I remind members of the Covid-related measures that are in place and that face covering should be worn when moving around the chamber and across the Holyrood campus. The next item of business is a member's business debate on motion 1089, in the name of Siobhan Brown, on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, awareness day 9 September. The business debate will be concluded without any questions being put. I would first of all wish to ask those members who would seek to speak in the debate to please press the request of speak buttons now. I call on Siobhan Brown to open the debate up to seven minutes please, Ms Brown. I would like to thank everyone who supported my motion to recognise International Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Awareness Day on 9 September, allowing for it to be debated in the chamber today. Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, commonly known as FASD, is a condition that deserves national attention and awareness. In my motion I pay recognition to the work done by OSHE, an organisation within my constituency of air, which provides support, advice, guidance for parents and carers of children who are affected by FASD. OSHE was founded by Mary Ellen and Billy McFail. McFail has been fostering for over 20 years and has looked after more than 50 foster children during this time. Over the years, the McFail family has been shocked to learn of the prevalence of FASD, particularly in children in care, and about the lack of resources for families and foster families affected. The story of the OSHE charity, however, is one that spreads hope, a hope of those with FASD that can lead a thriving and fulfilling life with the right support in place. Today, I want to tell you the story of Taylor, Mary Ellen and Billy's son, with an FASD diagnosis as a baby, which at the time was quite rare, as it only came about because the doctor noted the mother's alcohol dependence on the baby's medical notes. Clinicians told the McFails that Taylor would never walk, never talk and never sit up. Taylor, supported by Mary Ellen and Billy, had other ideas and surpassed all these milestones. To cut a long story short, he is now in mainstream education. Taylor proved in part to be the inspiration for the charity. When he was nine years old, he wrote a book about an octopus called OSHE. In the story, OSHE, the octopus, was invited to a party but was worried that his tentacles would get stuck on the slide. All his friends lent them their socks to wear, meaning that OSHE could be just like everyone else and go down the slide and enjoy the party. I believe that this story, written by Taylor, shows how we want Scotland to treat those like OSHE. The answer is not to try and make the person fit in, but to make the surroundings fit the person and then everyone can enjoy the metaphorical party. How common is FASD? It is estimated that around 4,500 people in Scotland have Down syndrome, about 44,000 have autism, around 37,000 have ADHD and it is estimated that close to 285,000 in Scotland could have FASD. We must look at ways on how we can reduce occurrences of FASD through education, raising awareness and we can also offer resources and support to those already affected. Similarly, to the fantastic work that has been done in Scotland to make Scotland more autism friendly, I urge the Scottish Government to implement an FASD strategy to address prevention, diagnosis and support and engagement for awareness and training across all sectors, public health, medical, education, social work, criminal justice, third sector and housing. Today I want to highlight diagnosis, support and prevention. You will already know that FASD is caused by exposure to alcohol in the womb. Without a fully developed liver, the fetus is unable to filter out the toxins that are passed freely through the placenta into the bloodstream. One in seven babies experience significant alcohol exposure in Scotland. However, this is what is not commonly known. There is a suggestion that 99 per cent of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder cases are left undiagnosed. People with FASD experience problems with thinking, speech, social skills, timekeeping and memory. The condition often exists alongside autism, ADHD and mental health problems, but it is not just a brain issue. It can also affect facial features, limbs and height. All those together mean that the condition requires sophisticated diagnosis and treatment. With research showing an early diagnosis can make a massive difference. A 2017 study on doctors across the UK found that only 31 per cent of the GPs said that they had an in-depth education regarding FASD. It is very welcome that the Scottish Government has been funding the fetal alcohol advisory and support team since 2015. The small team based in Ayrshire has become the national hub for providing training, research and consultations on FASD. They offer assessments for children and provide support and mediation in schools for parents and carers. FASD usually comes with overlapping social issues. 50 per cent of individuals end up in prison, psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment facilities. An FASD diagnosis is 28 times higher in these settings than in the general population. Those with FASD are more likely to experience homelessness, unemployment and dependent living. With such experiences leaving them to face additional issues such as addiction, 35 per cent have drug and alcohol problems and 23 per cent have received inpatient care for mental illness. When looking at ways to support those with FASD, we must look at a multi-strand plan of action. That means looking at poverty, domestic violence, mental health and safe and secure housing, just to name a few. The Scottish Government has taken considerable action to raise awareness of the dangers of drinking while pregnant and to train health practitioners on how to educate women. Since 2016, we have also increased screening of alcohol intake while pregnant, with midwives encouraged to record instances of alcohol on the mother's health records. However, I am led to believe that in many cases it is not recorded on the baby's medical record. That is key to ensuring that the correct diagnosis of FASD, especially within the care system, means being on the child's record not only just the mother's. 80 per cent of children in care have FASD and it can be easy for society to demonise biological mothers. When pregnant, it is important that the mother feels that she can be honest about her alcohol use. If it is an addiction, it is not easy to stop. We must remove the stigma for those seeking help. We must educate society on the dangers of alcohol to an unborn baby, the ones we know about and the ones we are hearing about today. We must inform mums to be. We must treat people with compassion, but most we need to recognise that the support and help of those children, young people and adults with FASD needs. I thank my colleague Siobhan Brown for leading the debate. I would like to extend my gratitude to the work carried out by Alcohol Focus Scotland for providing on-going information and support to all those affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. As a country, our relationship with alcohol is fractious and troubled at times. Tackling harmful patterns of consumption undoubtedly represent one of the most significant public health challenges that we face today. It can be difficult and a sensitive issue to address, considering that we all know people whose lives, families and communities have been impacted by the effects of harmful alcohol use. Despite that awareness, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is often described simultaneously as the most prevalent and the most invisible neurodevelopmental condition in Scotland. Often misunderstood and misdiagnosed, the effects of FASD are diverse and can lead to a wide range of both mental and physical issues, including a reduced capacity for learning and understanding behaviours. As a teacher, I have witnessed first-hand the limiting nature of FASD. For children affected by the condition, the already intimidating school environment can be incredibly difficult to navigate. Developmental problems with social skills and communication and the requirement for additional educational support sadly place these students at a greater risk of exclusion and bullying, an experience that they will likely carry for the rest of their lives. In addition, the limited knowledge and expertise of teachers at times in managing and accommodating children with FASD represents a further obstacle in their efforts to create a constructive and inclusive learning environment. Thankfully, we are here to remind and inform people that FASD is preventable. It is crucial that we promote recognition of the dangers attributed to drinking alcohol during any stage of pregnancy and that we do so in a way that does not seek to penalise or condemn women. Our focus should remain firmly on education and health of the population of all, while taking care not to stigmatise FASD, which would only deter individuals from seeking the help and treatment that they need. I am therefore pleased to see that the Scottish Government has remained committed to its 2018 pledge to increase support for children and families affected. Since 2018, amidst the provision of more than £395,000 in funding to the Fetal Alcohol Advisory and Support Team, the Government has launched a successful FASD hub. Through the hub, essential tiered support services and vital lifelines are offered to members of the public. I would also like to highlight the creation of a free FASD learning resource on the NHS Education Scotland website, which includes valuable guidance for educators and helpful resources for parents and carers. I hope that we can continue to promote and increase awareness so that no child is born, avoidably suffering the consequences. I firmly believe that, by championing campaigns such as hashtag no alcohol no risk and supporting the sustained development and expansion of services designed to help families across Scotland, we can improve the physical and mental wellbeing of our children and provide them with the high quality of life that they deserve. As we have heard, Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders can cause children to have a range of issues that are a direct result from alcohol consumption during pregnancy. We must continue to raise awareness of that condition to ensure that mothers understand the dangers of drinking while