Hello everyone, thanks for turning up for this chat. We are going to talk about accessibility on general, why it's important and how we're going to start working this in to essentially your workflow, so nothing ever impacts on anything there. Now before we talk, really I'd like to just have a quick hand us the only time you'll be audience participation.  Perfect, you guys are my favourite. So can I give you a bit of a background about myself? Yeah I've worked in local government for a very long time. I was able to kind of use all of my knowledge in that and actually bring that in to into HECS productions. In all honesty accessibility is flipping great in all honesty. It's not only going to help you from making sure that you are including everyone into your website, into your mobile applications, but independently you're bringing that into a bit of an SEO strategy as well. If a screen reader can read your content so can Google. So if you are having a little bit of trouble, really emphasise that point. I've got a background of procuring content management systems so we're actually having a good understanding of it. It is the content management system that helps but it's also a lot of things you need to put into your work there to allow your content to be accessible. Currently we're working with the GES at the moment to actually help implement the legislation into mobile and accessibility. On that point you've got to the 29th, please, please, please submit any consultation with comments that you may have about how to make public bodies websites accessible. To kind of give you a good idea of an inaccessible website, there you go. Some people will not see anything on their web page, they will not hear anything on a web page. So when you're developing something or designing or even thinking about a web page, sometimes this is the response that they're going to get. Absolutely nothing. So we really need to make sure that any website that you create is for everyone. So there's quite a few things that you can kind of think about. Obviously we've just looked at site on there. You could also think about things like hearing impairment. What happens if someone is reading your video but you can't actually see any of the subtitles? They may also just be on a bus and they don't want to actually have their audio being displayed. So again, subtitles is a brilliant way of stopping that. Audio doesn't work, that's a bit of a one. So yeah, by putting things on my subtitles is extremely useful. So it's little things like this that you can start working into your content to actually allow it to work. One thing I would highly recommend doing and I didn't have time to put in this presentation, if you Google frozen audio description, if you've got children, maybe don't do it with them because they'll want to watch that film again and again and again. But have a look at the trailer with their audio described. It is fantastic and it's certainly something that will really help you push things forward. When you're thinking about people with a disability, you're thinking about one in five people in the UK. Now if your website's inaccessible, one in five people cannot access the information on your website. And we all don't think that is right. If you think about this in a real world example, it's a beautiful family, kind of randomly picked at randomly in there. But there's five people in this screen. Now not one of them has declared themselves as being disabled. But you've got four people in that screen that require glasses. You have three people that do have a mild case of dyslexia. You've got two people that have very short attention spans and one person is elderly. Now all of those aspects and all of those ideas of people or those characteristics of people actually require you to think about how your content is on a website or a mobile device. If you think about my sister, she uses the phone all of the time. No matter where you are, time of day she'll be on her phone. Now today is a lovely beautiful day. What happens if her screen is being impaired because there is a bright light of sun on her screen? She can't read her content. So again, thinking of other ways to have that content read out to them or allow them to actually start to in consuming information without the need of relying on just text on the screen. If we think about the population of Northern Ireland, 1.81 million roughly give or take. And if we use the one-in-five statistic, that's 3,62,000 people registered as disabled. So potentially this amount of people cannot view a web page because you've not gone through the proper process to find out why it is inaccessible. So we plan, we design, we develop, we put our life and soul into building things. But we're not thinking about everyone while we do that. Now there could be many reasons why we aren't doing that. Knowledge is a key one. Now we're still learning as an agency. We've partnered up with the Shore Trust to actually bring more knowledge into this. I do not have a visual impairment. I have glasses to help me see when I'm looking at distances. But you've got someone like Alan who is completely blind. Requires a screen reader to actually go through that whole website. I can't replicate that. I can close my eyes and try using the George system. But actually having that knowledge and having that expertise will help us move that forward. And as an agency any website that we produce will be accessible from the AA and AAA standard. And we're using the knowledge from Shore Trust to make sure that anything we produce follows that. The one thing we will talk about a lot today is time. Time is not an excuse. Time is something that we can always make for. Time is something that is just that we've not workflowed it properly. We need to think about every step. Who's got a fan of a client that always wants a logo just a little bit more bigger? Or they really want a website to pop out of the screen. In all honesty, if you should be building, designing or creating websites, accessibility should always be in your mind. You should always be developing or designing a website that is accessible. It should happen for them automatically. There will always fall back to you and say, well it's going to cost me more money if it's going to be accessible. And they think as a designer, a developer, an agency owner, that it's going to cost you more money to do that. But again it's thinking