that a standard size post will fit in and just enough room for the set screw to actuate the jumping horse at the beginning was attached with two very simple posts that was a very early mount actually in my clear the cost of making mounts is hard to kind of talk about because it's really kind of an experience thing as to how fast you can do it it's a time of building mounts can be difficult materials I don't find are all that expensive in building mounts because we don't use that much but that's a hard one to answer I don't really have a good thing for that a good answer for you on that Rebecca Landau Hernandez have never done on the receiver systems and disaster recovery no I haven't sounds like it would be a great idea because I feel that it's a really useful useful thing the article that I wrote on receivers was part of a special issue of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation and I've been meaning to put it up on my website which is mountmakingfocus alloneword.com and I will try to get that onto the website over the next week because it's a worthwhile article to read the entire special issue on mountmaking is currently in the process of trying to be put online through the I believe the wiki site as the foundation of the AIC Shelly Uller who is the mountmaker from the Museum of the American Indian has talked about working on that so we will see if that gets out there pretty soon. Jamie I'm not sure if you answered the second part of Lauren's question but did you ever reuse mounts or parts of mounts for different objects? Thank you. So I didn't answer very much the second half of Lauren Poston's question on reusing mounts mounts are very individual things. There are some things that are standard enough that you have mounts that are made for say plates or we had an entire mount system that we made for garments like kimonos when we were at Seattle Art Museum and those are easy to reuse. Reusing materials I have cut up old mounts and repurposed them just to save materials but as far as reusing the actual mount it really depends on how custom that mount has to be made to the individual object so it can be done but it's definitely somewhat it's a very individual sort of thing to be able to reuse a mount. Now the support systems the posts and everything are definitely reused and once a mount is made for an object it should be part of the basically what goes with the object because there's no point in ever remaking a mount that is well done. So I know at Seattle Art Museum in the session records a field for not only the location of the object but the location of the mount and that I feel is really important. Jamie and I also would make a comment it's something I've always kind of understood being coming from background packing. It seems like mountmaking has a lot of similarities to just basic packing when it comes to selecting strong points of contact to an object, providing support and protection against vibration it just seems like it's a more in-depth kind of in-tune process but a very similar process to what a packer does to handle an object. I think that's very true. All of these things whether it's the handling the packing the transport they're all really looking at the object in what its needs are how much support this needs and where can we grab it and mountmaking is kind of the aesthetic end of it and of course we have storage mounts that don't need to look pretty and then we have the mounts that we're putting on display that we want to be more discreet but they all still have to follow the same set of protocols as to holding on gently taking care of this thing for traveling exhibits there are definitely things that we'll do slightly different if and this is where the receivers again come into their own to be able to use the mount in a variety of different fashions we have built mounts that have actually become part of the securing of the object in the shipping system this can work very well but it also and transmit more vibration to the object so it's something that we use in a very advised manner but you know this is where I like to emphasize that amount is an idea amount is a set of criteria that we're working meet and that we're able to put in all sorts of purposes into our mount making and so I'm really happy to be able to kind of spread the gospel of mount making as it is to be able to just harness the brain power of all of you I hope that this has given you a little look and that you're fascinated with it because to me this is a professional puzzle solving discipline in our in our work life and I just I really enjoy it I have actually just taken a job with the acidic studios which is commercial operation that is doing the exhibits for the Burke Museum so I'm going to be building mounts for the Burke collection over the past over the next about 8 months and so I won't be doing as many workshops during that time but I should still be doing some you can keep track of them by going to the website mountmakingfocus.com and the announcements should be there there is one workshop coming up December 4th through 7th that still has a couple of places in it and you can check it out there you also mentioned the go ahead Susan I'm going to put up the evaluation link this is the evaluation for the whole course and we'd really appreciate it if you liked the time and fill it out I'll also post it in the education website but please fill it out they're very important to us we learn a lot from them what I was going to say was you mentioned earlier Jamie the international mountain making forum they just had it in London September but every other year they have it in the US the mountain making forum is a every other year conference that started first one is at the at the Getty second was at the Smithsonian third was at the Field Museum the one in London that happened in September was the first time it has gone outside of the US it is possible that the next one could be I think the next one is probably going to be back in the US there's possibilities of Salt Lake City and so we'll try to get announcements out for that the pack-in forum is an excellent place for announcements of that also there is a mountain making forum