pregnant and the impact that it can have on their unborn child. FASD was not something that I was aware of until I was in my mid-20s and, for me, education is one of the best ways for people to learn about having a happy, healthy pregnancy. Given that three in every 100 babies in the UK are affected by that condition and that roughly 45 per cent of pregnancies are unplanned, educating young people might be one way to reduce the number of children being born with that condition. Another, and I know that we do not have enough time to discuss this in more depth today, is to continue to tackle the issues that we have in Scotland in relation to binge drinking. We also know that the issues relating to binge drinking have only been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, causing real concern to health boards, experts and organisations that offer advice regarding FASD. Although FASD is completely preventable, Alcohol Focus Scotland and other organisations have suggested that it is a cause for concern, as no amount of alcohol is safe for pregnant women or women planning for a pregnancy. Turning to children and adults with FASD, I agree with Siobhan Brown and others that we must do more to support them. Although there are a wide range of benefits and support networks to help families with that condition, as FASD goes undetected for quite some time, it means that many tried to cope without talking to organisations who could assist them. Turning to my earlier point of education, if teachers and childcare professionals were trained to spot the symptoms of FASD, that might allow families to understand what support is available to them. During Ms Brown's opening contribution, she spoke passionately about the area that she represents and the excellent work that is being carried out by a FASD organisation based in Ayr, and also about the wonderful story that she told about Taylor and Oshaley Octopus, which gives us an insight about people living with FASD, and it is why it is so important that we must continue to talk about that condition. Therefore, I would like to continue with that narrative by talking about the work that was carried out by NHS Lanarkshire on the run-up to FASD awareness day, which took place on 9 September. As part of their campaign, NHS Lanarkshire released figures that were conducted by alcohol focused Scotland, which have reeled around 29 per cent of adults who were drinking more than before Covid-19 restrictions were introduced. In addition, younger adults were more likely to report an increase in frequency and quantity of alcohol consumed. NHS Lanarkshire took to social media to raise awareness but also targeted those who were more likely to become pregnant or who were trying to conceive, providing details of who they can contact for support. Although the campaign was positively received, more work needs to be done to make this new developmental condition more known. Various groups, including alcohol focused Scotland, have called on the Scottish Government to introduce mandatory alcohol labelling to increase awareness of the risks associated with drinking. Most of the labelling on bottles are not satisfactory at present, with many being a small picture with no information or explanation of why you should not drink whilst pregnant. Alcohol focused Scotland argued that providing helpful messaging on labels will provide information and advice at the point of purchase, which will help women to make a choice that is healthy for their unborn child. I would once again like to thank Siobhan Brown for bringing this issue to the chamber today, and, hopefully, by raising awareness, more can be done to support pregnant women and families living with FVSD. I now call Paul O'Kane to be followed by Rona Mackay. I also thank Siobhan Brown for bringing this important debate to the chamber today, as we mark international FVSD awareness day, which, as we have heard, fell on 9 September. It is vitally important that, as a Parliament, we have an opportunity to talk about this issue, to raise awareness and to call for continued action to support interventions to reduce the prevalence and impact of FVSD in Scotland, and to support those living with it. I thank, as colleagues have done, alcohol focused Scotland for the informative briefing ahead of today's debate, and, indeed, for its continued work to raise awareness and campaign for solutions. As we have heard already, it has been estimated that around 3.2 per cent of Scotland's young people are living with FVSD. As Siobhan Brown said, when we compare that to other conditions such as autism, it is quite stark. Indeed, a study in my region in West Scotland suggests that prevalence is higher than previously thought, with as many as 40 per cent of babies showing signs of exposure to alcohol in the second semester and one in seven showing signs of exposure to high and frequent consumption. If FVSD affects people throughout their lives, 90 per cent experience mental health problems, 79 per cent experience unemployment, 60 per cent have disrupted school experiences, 43 per cent have their education disrupted, 35 per cent have been imprisoned as adolescents, and 20 per cent have needed in-patient psychiatric care. Life expectancy for people with FVSD is tragically short at just 34 years, with many deaths attributed to addiction, misadventure or suicide. Those figures are stark, and they point to the need for renewed action, which is incumbent on all of us. Action such as the calls by alcohol-focused Scotland and others to move to a mandatory system of labelling on alcohol, which Meghan Gallagher alluded to in her remarks. Those warnings have to be clear on the risks, particularly during pregnancy, because we know that more than a quarter or 28 per cent of women in the UK are unaware of the current health advice from chief medical officers, which makes it clear that there is no safe amount of alcohol to consume during pregnancy. It is clear that more must be done to compel alcohol companies to label products appropriately, making clear risks with health information and advice at the point of purchase. It is important that we do not demonise women or stigmatise FVSD, as Cocab Stewart alluded to. Interventions such as labelling must sit alongside better community supports and education, particularly during pregnancy. We know the difference that a strong supportive relationship with a trusted professional can make. I want to acknowledge the work of GPs, nurses, midwives and social workers in that area. I hope that the minister will pick up in some of those areas in closing. As I begin to draw my remarks to close, I would like to call for better support for those living with FVSD, particularly young care-experienced people, because we know the challenges that are particularly experienced by that group. As we seek to keep the promise that we all want to do, we must deliver. Adoption UK, through our FVSD hub in Scotland, has made clear the need for diagnosis and support to be improved sitting alongside that work in prevention. Particular calls include a published FVSD-specific strategy to cover awareness raising, diagnosis and support services, individual plans and lifelong support for all children diagnosed with FVSD, including home, educational, mental health and access to work support and resources. Individuals who have a diagnosis of FVSD should be given a multidisciplinary support plan, acknowledging their individual needs and that of their parents, carers and wider family. That should include access to relevant and required support services. We must continue to raise awareness of FVSD and to do all that we can to support prevention, diagnosis and support in order to save and improve lives. I now call Rona Mackay, who will be followed by Brian Whittle. Brian Whittle will be the last speaker before I ask the minister to wind up the debate. Rona Mackay. First, I thank my colleague Siobhan Brown for bringing this important debate to the chamber to recognise international FVSD awareness day. For highlighting the great work that has been done in her constituency, it is my pleasure to speak in this debate. As Siobhan Brown said, anestimated 285,000 children and young people and adults throughout Scotland could have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a lifelong, life-changing, neurodevelopmental condition, and yet, amazingly, less than 1 per cent of them have ever been formally diagnosed and properly supported, even more startling as the reality that FVSD is preventable, but sadly it is not so often prevented. Presiding Officer, around seven years ago, I was a children's panel member east end of Glasgow. I was fortunate to attend a lecture by, I think, Dr Jonathan Share of the Queen's Nursing Institute of Scotland, whose knowledge on the subject is beyond compare. Apologies if I have confused him with someone else, but I am pretty sure that it was Dr Share. He told panel members that many of the children referred to us would be suffering from FVSD. In effect, much of their behaviour and many of their issues related to having this condition, but many were often undiagnosed. This made immediate sense to me and it shone a light on many of the young people we saw and the day-to-day difficulties they faced due to being exposed to alcohol in the womb. I also remember that he spoke about advice given to pregnant women at that time about limiting their alcohol intake. He said that the only way to be sure that your child would not be affected by FVSD was to avoid drinking entirely, as the body processes alcohol differently in every person. He pointed out that what might have low impact on one person could be devastating to another. His message, the only way to avoid giving your baby FVSD was to drink no alcohol at all. In Scotland, we want to give our every child the best start in life and our policies reflect that. However, some children are denied getting that best start before they are even born. FVSD is a family of complex conditions arising from exposure to alcohol at any stage of pregnancy. It affects the child's physical and mental health, capacity to learn and it is the most common but unrecognised neurodevelopmental condition in Scotland. It can cause learning, disability, speech and language difficulties and many other issues that we have heard members outline today. Early diagnosis and support for people with FVSD is crucial to avoid a range of issues that they commonly encounter. In later life, 90 per cent of those affected are estimated to experience mental health problems, a large number of experience unemployment, imprisonment and many need in patient psychiatric care. Last November, the Scottish Government and NHS Education Scotland launched an excellent e-learning resource on FVSD accessible to anyone, which explains what FVSD is, how to prevent it and the support available. In 2017, adoption UK conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 adopters looking at a range of issues. 