about how your workflow is in place to make sure that everything that you do is just flowing the normal flow. If the client is really adamant that I've got no money, you can't make this website accessible, think about a very orange airline that has very decent fares. They've got on their website that nearly half a million people registered, disabled use their flight services. If you think about that from an average fare, it's definitely didn't pay that to come over here, but an average fare is roughly about 90 pounds. So if they couldn't service those people on a website, on their application, that's a hell of a lot of money that they're losing. And it's little things like that that we can easily put into our briefs, our conversations with clients, to actually show them what they are missing out on. But that's the client. Think about your everyday life. How many times have you missed a bean collection and needed to contact a council to say, can you come and pick it back up again? A lot of website forms are inaccessible, labels are done incorrectly, maybe the colour contrast is incorrect. If you think of everything that you do on a day-to-day level, you've done a thing. There's a lot of people here that can't actually use the content, they can't consume anything. So really have to think about that and then take those real-world examples to your client. And the way that we looked at this is we saw that there was a need. You know, we needed to start making websites that are fully accessible for everyone. So we did, we partnered with the short trust. A few of us went down to need to actually witness one of our councils actually being completely audited. We were able to sit back and actually witness this. So we had a lot of different disabilities being shown to us and actually how the websites will actually start being put together. The team were fantastic, they're really well-conducted, they really opened our eyes up to different ways of doing things. And these are real people. We use personas all of the time in the work that we do. But hands-on people actually use a persona that actually has a disability or has something that has a way of not using a web page efficiently. You know, we don't think about this. So we use real people to actually find out what they're doing and how they're using their websites to make sure that it is working right for them. So how can we do it? How can we help our clients, how can we help people that are visiting the web pages to do that? Everything starts here. That very first meeting, that very first client interaction that you have, be it an email, a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, everything gets brought up here. You tell them why you're making your websites successful. You're telling them what we're doing to make sure that we're doing that. This may not be with a client. This can be your team, your third-party providers, your freelancers that you might be using. Anyone that's part of your project should be brought in for accessibility right at the start. We try to go to a content management provider. They wanted us to help them with accessibility. They said, great, come and talk to us when it's 80% done and we'll start talking about accessibility. Think of how many things have gone wrong since then. Think of how many times they've had a question, but they've just not thought about it so they've done the display none. We've hidden it straight away. Everything should be considered right at the start. Once you've moved that on, then start to think about the wireframes. So even though you're not putting any colour to the screen, what you're doing is you're starting to get the layout right. Is there a carousel or a slider being involved in here? Are video things... Yes, fantastic. So how is that going to be displayed on a screen reader? So when a slide moves, are you still reading the content? Does the person have control of the slider? Does the video auto play?  And things that we always look at, and I have to thank you very much for bringing us up yesterday during the Contribute today, theallyproject.com checklist is fantastic. When you start wireframing, check this out, because it will give you a couple of points of where you can actually start, be it at certain areas. It's something that is definitely worth just making a little note. So when it goes to your designer or your developer, you'll then be able to start working with them on that. And then moving on to the design phase. They're aware of what's gone on. They're aware of what we're doing, what we're trying to achieve and how we're trying to achieve it. So start thinking with them and start talking to the developers. Make sure there's a nice flow with everyone talking, because this will help them. Good things that they can really concentrate on is color contrast. So color contrast is massive. You need to make sure that you are differentiating certain parts. So here we've got an example of a colorblind test. There's a number in there. Some people in this room will be able to see it, and some people won't be able to see it. So what we need to do as designers and developers is make sure that we find ways that they can differentiate. Certain things you can try are the color contrast checker. So this is what was our corporate orange. And this was our corporate background on our website. And we found out that we failed every single time. So, by making extremely small change to the foreground color, we've then become pretty much successful on heading text. And yes, we're not very good on the normal text, but very little chance that we're going to be using that. But if you just look at the lightness and the difference between the two that we're using, that is a minor difference. It's very, very small. But I'll tell you what, that is making a world of difference to a lot of people. A quick one to go on. The resource color contrast checker. Please give it a go. You can put in hex codes. If you have a Mac or anything, there are color droppers that you can pick up in news and there are apps. All of these links will be available, so we'll make sure that you will have access to all of these as well. We use Trello on a second-by-second basis that feels like I was getting notifications up. But they have labels, and the way that they've worked on the color contrast is actually putting in patterns to allow people to differentiate between the different