online which is I think the Google group and I can try to get links to that I do want to also look and answer Tom Doyle's question have you ever used wood for making the basic amount in a case I believe that birch wood is sometimes used since it does not off-gas as much wood can be used wood is not used really as a mountain making material all that much because all wood products do give off organic acids but it is an appropriate thing at time birch is an excellent wood because it is very dry has very little in the way of extractives that are part of it poplar would be another one that is used in that way and alder is also quite dry but overall we don't tend to use it very much although casework is still made mostly of like metite 2 which is a formaldehyde free of bored material but as the adi tests become more and more important we continue to go away from wood products in exhibits at all and so it hasn't been really a part of mountain making for quite a while I just want to remind you of a couple of things I need to get all of your assignments by November 26 and if you're not going to you're not aiming to get the credly badge it doesn't matter and I may contact some people to ask them if that's their intention is to not do anything which is fine I'll also see if I can get the FAIC receiver systems article and I'll post it in the handouts if I can and I'll see if I can post the special issue on mounts and what else ah we have two upcoming free webinars in connecting to collections care in two weeks there's one on plastics and caring for plastics it might be of interest and in the middle of December we have one on creating objects so that should be of interest to you too so go to our website you can click on the picture in the in the slides that roll by and you can sign up and that'd be fine those are free are there any more questions I want to say thank you for participating in this course we really appreciate it this is the first time we've done a course and so we've been happy with how it's gone and I want to thank Mark who's been my comrade in doing this as the course coordinator and I want to thank Jamie for giving a lovely talk today and I believe and I will check this out that if you're registered for this course that you have access to webinars and stuff as much as you want and I'll make sure that that's the case and if it is I will let you know and I think that's it do you have anything to say Mark or Jamie just thank Jamie for a wonderful presentation today as well as all the other speakers that we've had the last couple of weeks it's been I think a very in depth for the various topics and I hope everybody appreciated the amount of information and resources that people provided to you and I hope that benefits you and your role and your institution that's what it's all about and I'd like to thank Susan and AIC for inviting all this this has been a great opportunity they have a pool of some really talented people together to be able to share their knowledge in a given field so thank you Susan thank you and we really appreciate being able to partner with Packin that's been really wonderful for us so thank you you're welcome we want to thank Mike Morneau he's been our producer he's faithful they're behind the scenes making sure everything goes well and we want to thank him but please fill out the evaluation form and as I said I will try to post it also in the education website so that you can if you don't get it here you can get it there and remember November 26 we turn into pumpkins and so have a nice Thanksgiving and thank you very much and we hope that you'll join us in some of our free webinars we're going to have some courses next year there's going to be one on storage New York program probably we also have some things coming up next year on microclimates that will be in January so keep an eye on the website find things and we also have lots and lots of resources on our website so you can always go there so thank you very much bye bye thank you all I've really enjoyed working with you and thanks for all


Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP, and now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and HP Discover. Day two, right before the keynotes, the keynotes are coming up. We're going to hear from two o'clock to four o'clock at a local time. We'll cut away to those keynotes. Check out HP Discover.Social, it's our new digital social experience. Go to wikibon.com for all the research and check out siliconangle.tv and siliconangle.com for all the action around HP Discover and around the industry. Craig Partridge is here, he's the director of data center platforms for HP Consulting. Craig, good to see you. Thanks Dave, thanks Jeff, nice to see you. We talked, we actually kicked off day one with a discussion around consulting. Prior to Meg's sort of unveiling of those four pillars, you know, traditionally you would have a discussion about products and then that's really, you know, changing. And so it's kind of right in your wheelhouse. Right, and you saw the leadership team up there talking about transformation areas, right? And the products come because we're taking customers on the journey from a consulting perspective. This is like Manor from Heaven. I mean, this is all we do. We spend our time out there talking about solutions, talking about the journey, how to transform. And it's really a business outcome conversation and now to see us as a HP organization gearing ourselves completely around that, that's a fabulous start. Yes, so what does that mean for you guys? I mean, is that the whole organization now aligned around those sort of four areas. What do you think it means for your business and your customers? Yeah, in a word, a lot more pressure, right? Because, you know, we, and it's good pressure, it's the kind of pressure we want. It's actually the kind of pressure we've been asking for for some time and I think there was absolutely a time when customers would look at buying HP products and services and they do the speeds and feeds match and they compare against the competition. It was a product-driven conversation but I think increasingly over the last few years and certainly with