70 per cent of respondents said that they weren't warned that their child could be at risk of FVSD when they adopted. Furthermore, 85 per cent have not been told since they adopted that their child may have FVSD and 35 per cent have considered that their child might have FVSD. The report that 55 per cent of children waited two years or longer for their FVSD diagnosis and 78 per cent of parents whose children were diagnosed with FVSD didn't feel that healthcare professionals were knowledgeable about the condition or its various presentations. As we've heard other members say, they recommend improved diagnosis and support for people living with FVSD through the introduction of a dedicated multi-year national strategy for treatment and prevention. That combined with increased awareness of the risks associated with drinking during pregnancy. In conclusion, FVSD is a condition that is entirely presentable. It is not about stigmatising or shaming women, it just requires women not to drink for the entirety of their pregnancy. What we are facing today with the scourge of a global pandemic still prevalent, surely that's not too much to ask to ensure that our children do get the best start in life. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, for letting me sneak into this debate at the last minute. Can I thank Shwam Brown for bringing this really important debate to the chamber? She highlights the impact of a diagnosis of FVSD can hammer a person that increased likelihood of custodial sentences. Early death, as Paul Cain talked about, is homelessness, unemployment and the higher level of mental illness. I have a personal interest in that because I was approached by a couple of foster parents who work with their adopted son and daughter both who have a diagnosis of FVSD. I have such fondness for those parents and respect for what they do in taking on children in this condition. The positive thing is to talk about the impact of giving opportunity to children with the condition to participate and the benefits of sport. You knew that I was going to get sport in here somewhere, Deputy Presiding Officer. I have worked specifically for this young man for several years and he is nothing but a ball of fast twitch fibres. His outlet for his fast twitch fibres happens to be sport. I think that the point there is that if he did not have that outlet, where would that energy go? If you met this young man, you would say that he was very active.  I think that the benefit of sport brings to self-discipline, the structure that that brings to his life is immense. He has become an international athlete himself, he has had the opportunity to travel, and that in itself has helped him to develop as an individual. He is at college at the moment, he is now studying at college. I think that that tells a story that is very similar to the story that Siobhan Brown made. Covid has had a specific impact on people with this kind of condition, because when that discipline structure and support is unavailable, when I was managing to get my athletes back to see them, the impact on him was much more marked than it had been on the rest of the squad. I have to say that he obviously had a love of doughnuts, I think, is probably the way I would like to put that, and I think that that is something that we do need to consider when, as I say, I am a big believer, as you know, in giving kids the opportunity to participate. It does not have to be sport, it could be music, art, drama or whatever, but the impact that Covid has had on the vulnerable and that they have not been able to access that. The system needs to consider, I think, also how support is maintained from a child into adult in a foster situation, because the support drops off dramatically once they get to a certain age. I think that FASD is a preventable condition. I think that, as Siobhan Brown has said and others have said, we need to look at how we prevent that from happening in the first instance. It is a health issue, and we need to consider Scotland that Scotland has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I think that that is where we need to start. I thank Siobhan Brown once again for bringing the debate to the chamber and for yourself, for letting me sneak in. I now call on Kevin Stewart to wind up for the Scottish Government up to about seven minutes. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. First of all, I pay tribute to Siobhan Brown for bringing this motion to the chamber. I would like to thank every single member for their consensual approach to the debate and on this extremely important issue. I would also like to pay tribute to the McFales and their work that Ms Brown has described today. Taylor's book, Oshie the Octopus, will now definitely have to be on my reading list, and maybe Ms Brown can help me to source a copy of that. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, which is caused, as others have said, by prenatal alcohol exposure, is one of the most common neurodevelopmental conditions in Scotland, but it is also one of the lesser known ones. It is in respect of those simple facts that I find myself wholeheartedly in agreement with today's motion. We must all do more to promote the dangers of alcohol consumption during pregnancy, but also to support those with a diagnosis of FASD. We all must do our level best to destigmatise the situation that some of the folks who have alcohol problems have in getting them to the right help. We should also be supportive of the pregnant women in our lives, whether we be partners, family members, friends in all of this. There is no safe amount of alcohol that can be consumed during pregnancy. The advice from Scotland's chief medical officer is clear—no alcohol, no risk. The Government is taking forward a range of work to help support this message. Our 2018 alcohol framework demonstrates that we are committed to improve health messaging on alcohol, and we have committed to press alcohol producers to put health information on physical products and packaging labels. We will be prepared to consider taking a mandatory approach in Scotland if progress is not made. That action will include consideration of pregnancy warning labels. Positive progress is however being made as alcohol consumption in Scotland in 2020 remained at its lowest level since 1994. Reduced levels of alcohol consumption across society can lead to a reduced prevalence of FASD. Prevention and early intervention remain vital in respect of reducing the impact of FASD, but it is also vital that children and young people with a diagnosis can access the right support in terms of both health and social care, or even sport, as Mr Whittle mentioned in his speech. To best ensure support to those who are impacted by FASD, we have funded the Fetal alcohol advisory and support team since 2018 to deliver training nationally. That improves the knowledge of professionals working with individuals with FASD. We have also funded the Royal College of General Practitioners to produce an e-learning module on FASD for GPs and the wider healthcare community in primary care. Furthermore, we have provided adoption UK Scotland with over £526,000 since June 2019 to establish FASD Hub Scotland. The hub provides a foundation on which awareness of FASD can be further promoted. It also provides a dedicated helpline and support and advice to parents, carers and children who have been impacted by FASD. It is notable that on FASD awareness day earlier this month, adoption UK called on Governments across the UK to replicate the success of FASD Hub Scotland. In addition to our FASD-specific offerings, the Scottish Government has also published principles and standards of care through a new national neurodevelopmental specification for children and young people. The new specification aims to ensure that children with neurodevelopmental profiles, including those with FASD, receive further support than is currently available. The offering will sit alongside the child and adolescent mental health service CAMHS, and that work will benefit from the recently announced £10.83 million funding to support service provision through phase 2 of our mental health recovery and renewal fund. Specifically, £5.25 million of that funding is being allocated to NHS boards to build professional capacity to support children and young people with neurodevelopmental support needs. Furthermore, we are at an early stage and I put in resources in place to allow us to start consulting on what people would like to see from the wider autism learning disabilities and neurodiversity bill, which we committed to in the latest programme for government, with part of that being the creation of a commissioner. The bill has arisen from discussions around autism and learning disabilities in particular, but consultation on the bill will include other neurodevelopmental support issues such as FASD. As with every piece of proposed legislation, working with individuals, with lived experience and organisations will be at its heart. I would encourage all interested parties to get involved in those discussions when we begin them early next year. Our proposal to develop a national care service also provides significant potential to better ensure that those impacted by FASD can access the social care support that they need and deserve. In conclusion, I record my thanks for the opportunity to take part in that debate and for the thoughtful contributions of all colleagues across this Parliament in their contributions today. While FASD remains a significant lifelong condition affecting an individual's mental and physical health, it remains preventable and early diagnosis and tailored interventions can improve outcomes for children. In Scotland, we have a solid foundation on which to build their level of support in respect of FASD through work with OSHAs and other organisations like them. The Government remains committed to continuing to take forward this important area of work. Finally, I thank Ms Brown once again for bringing this important debate to the chamber. That concludes the debate, and I suspend this meeting until 2.30.