colors within there. So it's not just a case of making sure that you're only using completely opposite colors. You're actually putting patterns into that as well. And because everything that you've done, everyone's been part of this, you can then pass this over to the developers. You've got your wireframes. You know where you're going to be using certain roles. You're going to be using certain other items. And then what it will be now is they'll just be putting those final touches on things. They'll be making sure that you've got skip links in there. They'll make sure that you've got the right areas, the right links in the right places because it's all been wireframed. It's all been thoughts about it. The design is all been there for you. One of our biggest, biggest bug bears are these beautiful things. Everyone's social links. Everyone's using something like font awesome or maybe another icon font. My SVG's fantastic. You can put a title in there. You can get the text being read out to you. But if you have kind of the standard font awesome font, that's great. It's being displayed on the screen. Now, if you put a web link in there, you'd think, right, on a screen reader that needs to be read out. But the problem is, they're not going to read anything. There's no text in there whatsoever stating that this is a link to something. So by putting just a hidden area in here, there's not been displayed from the front end. It's been just displayed in the code. It's allowing you to say what the link is doing. So someone like Alan, who uses a screen reader, will actually hear Visit Facebook and they know that they'll be going to the Facebook web page. So you're taking a photo. I won't change it. And from the front end, everything looks the same. Nothing's changed. So your styles, you're going to keep your designers happy. You're going to keep the initial quality and happy as well because it's still going to be looking exactly the same. Not rambled on quite a bit. Now I'd like you guys to actually see or hear this in action. So we're going to welcome Alan up to the screen to give you a quick introduction. And then what we're going to do is go through how a screen reader uses and it hurt me to do a very bad accessible web page and how the difference it looks from an accessible and a good web page. Now we're going to do this on the screen. So if you want to see Alan's keys and how they're using it, if you want to visit www.Thorlicks.com. We're going to try and set up a bit of a live streaming as well. So on your phone or on your laptop you'll be able to see what Alan is actually typing and why you can see this being done on the screen as well. So just give us a couple of minutes and we'll just get this set up. So afternoon is it on the screen? On the screen is a site that James has put together or that cheese. This is his bad site for accessibility. In a moment we'll show you how the better one or the good one looks. So please take note, hopefully this shouldn't be any change visually. Now James obviously said you can watch how Jaws works but think about like virtual reality if you want to close your eyes be in my virtual reality and hear what I see because sometimes the site and your hearing sort of overtakes. But I'll leave that to you. Right, so with Jaws I use a lot of shortcut keys to navigate around a page. Now we've got memories for a screen reader they only hear where the cursor lands nothing around the outside or to left or to the right or any direction. So it's just literally where the cursor lands is why here. So I'm just going to refresh the page pretending that I've just gone through it by a googling because I'm think. That's fine isn't it. Okay, so when James sent me this initially it didn't make me sit back in my chair. So hopefully I can trust it. Okay, so this is the initial link ready. Okay, so we've got contrast here of Jaws talking and the video. The problem is I can't hardly hear anything or could you hear me? Okay, so we've got some shortcut keys that you might look at before hopefully I can go straight to it on call. Oh, thank you for that. Okay, so it's taken me a few minutes or seconds to find out where pause is and to actually pause the video so I can operate my screen user screen reader sorry to navigate around the page. Now the first thing I normally do when I get to a page is look for headings. Now headings will for screen reader minimise how much information is on a screen. If you think of a newspaper you've got a heading and then you've got different text size or font size to each story and your eyes can visually go to that story you want could be on the page and then go to that page to get more information from it. That is just like a web page hopefully with headings but if you imagine you've got no headings it will be like looking at paper all the same font same colour all the way down and what I'll have to do then is listen to the whole page. Now we've only got a small page here but if you imagine a bigger site we've got 20-30 pages to get the information you actually want it's going to be quite difficult. So I have got a shortcut key which brings down all the headings and hopefully heading list dialogue heading list view more videos calling to one of one to remove the items in the video. Oh was it? Oh. Okay. More videos calling to one of one. So there because James Tate said there's no headings there but we have got one which is the YouTube video but I've got nothing else. So am I now thinking of a page or is it just videos? Okay because if I've got that then I can quickly jump to that information. I'll get my key buddy. Enter heading level 2 more videos. YouTube video. So it's down to YouTube video. Link out to make cheddar cheese. If I want to know how to make cheddar cheese I'm there. Anything else it doesn't matter. Okay but obviously on a website you can have your details in contact details. You're going to have different information about cheeses on here or to go to other people's websites that perhaps sponsoring you or allowing you to advertise on there. So headings are a really good tool for a screen reader. Okay now we heard a little bit of the form fields. We're looking to making a contact. Now James on his site has put not just any contact details but he's actually got somewhere we can sign up to have alerts or a newsletter which again is for somebody who's doing a site it's going to be really good to keep in contact