the emergence of the digital economy as they called it, the idea economy, as you get into this kind of bimodal fast pace of IT, customers, they need to get past that and need to get to outcomes much quicker. So we've seen that shift from a consulting perspective. We've seen it for years. I think the time's right now for us to lead with services, lead with solutions, be able to be that trusted advisor to the customer and take them on that journey because actually everything that we do as HP then flows behind that. That's where our value comes from that tip of the spear. We talked to Johann yesterday, just we were talking about one of the tips of the spear was the workshops that you guys are doing. Right. And I felt like Nefkin's up on stage yesterday, was actually conducting a little mini workshop. I mean, did you get that sense, right? It was very consultative and giving some advice to the audience. I thought that was quite good. Absolutely, I mean, we're, you know, if we can get the right momentums going with customers, it always starts with a strategic conversation. Those are the best outcomes for HP and for the customer. And those are advised type discussions which are really around setting strategy, aligning teams which in most customers really don't speak to each other. And that sounds like a strange thing but for most of our customers, they're still very siloed. The compute guys, the storage guys, the networking guys and never mind the facilities guys, right? Who are running the power and the cooling to this thing. They very rarely get the chance to say, actually, how do we navigate this future that is coming upon us? How do we find our footprint in that digital economy? And actually as a team, how do we bring that together? That's what those workshops are really all about. It's, yes, it's thought provoking. Yes, it's giving IP into the room to the team. And yes, there's some educational side to it but really the value of those workshops is where those teams from within the customer account get the chance to talk about stuff they really don't get to talk about on a day-to-day basis because they're up against the cold face. Rarely they get the time to step back and be facilitated through something in a much more strategic way. So it was great to see them. Yeah, so how do those come about? Who catalyzes them? Is it you sort of pitching that to the CIO level and he or she sort of organizes that team? Is it more of a bottom's up approach? I think the thing that maybe is not quite as obvious, we have quite a catalog now, an extensive catalog. If you go to the transformation area here, you'll see a number of workshops in effect. And I think what may not be obvious in the outset is that they come at different levels. So there are definitely workshops which are set at the CX level and they would be the advisory type workshops. And they're really an abstracted conversation about some of the big ticket items that really disrupting customers' environments. What we tend to find is, and they are the CXO conversations, but what we tend to find is after we've done those initial engagements, what will come out of that is a kind of roadmap which says, okay, we need to explore this area more. We need to explore this area more. And so then you'll drop into a slightly deeper level of conversation. Still strategic, still needs a combined direction from the domain teams, but is focused in a slightly different area. I'll give you a good example. We recently discovered over in Barcelona, we launched our software defined infrastructure workshop. Now that's a broad ticket item because software defined infrastructure really covers the facilities, it covers compute, it covers storage, it covers networking. And it's really about trying to bring the automation and orchestration of all of that together under one fabric. What will often happen after that high level advisory workshop is, okay, the customer will say, well, I wanna start here. So in our discussions, I think software defined networking is the area where I'm gonna take the next step. And so we'll drop down into workshops which are really aimed at then exploring that in a lot more detail. So what I don't think is obvious is that these are tiered kind of workshops and they engage customers at the CX level and then we can get down into the guys that are actually spending the money in those domain areas as well. Yeah, so you're taking kind of a waterfall approach and appealing the layers, if you will. So take software defined infrastructure. You're talking earlier about business outcomes. So now that you're, you know, whatever, eight, nine months into it, what have you seen as some of the business outcomes of those workshops? I can pretty much summarize this in a couple of ways. So for most of our customers, the challenge they have is one set around what's happening to them from a digital work place, sorry, from a digital economy point of view. They're absolutely up against it, trying to find those new revenue streams, trying to connect to customers in different ways, trying to connect to citizens if you're a government entity in different ways. And in trying to exploit those revenue streams, which is the business outcome they're trying to achieve. This is a top line conversation. This isn't a cost issue, which has typically been the IT conversation. How do we take the cost out? This is now a conversation about how do we bring new revenue streams and new analytics and new insights? Those are the kind of business outcomes that are kind of on the table now. And software defined is really a response to, how do I get that cloud-like agility into the infrastructure fabric? So that as I go and explore in that area, in that kind of mode two kind of bimodal state, as I find those rich veins where I do connect and do generate the new revenue streams, how does my infrastructure adapt in real time to that stuff? Traditionally, we kind of built that mode one infrastructure which is rock solid and reliable, 99% uptime, but it's not very flexible. It's not very agile. It's designed for a high SLA. It's not designed for code changes coming out on a daily basis. And yet, actually as you explore the digital