The year was 1971. No one, absolutely no one knew what to expect. No one except for a 20-something-year-old coach who had a dream. A coach whose dream became the dawn of women's basketball as we know it today. The great Kathy Rush was the architect of the foundation known as the Mighty Max from Immaculata College. The now university is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first of three national titles. One of the greatest thrills I think was to see Immaculata basketball girls team. The marquee of Madison Square Garden. The first time that a women's college basketball team was on that marquee. In 1972 a group of remarkable young women and their coach Kathy Rush did what many thought was impossible. Winning their first ever national women's college basketball championship for Immaculata. First of three consecutive national titles so I just want to say congratulations to the legendary Mighty Max. You demonstrated a dominance rarely seen in any sport. I'm talking women's or men's becoming true heroes of intercollegiate athletics. Blessings to all. Behind me are three gigantic trophies. Trophies that were won by our Mighty Max team years of 72, 73, 74. Every student that comes and takes a tour to see Immaculata University we make sure we take them through this building and point out those trophies. We're very excited even 50 years later. So on behalf of the faculty staff and students of Immaculata University congratulations Mighty Max. Now 50 years after Immaculata won its first national championship in 1972. One of the times seemed an improbable journey for so many different reasons. We celebrate that 1971 to 72 Immaculata team. A team that was long on skill, teamwork, friendship and community and created a path to future Immaculata championships. Hi Mighty Max. Wow it's still so hard to believe what took place 50 years ago. As a Mighty Max myself we all know what a great place Immaculata University is and that's because Immaculata is a place where they make you believe anything is possible. Today we're honoring 50 years ago all that you accomplished with your first championship win. Thank you for reminding us of what we're all capable of doing. Thank you for providing so many including myself the opportunities we have today. Go Max. Hey congratulations Kathy and to the Mighty Max and I have to say you are mighty in 72, 73 and 74 when you became the national champs. You are an excellent program and a program for us to strive to achieve. So enjoy your celebration and have a drink on me. First I'm just incredibly humbled to be asked to be a part of this special occasion. Fifty years is when you think about it. It's you know a half a century has gone by and the memories that you all made are going to last another century or more as long as they start to talk as long as they ever talk about women's basketball. For me personally to to actually have had contact with gotten to know coach against and have personal and great relationships with a lot of the people involved makes it even more personal for me having grown up there and experiencing it firsthand and not even knowing what we were experiencing at the time and now looking back it was a magical time and we didn't know it and you probably didn't know it that it was such a magical time. Congratulations to the Immaculata championship basketball teams. I personally want to thank you for all that you have done to highlight the efficacy of women's athletics the legacy of Immaculata University and the pioneering spirit of being the first women's championship team. Thank you you are an inspiration to all of us. Hi I'm Mayor Jim Kenny and I wanted to congratulate the Immaculata Mighty Max on the 50th anniversary of winning your first of three national women's college basketball championships. The city of Philadelphia is proud of you and your accomplishments and Immaculata should be incredibly proud of their historic run. Bravo. Congratulations on your achievements. We are so proud of you and proud that you have built the legacy of Immaculata University. Go Mighty Max. 50 years ago I was a sophomore when we won our first national basketball championship so I knew the players quite well. Also I was one of six lucky students who drove all night long to get to normal Illinois to actually be at the first national championship. Congratulations Mighty Max and I send a half a century's worth of thanks for the legacy you continue to share with Immaculata. Blessings to all. Congratulations Mighty Max on a groundbreaking legacy for Immaculata University and women's basketball. Hello champs I hope you know that you have inspired young female athletes for over 50 years. Congratulations. Go Max. For me their enduring legacy is simple but very meaningful. At a time when most colleges did not offer women's athletic scholarships for college basketball these young students played the game of basketball simply because they loved to play, loved to compete and loved the friendships they formed. The 1971 to 72 Immaculata team was a new face in this country behind which there were many young female basketball players all over the country with the same love of the game and they helped shine a light on the importance and joy of women's athletics. Congratulations. To the families of the players that are no longer with us congratulations and hold on to your memories. To the players that are all in attendance so much admiration and respect for all of you there's a direct connection there that that that I would like to to share in that you know obviously Judy you know and I have a relationship based on our our friendships you know and and with Phil and but what Kathy Rush did not just for you but for thousands and thousands and thousands of kids who came through her camp and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who worked her camps college coaches who came to recruit at her camps and people like me that worked there and got to know her personally and it changed my life because I wanted to met Phil and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go back to Kenrick and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to UVA with Debbie Ryan and I wouldn't be here today so I feel like not only did Immaculata and you all and Kathy win those three national championships in a row but I think in a lot of ways you're also responsible for the 11 that we have so congratulations love you all and I wish I could really be there I love nothing more to be there to walk in there and just look at all your faces and see what this all means to you so congrats god bless you and this former kager at the university of Richmond is more than proud to be part of the celebration acknowledging this incredible basketball program school and all who played a role in its success by the way it was such an honor many years ago to interview the cast and crew of the mighty max motion picture right here such a feel good inspirational film and today you can't help but feel good and be inspired by the mighty max story two thumbs up a heartfelt congratulations and thank you on behalf of all the students here at Immaculata we want to congratulate the mighty max on their 50th anniversary of their first national championship go mighty max we high school basketball team congratulates the mighty max on their 50th anniversary we stand on your shoulders because we know we wouldn't be where we are without you congratulations on the 50th anniversary of your national championship we are so proud to carry on this legacy congratulations they were here it was a different era they were here for college education not to play baseball but they were stars on that team


Today is the 27th of April and it's the third day of the CBA 10 conference in Dhaka at the Independent University Bangladesh. We've had quite a few sessions. We had a number of video sessions. We're going to award a best video award this evening. We had a session with the BBC Media Action who are hosting a dinner for everybody tonight on showing a very interesting program that they've developed called Amrai Pari which stands for We Can Do It Ourselves. Very popular reality show program in Bangladesh that also gives the message on climate change adaptation for communities and they'll be showing that and we'll also do the Oscar of the best video presentation at that tonight. Tomorrow is the last day. We have the concluding session. We have a concluding plenary of the conference itself that is going to come up with a conference outcome. Not sure if we'll call it a declaration or an outcome. And then at the concluding session we'll be joined by dignitaries from the Government of Bangladesh and others, the head of UNDP in Bangladesh as well as the Minister for Tourism and Civil Aviation as well as the head of the Ministry of Environment as well and we will present the conclusions of the conference at that time.