with that person who's visiting. But the headings they've got no information there about how to keep in contact. Select a more field dialogue and list one, list two. Watch later button 118 to move to item new with the arrow keys. Share next button. Close button. Seek slider play button. Unlabeled once later 100% button. So I've got a button which this is button. You've got your eyes shut then you haven't got a clue what it's going to do. Setting menu. Fullscreen button. Name edit. Email edit. Name edit. I've got name which okay it's a name. I don't know what I'm signing up for but it's a name. Email edit. Email. Radio button. I've checked. Okay and I'm not checking. I've got a button that I've not checked. Radio button. I've checked. But I'm going to clue what am I signing up for or is it to allow other sites that we've heard today to have that information is it allowing people to share certain information. So I may be going down there clicking it and not really knowing what it is as um Caps lock off. Caps lock off. This game. I can also navigate individually. I don't have to use the jewels list. Name edit. So it's got name. Email edit. Grabbing the top. Name edit. Email edit. Right. So email. Radio button. I've checked. HTML. Okay. So I've got to go down there. Radio button. I've checked. Is actually the HTML. What for? I don't know. Radio button. I've checked. Plain text. Plain text. So I've got something over my HTML or plain text. Now is that for the email? Is that for a newsletter? I've got to start guessing. Something else that comes on websites that perhaps is more of a debate on the people who are blind or visually impaired is the use of graphics. Now graphics are good for myself. I lost my site when I was 28. But I've got some memory of images. You know, things are happening in life. So it will bring a website to life. But what we've got here hopefully. Select a graphic dialogue. List one. List zero. Hello Belfast. Hello Belfast. Okay. Now I can work that out as hello Belfast. Okay. The only difference there really, again, is it's not even taking time. The only part thing is that James hasn't put a space between hello and Belfast. Now that's an easier one to work out. Some aren't. I have to go over it key by key. Cheese-photo.jpg Okay. So we've got cheese-photo.jpg Well okay it's cheese. Right fine. We did a little bit better than I did suggest. Some websites I'd like to go to and there's graphics on there which are just numbered. There's just got some numbers there. Now the problem there is I don't know whether I'm missing something. Is it an instruction? Is it something that's going to be important information behind? Let's be wondering what is going to happen there. Okay. But I do know it's a cheese-photo and it's got a lot of information after that. Which cheese do you like? Okay. Which cheese do you like? Oh good. I know that one. So you're gabbling her on. Okay. What's really there? It should be a list. Okay. A great sort of example that I taught somebody is your list when you go shop in chocolate buttons. Okay. So do you get chocolate buttons from Cadris or do you get two items chocolate and some buttons for wherever you need buttons for? Okay. So the screen reader is just listing or reading a whole sentence which should be actually a list. So which phrase event led? Okay. You've also heard the video. Again just for the dialogue. List one, list two. Watch later. Play button. Play. Okay. Sometimes. Oh yes. There's no where to talk about the combination of buttons. Again show you the beginning. Call. Again because I can use the initial letter if not too bad. However we've got about five videos to play and obviously play and pause of the same initial letter is going to take me a long time to get there. Yeah. Okay. Now I hope they're going to change so if I delete this it'll be. Oh yeah. Oh dad. Oh dad. Website or ls-microsoft word. Website or good example. Hopefully. I thought you were. Good example. Enter. Okay we'll do your options or we can click it. I'll say I thought it was good. Microsoft word dialogue enabled to open hdmps colon slash slash orlix.com slash A11 to build. That's a wonderful thing. Main script to edit. Internet explorer. Escape for a fresh new page. Address and search using an easy example of good an easy example of good A11Y. Page has one frame. Two regions. Six settings and eight links. Okay. Quite good. There's a button there that just turns people's options again. No. So what we're going to do is just go over now the good example to assist screen readers. Okay. So as we said before we've got the first time to go on there. We're going to look for head ins. Heading list dialogue. Heading list new. Hello. Belfast word cam. Belfast colon one. One of six. So we've got heading level one. So we're going to activate that. It should go straight to the main information on this page. Which obviously is saying hello to yourselves. Some content you might want to read colon two. Content you're going to read. So we're not going to that heading. I'm going to get the information I want underneath. A wedge of Swiss cheese ready to be Swiss cheese. Do you like colon two? Okay. Some examples of cheese colon three. Contact us colon two. Okay. Now we've got the best of it first. Developers. And now you've got to contact us. So I could go straight there. And then there's the newsletter. Okay. So again I can just ignore in a way the rest of the page and quickly jump to that and think what I want to do. Get the newsletter. Escape. I've seen the example of code A11Y. Blitz list dialogue. Blitz list 0. Okay. Now I've got a link slave. We didn't go over that on the bad example. But I can just show you on the good one. Skip the content.  