economy, you find those new revenue streams, code and code changes and getting that code into the infrastructure. That's a daily occurrence. So software defined is about trying to get that bridge across both worlds and I think that's really where the business outcomes discussions come from. Okay, so that's interesting. So software defined is sort of the means to that end. So how do you go from a non-software defined to a software defined? Great question. In fact, we just had a presentation with a great customer of ours here in the US, Centerpoint Energy. I presented it with Dr. Stephen Pratt, the CTO there. And we actually found a great synergy. We don't have a huge piece of work with those guys. It's a real partnership model, multi-year program to instantiate a new data center. And we found a few common anchor points, right? So there's a desperate rush to modernize. Lot of customers still sitting on N minus one, N minus two revisions of hardware, of operating systems, of middleware, of management and automation capabilities that all sit within those silos. So there's a desperate need to modernize and we have a pretty much half my business is really driving the modernize agenda. How do I take risk of that legacy system out? How do I move onto these new platforms that have RESTful APIs that are part of that open ecosystem? And then the big challenge then is the migrate piece which is the other big engine. How do I then get the workloads onto that infrastructure so they can start taking advantage of it? And that means tackling the real thorny issues. I've still got customers with lots of business critical workloads on closed, proprietary, expensive, mainframe, Unix environments and they're saying, actually how do I get that workload into an open standard x86 Linux based architecture? Because if I can do that, those workloads can then start to participate in a more open ecosystem driven by that software defined narrative. So modernize and migrate have been the huge engines, but there's two other key important areas. I've not met a chief security officer yet who doesn't worry that if we start taking the human middleware out of the engine of the data center, we start replacing that with code. Hang on a minute, that sounds like a vulnerability, right? So what happens if malicious code now starts driving my data center in ways that I didn't happen before. I had the human middleware in place to try to prevent that. So there's a huge security conversation in governance and risk and compliance conversation. And again, that's one of the big transformation plays as well, protecting yourself from that threat. And then the other side of it is really around the management automation piece. And I think that's the area that is generating a lot of interest. HP OneView launched, we launched with a RESTful API model, we did it across the compute storage and fabric. And the reason that we're chasing that so hard is that that's a pivotal part of how you bring all of that to life. So the management automation side, along with the security side are kind of the bits that encompass that big modernize and migrate engine. That's a, go ahead please.  Is it simply because the new way is so much better or is it because it's finally, this is the catalyst to end of life, a lot of that old stuff and just get it over as opposed to just building the new on the new, which I would think would be much easier to execute kind of a carrot approach as opposed to the stick. Well, so, you know, directly ask you a question, I rarely come across a Greenfield site. I'm rarely looking at an empty data center floor and the customer saying, fill that stuff with new, right? And that is not an occasion that happens on a very frequent basis, right? Every customer is running a whole ton of hybrid, a whole ton of legacy. They got mission critical workloads. They got back office workloads. Centerpoint NG example, they have 81 mission critical applications and they're trying to distribute that across two active, active data centers. There's not an easy thing to do. So it's never a rip and replace story ever. It is an evolution. And when we talk about software defined, you know, there are elements of that which you can start to realize today, but it's actually a journey. It's going to be a multi-year journey. It'd be increments. It's not going to be a revolution. It'd be evolutionary parts as we mature the API models, as we move more of our workloads into that open ecosystem. And that's a journey. We'll start to get the benefits of that SDI model. And as we start to then plug some of the gaps that are in that model today, the analytics side of it, the arbitration side of it, we'll start to get faster at this thing and this thing will start to deliver more value. So it's really a journey. Craig, how will the four transformation areas that Meg announced yesterday affect your service offerings? Are you going to try to align to those? Are you going to plug into those? Talk about that one. Yeah, so my team actually directly worked, the advisory workshops aligned to each of those four areas. So we have the nice thing for us, and you mentioned it right at the beginning. This has been our DNA, right? This has been our fabric and consulting. We look at the world as a solution play. The transform to hybrid is really around this modernized migrate agenda. It's around cloud, it's around software defined. It's getting that cloud like agility into the data center. That's a huge piece, as I said before, that's a huge piece of what we do. I mentioned security, so protecting yourself from those risks and threats. That's again, something that has to permeate in every one of those transformation areas, not one of them is immune from that kind of discussion. We're doing a lot of work with customers around the convergence and the move into those highly scalable in-memory data analytics platforms. Our SAP HANA platform's been great in terms of getting that converged story onto the data center floor. And certainly when you go to those big end, those hawk type systems, the CS900 type systems, customers are needing the kind of services, support and consulting around that to get that time to value on the floor very quickly.  