From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the East Coast Studio for SiliconANGLE Media. Happy to welcome back to the program a many time guest, Chris Selland, who is now the Vice President of Strategic Growth with Unify Software. Great to see you, Chris. Thanks so much, Stu, great to see you too. All right, so Chris, we'd had you in your previous role many times. I think not only is the first time we've had you on since you made the switch, but also the first time we've had somebody from Unify Software on, so why don't you give us a little bit of background of Unify and what brought you to this opportunity? Sure, absolutely, happy to sort of open up the relationship with Unify Software. I'm sure it's going to be a long and good one, but I joined the company about six months ago at this point, so I joined earlier this year. I actually had worked with Unify for a bit as partners where when I was previously at the Vertica business inside of HP as you know for a number of years prior to that where we did all the work together. I also knew the founders of Unify who were actually at Green Plum, which was a direct Vertica competitor. Green Plum is acquired by EMC, Vertica was acquired by HP. We were sort of friendly respected competitors and so I've known the founders for a long time, but it was partly the people, but it was really the sort of the idea, the product. I was actually reading the report, the Peter Burris or the piece that Peter Burris just did on I guess wikibon.com and I read about distributed data and it plays so into our value proposition. We just see it's where things are going. I think it's where things are going right now and I think the market's bearing that out. Yeah, the piece of reference, it was actually, it's a wikibon research meeting. We run those weekly. Internally, we're actually going to be doing them soon. We'll be broadcasting video because of course we do a lot of video, but we pull the whole team together and it was one, George Gilbert actually led this for us talking about what architectures do I need to build when I start doing distributed data with my background really more in kind of the cloud and infrastructure world. We see it's a hybrid and many times a multi-cloud world and therefore one of the things we look at that's critical is like, wait, if I've got things in multiple places, I've got my SaaS over here, I've got multiple public clouds of music and I've got my data center, how do I get my arms around all the pieces and of course data is critical to that. Right, exactly. And the fact that more and more people need data to do their jobs these days, working with data is no longer just the area where data scientists, I mean, organizations are certainly investing in data scientists but there's a shortage, but at the same time marketing people, finance people, operations people, supply chain folks, they need data to do their jobs and as you said, where it is, it's distributed, it's in legacy systems, it's in the data centers and warehouses, it's in SaaS applications, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, it's all over the place, so yeah. Chris, I've talked to so many companies that are, everybody seems to be nibbling at a piece of this, we go to the Amazon show and there's this just ginormous ecosystem that everybody's picking at, can you drill in a little bit for what problems do you solve there, as I said, I've talked to people, everything from just trying to get the licensing in place, trying to empower the business unit to do things, trying to do, you know, governance and compliance of course, so where's Unify's point in this? Well, having come out of essentially the data warehousing market and now of course this has been going on of course with all the investments in HDFS and Hadoop infrastructure and open source infrastructure, so there's been this fundamental thinking that, well the answer is if I get all of the data in one place then I can analyze it, well that just doesn't work because it's just not feasible, so I think really, and it's really when you step back it's one of these like, yeah that makes total sense, what we do is we basically catalog the data in place, so you can use your legacy data that's on the mainframe, let's say I'm a marketing person, I'm trying to do a analysis of selling trends, marketing trends, marketing effectiveness and I want to use some order data that's on the mainframe, I want some click stream data that's sitting in HDFS, I want some customer data in the CRM system or maybe it's in Salesforce or Mercado, I need some data to work there, I want to use some external data, I want to use say weather data to look at seasonal analysis, I want to do neighborhooding, so how do I do that? You know, I may be sitting there with click or Tableau or Looker or one of these modern BI products or visualization products, but at the same time where's the data? So our value proposition starts with, we catalog the data and we show where the data is, so okay you've got these data sources, this is what they are, we describe them and then there's a whole collaboration element to the platform that lets people as they're using the data say, well, yes that's order data, but that's old data, so it's good if you use it up to 2007, but the more current data is over here, do things like that and then we also then help the person use it and again, I almost said like IT, but it's not data scientist, it's not just them, it's really about democratizing the use because business people don't know how to do inner and outer joins and things like that or what a schema is, they just know, I'm trying to do a better job of analyzing sales trends and I got all these different data sources, but then once I've found them, once I've decided what I want to use, how do I use them? So we answer that question too. Chris reminds me a lot of some of the early value propositions we heard when kind of Hadoop and the whole big data wave came, it was how do I get as a smaller company or even if I'm a bigger company, do it faster, do it for less money than the things that used to be, okay, it's going to be millions of dollars and it's going to take me 18 months to roll out. Is it right to say this is kind of an extension of that big data wave or what's different, what's the same? Absolutely, we use a lot of that stuff. I mean, we basically use, and we've got flexibility of what we can use, but for most of our customers, we use HADFS to store the data. We use Hive as the most typical data format of whether you have flexibility around there. We use MapReducer Spark to do transformation of the data. So we use all of those open source components and as the product is being used, as the platform is being used, and as multiple users, because it's designed to be an enterprise platform or using it, the data does eventually migrate into the data lake, but we don't require you to sort of get it there as a prerequisite. As I said, and this is one of the things that we really talked about a lot, we catalog the data where it is in place. So you don't have to move it to use it. You don't have to move it to see it, but at the same time, if you want to move it, you can. So, but the fundamental idea, I got to move it all first. I got to put it all in one place first. It never works. We've come into so many projects where organizations have tried to do that and they just can't. It's too complex these days. All right, Chris, what are some of the organizational dynamics you're seeing from your customers? You mentioned data scientists, the business users, who is identifying, who's driving these issues? Who's got the budget to try to fix some of these challenges? Well, it tends to be, our best implementations are driven, really almost all of them these days are driven by use cases. So they're driven by business needs. Some of the big ones, I've sort of talked about customers already, but like customer 360 views, for instance, there's a very large credit union client of ours that they have all of their data that is organized by accounts, but they can't really look at Stu Miniman's of my customers. So, how do I look at Stu's value to us as a customer? I can look at his mortgage account, I can look at his savings account, I can look at his checking account, I can look at his debit card, but I can't just see Stu. And I want to organize my data that way, that type of customer 360 or marketing analysis I talked about to Great Use Case, another one that we've been seeing a lot of is compliance, where just having a better handle on what data is, where it is, this is where some of the governance aspects of what we do also comes into play, even though we're very much about solving business problems. There's a very strong data governance, because when you're doing things like data compliance, we're working for instance with, and MoneyGram is a customer of ours, this day and age in particular, when there's money flows cross borders, there's often times regulators want to know, wait, that money that went from here to there, tell me where it came from, tell me where it went, tell me the lineage, and they need to be able to respond to those inquiries very, very quickly. Now the reality is, that data sits in all sorts of different places, both inside and outside of the organization. Being able to organize that, and give the ability to respond more quickly and effectively is a big competitive advantage. It both helps with avoiding regulatory fines, but it also helps with customer responsiveness. And then you've got things like GDPR, the general data protection regulation, I believe it is, which is being driven by the EU, where it's sort of like the next Y2K. I mean, anybody in data, if they're not paying attention to it, they need to be pretty quick. At least they're a big enough company, they're doing business in Europe, because if you're doing business with European companies or European customers, this is going to be a requirement as of May, I think May next year. So there's a whole another set of how data is kept, how data is stored, what customers can control over data, things like right to be forgotten. So this need to comply with regulatory, as data's gotten more important, as you might imagine the regulators have gotten more interested in what organizations are doing with data. So, you know, having a framework that organizes and helps you be more compliant with those regulations is absolutely critical. Yeah, my understanding GDPR, if you don't comply, there's hefty fines. Major fines. Major fines. That's going to hit you. Does Unify solve that? Is there other rearchitecture and redesign that customers need to do to be able to be compliant? Well, we provide a platform that can solve this. No, no, that's a whole idea again, where like being able to leave the data where it is, but know what it is and where it is, and if and when I need to use it, and if and when and where it came from, and where it's going and where it went, all of those things. So we provide the platform that enables the customers to use it or the partners to build those solutions for their customers. Yeah, I'm curious, customers, they're an option of public cloud. How does that play into what you're doing? Is that they deploy more SaaS environments? We were having a conversation off camera today talking about the consolidation that's happening in the software world. What do those dynamics mean for your customers? Well, public cloud is obviously booming and growing, and any organization has some public cloud infrastructure at this point, just about any organization. I mean, there's some very heavily