Depending on how many you've got there is the how the distance from the top to your main content. Now you've got to skip link it would or should skip the user all the way down to the main information. Alternatively a screen reader can use the number one to jump to the heading level one or as you've seen it will hurt going up to the heading list and finding that hello Belfast. Accessibility statement. Okay. Next one down to the link accessibility statement. Two things here. The accessibility statement should give confidence to people who use assistive technology to know that your site is helping them. So they've got that confidence of going all through your procedures and actually getting to the end product. Along with helpful hints that perhaps they're not known before especially if they've just started using assistive technology, things like the PDFs and other documents. Lots of times when we test the site the accessibility link is normally or sometimes at the bottom of the page. Now for myself I think well if there's something there that's going to help somebody don't you want it the first one or two links you're at. For myself I don't have the information if I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom. I've been there, I've done it already. Okay. Don't load our keys making PDF left bracket 200 kb right bracket left. Okay. So there's a PDF file there. On the bad one it wasn't labeled as a PDF it was just a link. This one was only user whether it was screen reader or can you see it visually? Visually it's PDF, you know what document you're opening and the sites. It's giving all the information there to anybody who wants to take note of that or if they want to open it and realise that it's up to them. Sign it up for our expert course left parent, external link, right parent. Okay. So we've got the sign of help for our expert course. Okay. Now James has put information alongside. Again can you see it visually? No. Okay. So it's not visual but for a screen reader it's allowing them to know that when activating that link it's going to go to a new window. Now you might think why is that important? The importance is that somebody might go then on that new window go to the home link and think they're coming back on your home page. If they're not realising they're actually on a different site. There you may lose your client, your visitor. Okay. But there you're giving them the information to know how to navigate back to your site or to delete the one they're on which automatically will go back to yours. Oh it's me calling. Okay. Now hopefully that the links maybe will directly give in the direction to the screen reader what information is going to happen or what you're going to get when you activate that link. So let's have a look at these graphs hopefully. Okay. Well hello. Well come and bill faster. Okay. Okay. So that one is a same graphics but it's a bit more descriptive. It's telling me what sort of cheese it is. Now we ended up discussing last night and said that perhaps somebody who's been blind since birth is not necessarily going to remember what image that is in their head. But there must be some of the in my opinion scents of how Swiss cheese tasted or smelt. And I think I'm sure it would have that sort of sense if they knew it was there as well. So again a good description on actually what's happening is beneficial. So let's go and see if we can find how to sign up for the slice of cheese. Go about 30 seconds. Sorry?  Here's what I did to before. Details nailed. You know. That gives them a brief outline on one page on the experience of an inaccessible website... ...that will hinder somebody who wants to visit your site... ...and keep on them being interested. Y ni'n cael ei bod i'r ysgolwyd, ar y cyfnod, i neud i gael â'r cyfuddio, cyfnodi'r cyffredin, ac yn ddwi'r ysgolwyd wedi'i gael ei sgolwyd. Felly roedd yn gallu gwpeth gweld i'r teimlach a gweithio leaders. Rhaid i chi bod yn ddigon. I hope you found that. It really is your document when you actually see this actually in place. So just a few things to sum up, putting this into your workflow until you see this actually happening, we find it very hard to actually start to move things forward. So things that is worth going back to actually start implementing into maybe some of your code. Please have a look at the ARIA website to allow you to add extra information to maybe some of the code that you develop. So for example, if you add something to a basket, then it's great if you find out someone's been added to a basket, but from a screen reader's point of view, how do they know what's been activated? So things like ARIA Live is extremely exciting from the code point of view. You can actually program your shopping cart to read out that maybe one item has been booked, maybe the seats number, the cost, everything will be read out to them and you've not done anything extra. You just put this little label into some of your code and it's allowing a screen reader to be read out. So extremely useful. There are so many of these little labels to have a look at. Please take your time and have a good look through them. Wave is brilliant. It's a very good automated tool. So when you go through some of your checks with maybe some of your designers or your developers, using something like Wave on a Chrome or Firefox plug-in, all actually on this web page, it will quickly highlight some of the issues, heading structure, contrast issues, forms not being correctly labeled. Very, very good, very quick, very easy to use. Site Improve also do a Chrome extension and it does exactly the same thing, but this will actually link you to the WCAG guidelines that you're actually failing at the moment. So rather than just seeing what the error is, it will help you educate and actually start finding out why this is an issue. Again, I know these links go pretty quick. I'll tweet them out. You can use them as much as you can afterwards. And that's it from us. Thank you very much, guys.


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Welcome to news desk on Silicon Angle TV for Tuesday, October 30th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Superstorm Sandy has made landfall on the east coast, the unwanted offspring of a tropical cyclone, and colder winter weather has left many people stranded with transport to, from, and within New York at a standstill, and stock trading on Wall Street suspended as well. Joining us with his breaking analysis on the impact of Sandy in the tech world is Silicon Angle founder John Furrier. Welcome John. John, the damage that continues to unfold as a result of Sandy has impacted the tech world in several ways as well, including the addition of crisis information available on a mobile device. In anticipation of Hurricane Sandy, Google set up what it calls a crisis map, a mobile feature where users can find power outage maps and information on shelters, storm tracking, and public alerts. How do you respond to Google's quick thinking? I think, I think it's really a great example of how technology is helping, helping, helping disasters. If you look back at history, you