So again, the data-driven enterprise transformation is great from our perspective. And I think that whole digital workplace mobility and powering that workforce, that's been something that has been the outcome, the consequence of all of this shift in the way that we deliver IT, the way we consume IT, the cloud debate is I think just the other side of that mobility and productivity conversation. So I think from our perspective, that whole wheel is a very core piece of what we do. Well, you have clients that I presume you do come to you and say, hey, we have a security concern. Let's focus on that and solve that problem. And I presume you have other situations where you might have some other initiative and you've got to weave security in orthogonally. I wonder if you could talk about how that transpires. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. There's going to be times when customers come to us and say, actually, we have a discrete problem and we can isolate where it's painful for us and it might be in the area of security. It might be in the area of management automation. It might be that they don't have a single pane of glass across their data center. It might be that the facilities and power and calling is not linked to the way that the infrastructure is working. So yeah, security is a good example of when we can actually bring those advice workshops. You remember I said it, they're tiered. We can come in with the advice workshops around how to move your security response forward. We have solutions around governance or risk and compliance around data protection and control. That's all played out in those workshops. So if we need to come down to those solution areas and start with the advice stage and move into the design and the implementation and the support side, we can do that. I think where we're most effective as a consulting entity and where the customers really see the biggest value is when we're able to step back a little bit further from that, and as I said, engage at those big advisory discussions because they will drive everything else that comes after that as well. So it's definitely a hybrid of yes, there's point solutions, there's pain points today. We can find them, we can isolate them, we can optimize them, we can engineer around those. But the biggest bang for the buck, I think, is when you get back to those advisory questions. I wonder if you could talk about, well, it was interesting hearing you talk about human middleware before. And I'm thinking in my head, I said, okay, now you start to digitize essentially softwareized that whole infrastructure. You dramatically expand your threat matrix. And so I'm thinking all these companies trying to digitize in this idea economy, what Meg calls the idea economy. What about internet of things? Are you having those types of discussions with customers? Are they just starting? Are you sort of deep into them? It's such a great question, and it's so topical. When we talk about the idea economy, the digital economy, it's really a pivot. And the pivot here is that infrastructure is still a critical element of how to deliver outcomes to business. But where the business is engaging is in the analytics and the coding aspects because code gets them to their customers and to their citizens quicker. The data they generate, they need to reap the insights from, so that's an analytics discussion. And every customer's at that, right? So I have customers that make very traditional products what we would consider to be good old fashioned traditional pieces of hardware. And now what happens when they start putting a few sensors on that thing, they can really differentiate themselves in the market, but they're literally coming to us and saying, I'm now generating streams of data. I am not equipped to cope with. I do not have the infrastructure. I don't have the smarts. I don't know how to get the right intelligence out of this. How can you help us with that? Oh, and by the way, I need to make sure that my data, which is my IP, which is now what differentiates me in the market is protected. I don't need that data leaking out. So it really is, I think that digital economy piece, the shift to code, the shift to analytics, that's really driving, again, reinvigorating the need for an adaptable infrastructure. So it becomes a big holistic thing. I mean, it's not very easy to tear the whole thing apart. It's joined at the hip in all sorts of places, but I think that's where the market's going. It's fascinating to see what's going on. We just said Barrett Jackson on earlier, and they're a car auction company, right? They live stream their car auctions. Well, here now, they're storing all their data, their archives, and it's a metadata opportunity for them. And they're thinking, okay, we just digitized, they only digitized 90 terabytes. We have the same problem with theCUBE, right? I mean, the opportunity. So, I mean, that's just one example. The application is increasingly the touch point with the outside world, right? Whether that's your customer, your partners, whoever, and it's not just for banks, but even with physical goods, still, often the majority of your actual interaction is via that screen, where there's a little screen, a big screen, or a middle-sized tablet screen. That's your differentiation. I mean, center point energy, you think, well, these guys supply energy to millions of customers in the U.S., but actually, they're absolutely up against that same problem. Their customers now don't just want the lights to stay on and the heat to be in the room and to be able to put the TV on. They want to pay their bills online and they want to do it from wherever they are. They don't want a call center. They want to order an appointment. It's not a call center somewhere, right? And these are digital interactions now. They're not going down to the local post office, to local stores to pay for their energy bills. They're in person. They're doing it right there in real time through app-based. So, you're absolutely right. That was interesting with Scott said earlier, he even moved the conversation really from workloads, which always is a pretty, the topic into the