regulated areas. Actually, healthcare is probably a good example where there's very little public cloud, but even there, we're working with, we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, we're very closely with the Azure team, for instance, and they're working in some healthcare environments where you have to be things like HIPAA compliant, so there's a lot of caution around that, but nonetheless, the move to public cloud is certainly happening, but I think I was just reading some stats the other day. I can't remember whether Wikibon or other stats, it's still only about 5% of IT spending, so, and the reality is organizations of any size have plenty of on-prem data, and of course, with all the use of SaaS solutions, Salesforce, Workday, Marketo, all of these different SaaS applications, it's also in somebody else's data center, much of our data as well, so it's absolutely a hybrid environment. That's why the report that you guys put out on distributed data, really it spoke so much to what our value proposition is, and that's why I'm really glad to be here to talk to you about it. Great, Chris, tell us a little bit about the company itself, how many employees you have, do you share, what metrics can you share about, number of customers, revenue, things like that? Sure, no, we've got about, I believe about 65 people at the company right now. I joined, like I said earlier this year, late February, early March, at that point, we were like 40 people, so we've been growing very quickly. I can't get in too specifically to like our revenue, but basically we're well in the triple-digit growth phase, you know, we're still a small company, but we're growing quickly. Our number of customers, it's up in the triple digits as well, so expanding very rapidly, and again, we're a platform company, so we serve a variety of industries, but some of the big ones are healthcare, financial services, but even more than the industries, it tends to be driven by these use cases that I talked about as well. And we're building out our partnerships also, so that's a big part of what I do also, is work with our- Can you share anything about funding where you are? Oh yeah, funding, you asked about that, sorry. Yes, we raised our B round of funding, which closed in March of this year, so we seed AB, so a company called Helion Venture Partners, who you may know, Canaan Partners, and then most recently, Scale Venture Partners are investors, so the company's raised a little over $32 million so far. Okay, partnerships, you mentioned Microsoft already, any other key partnerships you want to call out? We're doing a lot of work, we have a very broad partner network which we're building out, but some of the ones that we're sort of leaning in the most with Microsoft is certainly one. We're doing a lot of work with the guys at Cloudera as well, you know, we really work, we also work with Hortonworks, we also work with MapR. We're really working almost across the board in the BI space, we have spent a lot of time with the folks at Looker, who was also a partner I was working with very closely during my Vertica days, we're working with Klick, we're working with Tableau, we're really working with actually just about everybody in sort of BI and visualization, I don't think people like that term BI anymore, but the sort of, you know, the desktop visualization space. And then on the public cloud also Google, Amazon, so really all the kind of major players, I would say that though, the ones that we worked with the most closely today, as I mentioned earlier, we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator program, so we're certainly very involved in the Microsoft ecosystem. I actually just wrote a blog post, which I don't believe has been published yet, about some of the, what we call the full stack solutions, we've been rolling out with Microsoft for a few customers, where we're sitting on Azure, we're using HD Insight, which is essentially Microsoft's Cloud Hadoop distribution, visualized in Power BI, so we've really got a lot of deep integration with Microsoft, but we've got a broad network as well. And then I should also mention service providers, we're building out our service provider partnerships also. Chris, I'm surprised we haven't talked about kind of AI yet at all, machine learning, it feels like everybody that was doing big data, now it's kind of pivoted and maybe a little bit early in the buzzword phase, but what's your take on that? You've been part of this for a while, is big data just old now, and we have a new thing, or how do you put those together? Well, I think what we do maps very well until at least my personal view of what's going on with AI slash ML, is that it's really part of the fabric of what our product does. In that, so I talked before about once you've sort of found the data you want to use, how do I use it? Well, there's a lot of ML built into that, where essentially, so I see these different data sets, I want to use them. We do what's called one click functions, which basically, and what happens is these one click functions get smarter, is more and more people use the product and use the data, so that if I've got some table over here and then I've got some SAS data source over there, and one user of the product, or we might see like field names that, we grab the metadata, even though we don't require moving the data, we grab the metadata, we look at the metadata, and then we'll sort of tell the user, we suggest that you join this data source with that data source, and see what it looks like, and if they say, aha, that worked, then we say, oh, okay, that's part of sort of the whole ML infrastructure. Then we're more likely to advise the next few folks with a one click function that, hey, if you're trying to do an analysis of sales trends, well, you might want to use this source and that source, but you might want to join them together this way. So it's a combination of AI and ML built into the fabric of what we do, and then also the community aspect of more and more people using it, but that's, going back to your original question, that's what I think that there was a quote, I'll misquote it, so I'm not going to directly say it, but it was just, I think it might have been John Furrier who recently was talking about ML and just sort of saying, eventually we're not going to talk about ML anymore than we talk about phone business or something, it's just going to become sort of integrated into the fabric of how organizations do business and how organizations do things. So we very much got it built in, you could certainly call us an AI slash ML company if you want, it's actually definitely part of our slide deck, but at the same time, it's something that will just sort of become a part of doing business over time, but it really, it depends on large data sets. I mean, as we all know, this is why it's so cheap to get, like Amazon echoes and such these days, because it's really beneficial because the more data, there's value in that data. There was just another piece, I actually shared it on LinkedIn today as a matter of fact about talking about Amazon and Whole Foods and saying how, why are they getting such a valuation premium? They're getting such a valuation premium because they're smart about using data, but one of the reasons they're smart about using the data is because they have the data. So the more data you collect, the more data you use, the smarter the systems get, the more useful the solutions become. Yeah, absolutely. Last year at Amazon Reinvent, John Furrier and I interviewed Andy Jassy and I had posited that the customer flywheel is going to be replaced by that data flywheel. And enhance to make things spin even further. That's exactly right. And once you get that flywheel going, it becomes a bigger and bigger competitive advantage. By the way, that's also why the regulators are getting interested again these days too, right? So they're sort of that flywheel going back the other way, but from our perspective, I mean, first of all, it just makes economic sense, right? It's like these things could conceivably get out of control. That's at least what the regulators think if you're not careful and there's not some oversight. And I would say that yes, probably some oversight is a good idea. So you've got kind of flywheels pushing in both directions, but one way or another, organizations need to get much smarter and much more precise and prescriptive about how they use data. So, and that's really what we're trying to help with. Okay, Chris, want to give you the final word? Unify software you're working on kind of the strategic growth pieces. What should we look for from you in your segment through the rest of 2017? Oh, well, I think, I've always been a big believer. I've always, I've probably cited crossing the chasm like so many times on the cube, during my prior HP tenure and such, but I'm a big believer and we should be talking about customers. We should be talking about use cases. It's not about alphabet soup technology or data lakes. It's about the solutions and it's about how organizations are moving themselves forward with data. I mean, going back to that Amazon example. So I think from us, yes, we just released 2.0. We've got a very active blog come by unifysoftware.com, visit it. But it's also going to be around what our customers are doing and that's really what we're going to try to promote. I mean, if you remember, this was also something that for all the years I've worked with you guys, I've been very much, you always have to, you know, make sure that the customer has agreed to be cited. You know, it's nice when you can name them and reference them and we're working on our customer references because that's what I think is most powerful in this day and age because again, going back to my, what I said before about, you know, this is going throughout organizations now. People don't necessarily care about the technology infrastructure, but they care about what's being done with it. And so being able to tell those customer stories, I think that's what you're going to probably see and hear the most from us, but we'll talk about our product as much as you let us as well. So, great thing. It reminds me when Wikibon was founded, it was really about IT practitioners being able to share with their peers. Now when the software economy today, when they're doing things in software, often that can be leveraged by their peers and by the flywheel that they're doing, just like when Salesforce first rolled out and make one change and then everybody else has that option, we're starting to see that more and more as we deploy as SaaS and as cloud, it's not the shrink wrap software anymore. I think to that point, you know, I was at a conference earlier this year and it was an IT conference, but I was really sort of floored because when you ask what we're talking about, what the enlightened IT folks, and there's more and more enlightened IT folks are talking about these days is the same thing, right? It's how our business is succeeding by being better at leveraging data. So, and I think the opportunities for people in IT, but they really have to think outside of the box, right? It's not about Hadoop and Scoop and SQL and Java anymore. It's really about business solutions, but if you can start to think that way, I think there's tremendous opportunities and we're just scratching the surface. Absolutely, we've found that's really some of the proof points of what digital transformation really is. All right, Chris Allen, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thanks, Stu.