look back to Katrina and other storms, and this storm in particular is being dubbed the perfect storm, which really matches the no-name storm of 1991. And, you know, back then there was no cell phones in that, that day and age, but this is a great example how real-time communication is being impacted. So, from a disaster standpoint, you're seeing companies like Google, like Nervonex, offering services to people to help them avoid disasters. So, with Google's case, they're giving them real-time information, and with Twitter it's the same way, and with Nervonex, they're offering the ability to move data center information for free. That's really the key, is that the technology is there, and companies are looking at it as a service, not for money, but to develop value with the users and help people. Just like the last three presidential elections have been transformed by a new social media service, YouTube, Facebook, and now Twitter, natural disasters and tragedies are emerging as a way for social media services to gain respect and legitimacy as world-changing agents. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom delivered the message that there are now 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag Sandy. Could this be Instagram's big citizen journalism moment? Absolutely. I think it's everyone's moment. See, the thing about this is that the media business has changed, and we talked about this during the elections. Social media now is part of everyone's life. So, to me, the big striking analysis out of all this is that the information coming in from the market, or as we say in the tech business, the edge of the network, that's the users, with mobile phones is staggering. So, with Instagram, they're seeing 10 photos per second, or something like that. Crazy numbers are just a lot of information. So, that talks about a flood, a tsunami of data coming in. But also, you're seeing the humanization. And we talked about this in New York City last week around big data. Big data, and Kit Dodson of SiliconANGLE wrote a great post about how big data is helping the forecasters. What we're seeing is a humanization of technology, where people are helping each other in ways that just are natural. So, for disasters, you're seeing real-time communication and social media become the citizen journalism moment. Yes, check that box. Two, more importantly, information is being disseminated. No more public broadcast announcements on TV. You get press conferences and other vehicles. But Twitter and real-time internet is truly the medium of choice now for real-time market information. So, that's not just that messages. That's pictures, images, commentary, safety, food, shelter, etc. So, this is really about the humanization of our culture. As social media continues to play an active role in news gathering, how can big data play a part in that? As we talked about on SiliconANGLE all last week, which is Big Data Week, ironically in New York City, is that big data allows for technology and machines and computers and humans figure out what is happening relative to the storm, for example. So, in this case, think about the predictive analytics involved in big data and the amount of data involved to compute all the different scenarios of, say, a hurricane. So, literally, knowing what's going on relative to the storm path is a great example. And look at what New York City had done in preparing. And they still could have done a better job, but they really had this thing predicted to the actual beach that this thing was going to land on, Sandy, and the path of destruction and its way. So, that allows people an early warning detection system to plan and plan accordingly. Big Data is absolutely critical. If we knew this information with Katrina, things could have been avoided there. But Big Data allows us to get a first look at these things. And this is really the highlight of how Big Data is changing the world for the betterment of it. And again, there's a human element here. It's not just technology. The humans are the ones creating the insights and synthesizing the data. Twitter has provided a roundup of accounts suggested by local and state government officials that users can follow to get real-time emergency information, plus tips for using Twitter during a crisis. With massive power outages, plaguing victims of the storm, cell phones and mobile apps are really the only means of worldwide internet communication for many individuals. How is social media changing the way the general public can seek assistance in times of crisis? Well, I think it's just another one of those avenues where you have a mobile phone, assuming you have electricity and battery power, and the cell towers are operational. And I heard a talk from Qualcomm after Katrina at Telecosm event, George Gilder's event at one time. And the engineers were actually working on safety ways to actually in a disaster, have cell towers, have this peer-to-peer mesh network. So there is technology where mobile phones will be resilient in a way to provide that first responder usage for safety. So mobile phones and anything that touches the consumer will be a first responder capability as an avenue. Two, more importantly, getting information. So for example, with relative weather conditions in the storm, people can get information, talk to their peers, get really an insight of how bad it is. So in New York City, for example, battery was completely flooded at a record high flood. You know, I see people taking pictures, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out, don't go there or don't drive there. So, you know, information travels very, very rapidly or frictionlessly, as we say. And that's a good thing for helping people understand what's going on and they can protect themselves. Data center providers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. area said they are testing and fueling up their emergency backup generators, preparing to maintain services during any utility power outages caused by the hurricane. That includes having key staff on site for the duration of the storm. What's the key focus for these data centers at this time? And this is a great example. And, you know, we highlighted on Silicon Angle that startup Nervonix was offering a service for free to move all the data center and data out of these areas. And really what this is about is this is something that's not really talked