user experiences, right? It's the user interaction within the device in which you're interfacing with, which are different and have different characteristics. But at the end of the day, it's really at the user interaction level is where you need to define that experience. And that's how the workload is delivered. It's exactly right. And what we're trying to, I think what we're trying to do with customers in exploring that software defined conversation, which is so linked to the way that coding is changing. I mean, you've seen the shift towards microservices and containerization instead of virtualization and DevOps and the shift from kind of an ITIL governance centric way of doing IT to this very agile, virulent, very quick way of doing things. I mean, this is a, from a consultant's perspective, it's a perfect storm that what's going on, right? Because it's new ways of interacting at the front end. I need a digitally ready core that's going to be able to deliver that experience. Everything's got to be dynamic and adaptable. Everything's got to run in real time. It's not a, and it's not just a provisioning and deprovisioning conversation. You know, we spent the last few years talking about virtualization and cloud and how that's enabled us to stand services up and tear services down very, very quickly. The next frontier is not just provision and deprovisioning in real time. It's as that workload now runs, how does it in real time say, I need this resource now, I need that resource. Well, and so that's, I was going to say, so you have the sort of nexus of innovation in these organizations, your customers shifting from their systems of record, and then to the systems of engagement, they're like, oh, okay, that's nice, so should we have an all of a sudden, well, I could take analytic data and transaction data and bring it together and affect an outcome in near real time, before the customer makes a decision, before the patient dies, before the storm hits, that's a massive transformation, but huge opportunity, but very complex. It's a good time to bank as long as chaos is wonderful, right? All right, Craig, listen, we have to run, but so thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, a great discussion, really appreciate it. Enjoyed it, thanks for your time. All right, so stay tuned, everybody, we're going to cut away briefly, we've got the keynotes coming up, Meg Whitton's coming back, Martin Fink's going to be talking, I'm sure he's going to talk about the machine, which is always a really thought provoking discussion, get out here. It's one of my favorite parts of Discover, actually. High school, he's been really good at that, physics and chemistry, photons and all kinds of cool stuff going on there. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover, check out hpdiscover.social, we'll be back. Right after this, after the keynotes, Dave Vellante, Jeff Frick, right back.


Prime Minister, Honourable Philip J. Pierre and his Cabinet of Ministers secured control of the Government of St. Lucia amidst global economic instability. Inflation reached record highs, supply chain bottlenecks spiked, consumer prices, and the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic depleted government revenue. The ongoing Russian conflict in Ukraine continued to affect grain and wheat exports, which also contributes to higher retail prices of bread and other flour-based products. Domestically, St. Lucia's economy experienced the sharpest decline in the entire Latin America and Caribbean region. St. Lucia's fiscal deficit, which is an important indicator of a country's ability to serve its debt, for consecutive financial years from 2020 to 2022 mushroomed to more than 300 million EC dollars. St. Lucia's economy had already begun to show signs of downside risks before COVID. So when COVID struck, it took us overboard. But during COVID, we borrowed over $300 million, but that's $300 million, Mr. Speaker. Less than $20 million of these dollars were used for direct support to people. The direct support came from the NIC. That's when the direct support came from the NIC, Mr. Speaker, and we pledged at some point when the time is right to pay the NIC people back the money. That is where it came from, Mr. Speaker. But, Mr. Speaker, during that time, what did the government do? They were busy doing DFCs for elections. They were busy doing rules for election time, Mr. Speaker. So that $300 million that they borrowed. Because of the weakness that they called me at that time, they had to take it to pay salaries and that is what manifests itself in the figures that have been inherited. To return St. Lucia to a path of fiscal and economic stability, Prime Minister Pierre employed strategic policy measures that redirected millions of dollars back into the local economy to shield consumers from the full effects of inflation and also position the economy to experience buoyant GDP expansion in under two years. The evidence of the Prime Minister's efficient management of St. Lucia's economy can be found in the 2023-2024 estimates of revenue and expenditure. For the first time since fiscal year 2018-2019, the government of St. Lucia is projected to accrue an easy $29.6 million primary surplus. So what they inherited was a platform of sustainability, a platform that we could move on. And by 2019, before COVID, we were ready to work in deficit, current balance deficit of $43 million before COVID hit. Before COVID hit. Before COVID. That's where you. So you understand why we have problems? And right now, we've taken it from last year. We've taken it from Mr. Speaker. When we got it with last year, we had anticipated that we would have in 2022-2023. When we took it in 2021, our overall deficit was $324 million and our primary deficit was $156 million. We took it from there and we brought it into one year to have a surplus of $29 million. Since coming into office in 2021, St. Lucia has experienced consecutive years of GDP growth. Prime Minister Pierre has also successfully managed to reduce the deficit and implement policies which have inspired an increase in revenue collection for the government. From the office of the Prime Minister, Rihanna Isidore.