So let's try this first significant digits or significant figures problem so Well tell how many significant figures there are in each of these numbers so Remember zeros are the things that Get people confused of course If you remember if you've got a decimal point in your number Like this one does here a does three point four zero zero then that means all of the Zeros after the first non-zero number are significant So you see here. We've got two non-zeros, which definitely are significant And of course we've got two zeros after the decimal place. So that means they're significant too So how many significant digits do we got pull? um captive zeros Are the same thing? They're significant why because they're in between two non-zero digits so we've got a Three and a four which are definitely significant and two zeros which are quote-unquote adaptive So they are significant. So we've got four a total of four significant digits And then remember the rules with trailing zeros okay so this number 300 here is actually Only got one significant digit why because there's no decimal point in this so Right so remember trailing zeros are only significant if there's a decimal point in that number if There's not a decimal point in that number so in other words if we did something like this That's one point that would actually have three significant digits. So make sure you realize the difference between these So sometimes you can get tricked pretty easily. So we'll try another one of these and See if you guys get it hopefully you do


Worried by the failure of past and present governments to complete the construction of the Major-Bellwide General Hospital, the community has mobilized critical stakeholders for the speedy completion of the project. This report is presented from our studios. Some of the stakeholders at the meeting include Deputy Chairman of the Local Government, Abu Bakr Baba, Former Chairman of the Local Government, Mohamed Bakr and SSA on SDGs to Governor Hamad Dufintiri, Umar Oghidadu and others. Construction for the building of the 150-bed hospital started in 2008 under the Inyako's administration, but the project is still a mirage 13 years later due to the government procrastination and some contractual bottlenecks. Elisadeh turned the rationale behind the stakeholders' meeting. Italia, who is also the chairman house committee on sustainable development goals, said he was spurred to convene the meeting in order to address the major concern of the people of the area which is the availability of a good health institution. Also speaking from a chairman of the Major-Bellwide Local Government, Mohamed Bakr noted that building was not properly constructed. The purpose of this gathering is for us to come and brainstorm and see a way we can approach the government of the day or any other donor agency that can provide soco to the people of Mahabalua to help complete this general hospital. He said the state government and contractor were entangled in some legal tussles which hamper the progress of the work. Also speaking, the Senior Special Assistant Governor Finteri also assured of the commitment of the state government towards the completion of the project. This project, if not the most important project in Mahabalua, is one of the most important projects we have around. Not for anything, but because of those who stand to benefit. And the population is so much now that the pressure on our primary health centers is so enormous that we need a referral hospital, at least this general hospital to be completed so that referral cases will be directed to this place. Some of the stakeholders at the meeting include Deputy Chairman of the Local Government Abu Bakr Baba.


Appalachian Wireless proudly brings you unlimited data. Unlimited data is only $80 a month for a single line. Four lines as low as $200. Better service? Bigger savings? That's today's Appalachian Wireless. An East Kentucky network company. Fiat has speed slowed at 25 gigabytes per line to 512 kilobits for phones and tablets. And 15 gigabytes for motors. See store for more details. The homelessness issue in our region differs from that in urban areas. It's more of an out of sight, out of mind problem. But what is being done about it? There are a few homeless shelters in the region but they can only accept a limited amount of people. Now Mountain Comprehensive Care Center is doing something about that today as they are participating in a statewide count called the K-Count. But what is the K-Count? HUD has volunteers across the state of Kentucky to go out and count homeless people. And HUD collects all the data and all this data goes into the system. They got one central area that is entered into the computer. And it helps with funding for the homeless in Kentucky. Mountain Comprehensives are not just out counting the homeless. They're out here helping them in the process. And they're asking you to help them do that. We try to get them emergency blankets. We try to get them food. And we usually carry bottles of water around with us. MREs, heater meals, stuff of that nature. If they want to donate any canned foods, any non-perishable items, we can hand out. Because we don't just do this once a year. We do this throughout the year. Thank you.


I'm Dr. Lisa Aronson-Fontes, author of Invisible Chains' Overcoming Course of Control in your intimate relationship. Course of Control describes a relationship where one person systematically dominates their partner. Over time, a victim of course of control feels trapped by the following tactics, isolating. The controlling person separates their partner from friends and family. The victim becomes increasingly isolated and dependent on the abuser. Micromanaging, telling the other person what to do, what to wear, who to speak with, how to clean the house, care for the kids and cook. The person being controlled feels less and less free. Stalking during the relationship and after it ends, constant calls and texts suddenly showing up, monitoring the victim's computer and phone use. Being stalked is like being handcuffed to the abuser at all times. Sexual coercion. The controlling person makes the decisions about sex and may require sex on demand. The person being victimized does not feel free to say not now or not like that. Physical violence is sometimes but not always present. It's one weapon of coercive control and not all controlling people use it. Loving acts. The controlling person does loving and romantic things when this seems like the best way to hold on to his partner. His occasional kindness binds her to him. A lot of relationships have some control. Maybe one person handles the money while the other controls their social life. Coercive control is different. We're talking about a relationship where one person dominates the other in several spheres. Not just bossiness, it's domination. Interested in learning more? Please check out my book, Invisible Chains, Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship and look for my other videos on Coercive Control.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Good morning from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are coming to you live from AWS re-invent 19. This is theCUBE's second full day of coverage and Stu and I are pleased to welcome one of our CUBE alum back to the program. We have Greg Hughes, the CEO of Veritas. Greg, welcome back, good morning. It's great to be here, thank you, yeah, terrific. This is 10, 15 in the morning and this is already jam-packed, lots of buzz, lots of news yesterday. I think that's kind of an understatement. Give us a little bit of an overview of Veritas and AWS. What you guys got going on? It's an amazing show, first of all. And it was, the keynote yesterday was pretty incredible. Three hours long. I mean, that stamina involved in a three-hour keynote. I got to get hats off to Andy Jassy for doing that. One of the big announcements that was in that keynote was that Outpost has been, is now generally available. And Amazon Outpost is basically the Amazon web services that you can put within your data center, okay? So we talk a lot about this hybrid cloud model on-prem in your data center and private cloud all the way to the public cloud. And so that is Outpost announcement. And we're really excited to say that we are a partner with AWS on Amazon Outpost and we have a designed and tested and validated solution on AWS Outpost. So if you move your applications of customers, their applications onto Outposts, they have the peace of mind knowing that their data is protected by Veritas. All right, we're really excited about that. So Greg, everybody absolutely is very interested in Outposts. I've just spent a couple of days in meetings trying to dig in. It is the building block Amazon's using for things like AWS local zones, AWS wavelength for 5G. One of the questions I really have for the ecosystem because I've seen a lot of announcements is, this is, yes, it's the Nitro Chip and hardware and a subset of services that you would get from AWS and from a management standpoint, it looks like you've just put an AZ in your data center. But talk to us a little bit about what does it mean to actually integrate there? Because Veritas has been an AWS partner for a number of years. I understand what it means to use Veritas in the public cloud. Walk us through some of the nuance and detail of what this means. Yeah, no, we have a very, very close partnership with AWS. Our engineers work very closely together and we did preceding this announcement. And basically, in this specific case, it means if you have an application or data on Outposts, it will be automatically backed up to the cloud to S3 through Veritas NetBackup. And so you can manage your Outposts through Amazon, your Veritas estate through our NetBackup console, and the things work seamlessly together. Yeah, so just when I looked at it, it's there's things like ECS and EMR and RDS are in there. S3 is not yet a service available on Outposts. Not available on Outposts, but we can back it up to S3. So that's what I'm trying to understand is where does my data live and how do I protect it with Outposts? Well, you can manage that through Veritas, essentially. So that's primarily the use case is for backing up to make sure your data is protected when it's on Outposts. We see customers who want to experiment with Outposts. They want to try cloud services. They have certain applications and certain workloads that are low latency and need low latency. And so they're going to run those in their data centers. Those applications, those workloads can be protected through Veritas just like everything else is protected by Veritas. That's the idea. So for customers who have been with Veritas for a long time and they've got a cloud strategy that they're working on, walk us through maybe a, I don't want to use the word migration, but maybe an evolution. If they're saying, all right, there's workloads that we want to move to public cloud. What would that process be like for an existing Veritas customer? So we've actually spent a lot of time