about in the mainstream press, but certainly in the world that we live in around IT enterprises is that data center backup and recovery and disaster recovery is critical. So, this is a great example of what a company needs to do to avoid essentially being down. So, a lot of companies architect their data centers in a multi-homed way, multiple geographies. So, really what it's about is using those predictive analytics we mentioned and essentially preparing for essentially an outage. So, you have to assume the worst, hope for the best. And in this case, the technology is now available for data centers to actually be prepared and move the workload or computation or data center activities to another geography. So, you can literally shift the data, as pointed out by Nervonix, to other geographies completely free from the disaster. So, if something does happen, a flood or natural disaster or generator or power outage, they'll be prepared for it. Again, that's the worst case. Most data centers have backup and recovery capabilities, full-on power generators as just in case, as they don't have to switch that workload. But now, you're talking about full redundancy. And this is the direction of cloud that we talk about, a fully operational data center. Data center providers issued statements saying that all of their backup generators had been extensively tested. Hospitals in NYC made the same claims, however, we found out that some backup generators failed, forcing hospital staff and residents to move out. What would data centers do in the event of a backup generator failure? They would be basically similar to the hospitals if they're going to rely on those operations. Essentially, those operations will be shut down. So, if you have a backup generator that fails, assuming there's no power in the area, they have no choice. They can't run their equipment. So, essentially, they're effectively out of service, which is detrimental to the business if you're talking about providing public safety and or critical infrastructure services. It's a fail. If it's just a corporation, you know, if they're working or if it's a disaster in the area, then it might not be that impactful, but ultimately, there'll be no service. So, therefore, they'll be out of commission. That's why the data centers create fault-tolerant ways to do that. And I think ultimately, you'll see hospitals and other services create that kind of grid capabilities where they can move power around. So, that's something that's being talked about as a future direction. Not surprisingly, the storm has also affected several tech events. Yesterday, Sandy forced Google to cancel its event in New York. Why is Facebook also a loser in this scenario? Well, I think, you know, the everyone's events that was going on is a complete failure, because if you look at this, this is one of those things where everyone's hyping up a lot of things. I mean, you had the Kimmel show was also going on. You had the Facebook event for engineering. You also had the Google launch. I think it was an All Things D conference as well.  But in the wake of what this kind of storm is, this super storm or hurricane, the perfect storm, as I called it, it's pretty disastrous. So, they really can't do business, and that's just a loss financially. And I think they just have to take one, take a loss, a big loss there. ABC's Joanna Stern has compiled a list of useful apps to keep people in the loop during the storm's duration. Can you tell us how app developers can stay ahead of the game and developing apps that people actually need during emergency situations? Yeah. I mean, first of all, the couple things with respect to the applications you pointed out earlier around the question around, you know, using social media and mobile devices as a way to stay in touch. Absolutely, that's the case. And I think what you're seeing now is really the first generation of social media applications being mobile to be available. App developers can stay ahead a couple of ways. One is having a framework that can be for rapid agile development. And two, with the tsunami of data, as you talked about the tsunami of pictures and journalism coming from the field, there's a lot of signal noise ratio. So, there's two things that people have to really be aware of. One is the curation of what is a critical service of what's relevant to the user. And two, filtering. Because there's a lot of noise, ultimately it's about the signal from the noise and that no matter what the situation is, a user needs to find an application that's going to work for them. So, again, this is one of those situations where the benefit of the technology also is an Achilles heel and what will happen for app developers, they have to have a really elegant app with really good navigation and ultimately has to be discoverable. Users have to know where the app is. So, again, this is the full innovation cycle. It needs a search capability and with social media pushing those apps to the edge is where it's at. So, I think it's an opportunity for developers to develop really quick apps, curation and signal from the noise and also make the apps discoverable. Wall Street has closed for the duration of the storm. What does that mean for the stock market and do you see that having a larger implications on the economy? I don't see it as an implication in the economy. I think it was a good call to shut it down. I think it was the first time that it was shut down since 9-11 and ultimately if you looked at the footage yesterday, the pictures, it was massively flooded. So, I don't think it's going to have a major impact on the market. I think it's a good thing I think we need to take a break from the market. I think given it's an election year, there's a lot of volatility in the economy and I think you're seeing that obviously with the international. Some are saying we're going to go over off a cliff financially and I hope not with the election here that the economy can continue to run but I don't see it having any impact to the economy at all. If anything, it might be good to get a breather and get a perspective that, hey, this is kind of a disaster and people are losing their lives, give the financial system some well-needed break but I think it was a good call to shut down the stock market and keep everyone safe. Do you think the stall of the stock market and the destruction caused by Sandy will have an impact on