Iwi wei. Kirani pans, boss. Kirani pans. Imuame ni Kirani pans. Kirani pans. Hi. Kirani Muvita. Being the retaining officer for Kabuata constituency do hereby declare that I have in accordance with the law ascertained the results of the poor in the said constituency and that they have been given to public rights like this. Mulea Henry pay 30 Mujawa Kennedy NHP 46 Muzieche Engiwe Unip 63 Mubangafred DP 124 Ziambo Sydney Park 222 Talitrufia eep 422. Mandu trifia sp 1,849. Tremend, Tembol, PF 11,192. Taengwa, Andrew, UPND 13,574. Tremend, Tembol, PF 11,574. Tremend, Tembol, PF 11,574. Taengwa, Andrew, UPND 13,574. Taengwa, Andrew, UPND 13,574. Tremend, Tembol, PF 11,222. Tremend, Tembol, PF 11,574. So we will look at the many projects that needs to be done within the constitution. If we look at Kambulanga, we will be also number one priority because we have seen that Kambulanga didn't have a clinic, they didn't have a brother hospital or the road side but they also didn't have a police force. We will look at many other projects that needs to be taken care of in the constitution. Okay, thank you very much.


Thank you very much and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and delegates. I should say that the organizers did ask me to present to them the prepared text, so it was circulated. If I move off script, it might just be a matter of discipline rather than anything else. This is an input by reflecting on two events that I participated in in the past few weeks. The first being the Africa City Summit that took place in Marrakech last week at which local government hosted not only engagements amongst local authorities in Africa, but engagements with a whole range of stakeholders including academia, including civil society business, United Nations, bodies, and a whole range of stakeholders, and in there tried to find solutions to some of the more complex issues that we confront, but also try and identify opportunities for implementation. Some of the key outputs of this conference includes identifying areas of financing, urban development in African cities, urban planning and management, identifying tools for transitioning to sustainable cities and territories, and a whole range of issues that we engaged with. The second conference that I had the opportunity to participate in a few weeks ago was in Johannesburg hosted by the Premier of Hauteung David Makura, which was the conference of the African Development Bank, which is the Africa Investment Forum. And part of the outcome of this conference, or the forum as the organizers would insist that it be referred to, was that in fact commitments were made by those participating in this forum to the tune of 38 billion rents in investments across the African continent in 53 countries by over 300 institutional investors, including investors from Africa. And many of these projects were private sector driven and led and very few, but significant projects were public sector led initiatives. And I thought I should reflect on at least three of these, the first being the extension of the Hauteung train in Hauteung, South Africa, a project where commitments was made by investors at this conference to invest in the expansion and extension of the medium speed rail project that is led by the provincial government of Hauteung. The second being a housing project in Nairobi initiated by both city government and also national government in Kenya. And the third being a rail project, a monorail project in Accra. Now the reason I thought I should reflect on these two conferences is that they possibly bring us to a point where we say cities are beginning to think of and identify solutions. Investors in Africa and institutional investors and pension funds, et cetera have identified a platform through the Africa Investment Forum to invest in these projects. So as we gathered as local government in Marrakesh last week, we said we need to increase the number of city led projects where investors could be able to come in in the next round of the Africa Investment Forum so that city led projects that begin to redefine the urban landscape and the initiatives that are undertaken by cities are at the forefront of what our investors are looking at. Of course there are a number of issues that we need to resolve in the process including ensuring adequate project preparation, ensuring that we go through the necessary feasibility and bankability processes to ensure that investors have a platform from which they can engage because the African Investment Forum has created almost a platform that says investors from across the continent and internationally can come together and identify projects and have demonstrated appetite to invest in projects across the continent. And this is a forum at which they gather where such, if I may use the words of the private sector, deals are struck. The structure of the forum is such that in fact projects are presented, investors consider these projects and literally deals are made and in Johannesburg a few weeks ago there was a commitment to invest $38 billion in different parts of Africa, looking at different projects and the intention next day is to increase this so I am really more than anything else saying that we have a platform to advocate for investments that are led by cities in terms of ideas where we want to take our cities and where these investments should enable us to redefine the way in which our cities function. But coming back to the text because I was asked to talk more about improving urban governance standards in African cities, I thought I should reflect on two definitions of governance, one by the World Bank and one by UN Habitat to just counter pose what these could mean in terms of how we