working with AWS on what that journey looks like. And we developed a set of what we call well architected review solutions that Amazon reviews and that we've invested in so that our customers can depend on these solutions working well together. It usually starts with backing up to the cloud, okay? Instead of using secondary storage or tape, backing up to the cloud. And so we have a customer put to furrow group. It's a financial services firm that was able to leverage our appliances for on-prem rapid restore, but tear off the data to S3. So that's usually the start. The second step is using the cloud as a DR site. A lot of companies, as you know, invest in data center capacity just for disaster recovery. It's not used all that often. And so that's an obvious thing. You can move to the cloud and have a data center on demand, so to speak. So we have a customer China Marine that is using our product Veritas Resiliency Platform to do that with AWS. And then finally, it's moving your whole application stack to the cloud in migrating your data to the cloud. It still needs to be protected, right? It's still a customer's responsibility to protect that data in the cloud. And in that case, the Veritas products work really well in AWS. We can protect the workloads in the cloud. We have an environmental services firm, Veya, that has moved their applications to the cloud, still using Veritas for data protection. So that's really how we think about it. So Greg, Veritas, one of your strengths, you have a very large install base, and therefore I expect you have a good visibility into what your customers are doing. Bring us on-site a little bit. When we talk about leveraging the cloud, its agility and modernizing my applications, we know changing my application stack is a long-term, challenging thing to do. But do you have any kind of business outcomes, any proof points as to what your customers, what do they get as they're maturing their cloud journey and evolution? As you talked about. Yeah, Veritas, so we work with, our customers are 86% of the Fortune 500. We work with the largest institutions on the planet the most, so what I like to say, the largest, most complicated, most highly regulated enterprises in the world, 10 of the top 10 financial services, 10 of the top 10 telco, healthcare, those are all our customers. And they're all moving towards a hybrid world to leverage the cloud, but also have on-prem data centers in a hybrid environment. And one of the things they really want to leverage is that cheap and deep storage in the cloud. And we're seeing a very easy thing for our customers to do is to migrate from backing up to disk and tape for long-term retention, to backing up to the cloud, leveraging S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Andy talked about it yesterday, it's lower than the price of tape. Many of our customers still using tape for long-term retention, and it's a very simple step to data protection modernization, leveraging the cloud to replace that secondary storage and tape with the cloud and the storage in the cloud. So for an organization that has thousands of endpoints, servers, virtual environments, SaaS applications, can they manage all of that in the cloud through a single Veritas dashboard? How do you allow that comprehensive data protection? That's our journey, essentially. And our value proposition is that end-to-end data management. We kind of think of ourselves as the Switzerland of the storage and data protection world. We work with everything. We work with 500 different workload types. We back up to 150 different storage targets, including many of the cloud service providers. So that's really our whole value proposition is that ability to give you that abstraction across all the complex storage silos you have, we can take care of availability protection and insights. That's what we do. So a few years ago, we saw a little bit of a bit flip when we talk about security and the cloud. It used to be, for the early days of the cloud, it was I can't do cloud because I'm worried about the security and now many thought security is an opportunity when I go to the cloud. The last year or two, it's a very nuanced discussion and the relationship between my data, my cloud providers, my information and data protection is something that we've been digging into a lot at the AWS Reinforce show, inaugural show this year. We had a lot of great conversations. CISOs have a challenge. It's a board-level discussion. What are you hearing from your customers and what's Veritas' role in this great discussion? It's a great question. Look, security is a board-level conversation. And when I go talk, I spend about 30 to 50% of my time talking to customers and the cyber threat is real, in particular ransomware. What the enterprise is worried about is that their data gets completely encrypted through a ransomware attack and they're dead in the water. They can't ship product, they can't bill, they can't run payroll and the challenge is that the malware is going to get in. Spear phishing works. When you get those emails that say, click on this link, you know, in many cases, people still click on the link and the bad stuff gets in. So what you need is you need a resilient infrastructure. And the foundation of that is to make sure you've got a protected copy of your data that you can depend on and roll back to that you know is good. And that's really driven a lot of our business in the last few years is making sure we can help our customers have that resilient data. It's true whether in the public cloud or on-prem, same challenge, right? Wondering though, from a ransomware perspective to help reduce spread, is data protection in the cloud and an enabler of mitigating the risk that ransomware provides in terms of data not traversing through a customer's network if it's protected in the cloud? A ransomware attack can occur in your cloud or on-prem. It really doesn't matter. They don't really care. The bad guys don't care. But what you need ultimately is a copy of your data that you can go back to and you can restore everything else you can create. But that data, that state of your business, that's really the crown jewels. And if they've corrupted that, you know, you're in trouble. Yeah, so related to security, governance of course has been a big discussion. Last year, every single show I went to was talking about GDPR. This year we're all waiting for the California law to roll out. And we expect more of this to happen. You know, what are the discussions you're having with your customers there? And what's the latest? The regulatory environment is really moving fast. A lot more regulations around data. I was talking, it's funny, I was talking to a customer in St. Louis and they said the California Data Privacy Act was going to be the death of them. And you don't think about that for a customer in St. Louis, a big customer. I was talking to a customer in Australia and she said she has to deal with 27 different regulatory regimes. So how do you do that when the dirty secret is you don't know where all your data is, you don't know what's important, what's not. You know, most of our customers have very difficult time assessing that. So where Veritas comes in is we have some solutions that provide insight into that to allow you to understand where is your data, what can be deleted, what's really important, what's PII, what's protected, what's not protected, to really give you some insight in that across all the different silos that Andy was talking about yesterday. Showing them really where some of the vulnerabilities are that they might be completely blind to. That's exactly the risks and vulnerabilities that they have that they don't know. And that's now becoming a board level topic. So we're getting pulled in, I was actually in Europe a couple of weeks ago and one of our customers said look, I need to present to the board the insights that Veritas is providing me on my infrastructure site so that they're aware. Last question for you, yesterday when everything kicked off and you're right, it was a marathon, a three hour keynote, it's very impressive, I have to say. There's a lot of news packed in there. One of the biggest themes is transformation. It's a word that we talk about all the transformation. We talk about security transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation. It's used commonly, but yesterday it was really sort of like this sort of reinvention of AWS, but this transformation that Andy was saying, and it sounds like something that you're hearing that this has to come from the senior level of really understanding transformation. Not just do we go to the cloud, how, when, what, but also ultimately it's about data. And if you can't access the data, if you can't restore data quickly if there is, whether it's a human error or some sort of catastrophic event, you can't get to what you need, the business suffers, right? And there's going to be another competitor whose objects are closer than they appear in the mirror, right? Who is ready to come in and take over that business. Give me a little bit of a kind of an overview as we wrap up here about Veritas' transformation. As customers are having to pivot really quickly to use data as a competitive advantage. Yes, well look, we think about, our role in digital transformation is in the data transformation part of that. You can't have digital transformation without transforming your data. We talk a lot here about data has gravity. It kind of stands to stick where it is. We're trying to make that data mobile, flexible, protected, available, and visible. And that's really our role is in digital transformation to give you the freedom to use your data wherever you want to use it. That's what we do. One last question actually, on the data that has gravity, we talk about that a lot. Your last thoughts on Amazon moving towards where that gravity is, without post for an example. This is another example of, I think yesterday, and John Furrier even uncovered this and is exclusive with Andy Jassy. It's AWS everywhere, which is just like Amazon.com. And actually just to build on that, John Furrier and I, to Andy Jassy, like three years ago said, the next flywheel for Amazon is data. Is data, absolutely. Data's come up over and over again. I think we're working very closely together with AWS to help make this journey easy for our customers. We're both very customer obsessed. That came up a lot. We are customer obsessed as well. We're innovating step by step. We were the first launch partner with Glacier Deep Archive, so we attend to be at the forefront of allowing our customers to leverage AWS and know that they're protected by Veritas. Yeah, those demanding customers, right? Well, Greg, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program sharing what's new with Veritas and AWS and the transformation that you're both undergoing. We appreciate it. Thank you, Stu. Take care. Of course, Stu Miniman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day two of our coverage of AWS re-invent 19. Thanks for watching.