define governance. The first by the World Bank looks at governance from the point of view of accountability and efficiency and one preferred by UN Habitat looks at governance from the point of view of where power exists inside and outside the formal authority of institutions of government and therefore decisions are made based on complex relationships between many actors with different priorities. I had the privilege to serve under my predecessor as the mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Mazzondo who used to say to us that served under his leadership that understand governance from the point of view that leadership and power is dispersed in society and the responsibility of city governance and city leaders is to coordinate this leadership as it is dispersed throughout society. You can therefore think about what paradigm I subscribe to in relation to governance. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that there are three interrelated aspects that we need to take into account when managing governance in Africa. The first is that we need to take into account and the presentations before mine have indicated this in a succinct way. The unprecedented levels of urbanization in African cities and indeed in Asia, but if I may say in the global south, the unprecedented levels of urbanization required that we rethink the way in which we interface with investment planning and execution in our respective cities and territories. The second is about the growing disparities and inequality. So as urbanization presents an opportunity for access to opportunity and prosperity and for people to continuously climb the ladder of prosperity, the reality is that they do demonstrate the extent to which inequality can be felt in cities. We live in cities, at least I come from Johannesburg where you can see in a very stark way the disparities amongst the wealthy or between the wealthy and the poor, residents and those who live in cities and the way in which in fact cities are planned is almost in response to this reality and sometimes reinforces these disparities instead of rethinking the way in which these disparities can be resolved. So the paradigm around the right to the city is very important to the extent that it not only talks about providing housing opportunities to the city, but it is about creating opportunities for access to what city life and urbanization and urbanism represents in the current era. So in order to improve the standard of living in cities across Africa and to ensure access to basic services, we need an enabling regulatory environment and the access to funding in order to provide our citizens with the requisite services and to create platforms for their own prosperity and for the cities to prosper. Our view from the United Cities and local governments is that the new urban agenda and the broader 2030 global agenda creates an important vision for us to at least create consensus around what we need to do and what we need to address in our cities. And it is also a platform from which we can build the necessary coalitions that we need to ensure that we invest appropriately in our cities and that we are able to achieve not only multi-level governance, but the ability to build coalitions at a local level that involves the local authority, civil society, business and other actors in our respect to cities. We have seen that the initiatives throughout many cities that are beginning to provide leadership in certain areas and create platforms for the private sector and those with innovative ideas to contribute to the direction that the cities take and there are many examples we can refer to in Kigali and Nairobi and solutions that cities such as Addis Ababa, Johannesburg Cape Town and others are looking at in relation to providing an inclusive form of urbanism or at least what we used to call and our leadership in Johannesburg creating corridors of freedom in Johannesburg where we see urban development as a platform through which we create inclusive cities and inclusivity in our cities. I'd like to, having been given the three-minute notice before it gets to stop, make reference to one or two issues that I would conclude my remarks with. The first is to reflect on what I think was an important contribution and remains an important contribution to this discourse by the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ms. Amina Mohammed when she says, we need to get urbanization right and that this is dependent on inclusive and integrated national urban policies to ensure balanced territorial development and urban design and land use planning to promote growth, climate mitigation, urban resilience and poverty eradication and I think that statement itself possibly summarizes what we need to think about when we are addressing urbanism and urbanization in our context right now. And as I close to then say that finding a local and provincial national government symmetry as a result of the interventions that we make quite simply would mean that governance is a collective practice addressing societal problems for first land allocation and land use management, second the provision and management of basic infrastructure and services and third the movement and accessibility systems which means it is essentially about how people and goods can get around from one part of the settlement to another and in this regard I'm referring to a contribution made by Smith and as he talks about the issues that we need to deal with when we talk about urban governance in the current era. I look forward to participating in today's session and indeed also participating tomorrow engaging with all panelists and all other participants in this conference. Thank you very much.