the election? You know, there's been speculation that obviously the previous disasters, Katrina in particular really hurt Bush and Obama was clearly out front yesterday, politicking around this, coming across as a soundbite, stay home and it's pretty obvious you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how bad the storm was. This was well forecasted, you know, as Kit Dotson at Silicon Angle pointed out, the big data was already in play, the analytics on this thing so we kind of all knew this was the perfect storm. This wasn't like in 1991 where it was just kind of popped up on everyone and I remember I was actually on the edge of the ocean in Massachusetts during that storm and we had to evacuate that town I was in and no one knew this was coming so Obama saw this coming so I think he's taking a preemptive strike to essentially make sure this doesn't hurt him politically but yes this could hurt Obama if it was not well played. I thought he played it pretty well here and there was no no flag in my mind on Obama. The preparedness and the first responders and all the communities on the path of the hurricane were well prepared, the technology was there, the social media was there. I think ultimately again big data is the hero of this one and how it affected the human society in this case the humanization of the big data really played out well and this is a great case study of what big data can do to help people get insights in this case insights equals preparedness and readiness and also preventative from damage. This is the last time that we've spoke with you since the end of Big Data Week and I wanted to ask you a question about that. Yesterday in our Big Data Week wrap up we spoke with Mark Risen-Hopkins about real-time analytics emerging as one of the new themes at the O'Reilly Stratoconference. What are your thoughts on real-time analytics and what other themes did you notice at the IBM IOD event during Big Data Week? I think Mark pointed out really good we saw real-time analytics as a core theme and ultimately that is the killer application for big data right now there's a lot of technology going on innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond around building new tech to actually fill in the blanks if you will for what we're seeing as emerging areas around cloud mobile and social so platforms and tools that are coming available and applications are still yet to come however the Big Data Killer app today is analytics and what that means is that means insights so real-time information in this case we're talking about the disaster really highlight what we saw at Big Data Week okay and that is is that insights equals action actions equals value and and so analytics and insights is in the top theme the second theme that came out of Big Data Week was business value in this case business value is people value with the disaster so if you look at what we're just talking about if you substitute business value with you know society value big data also works for that value proposition so you know analytics and insight is at the top trend and the second big trend is in value business value society value human value and I think that is exactly what big data is all about and again this week if you look at the disaster the shining light of all this was big data is the hero big data created those insights those insights create value that value of saving lives this is a great example and applies to business and our human life well John thank you so much for your time today we appreciate you joining us thanks for in-depth coverage on tech news of the day and the latest breaking analysis tune in daily to news desk on silicon angle tv


Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week is John Troyer and happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alumni. We have Margaret Dawson and John Alasio. Margaret is the Vice President of Portfolio Product Marketing and John is the Vice President of Global Services. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. John has gotten the week and a half now of Red Hat greatness being at Summit last week. I unfortunately missed Summit first time in five years I hadn't been at the show. Did watch some of the interviews, caught up on it and of course we've talked to a lot of your team but yeah, Margaret let's start with you. One of the things we're looking at is really it's not just the maturation of OpenStack but it's beyond where we were, how it fits into the greater picture. Something we've been observing is when you think about open source projects it's not one massive stack that you just deploy. It's you take what you need it kind of gets embedded all over the place and help us frame for us where we are today. It's a big question. So I think there's a couple things. I mean in talking to customers I think there's a couple trends that are happening. One is one you've probably talked about a lot and we've probably covered at the Red Hat Summit which is just this overall digital transformation, digital leadership, whatever you want to call it. Digital disruption tends to be a thing and open source is definitely playing really the critical role in that. You will not be able to innovate and disrupt or even manage a disruption if you're not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt to it and have it work with other things. So the need for openness, for open APIs, for open technologies, interoperability allows us to move faster and have that innovation and agility that every enterprise and organization needs worldwide. And tied to that is kind of this overall hybrid cloud. So it's not just open stack is a part of a much bigger kind of solution or goal that enterprises have in order to win and transform and be a digital leader. Margaret, I love that digital transformation absolutely something we hear time and again from customers. John, I've got a confession to make. I'm an infrastructure person. Okay.  He missed the blinking lights. He did miss the blinking lights. They had a similar stack up on stage actually yesterday. Same fans you could hear in the back of the room. But the whole goal of infrastructure always of course is to run the applications, the whole reason for applications is to run and transform and do the business. So that's where I'm going with this is we're talking more about not only, you know, that foundational layer of open stack, but everything that goes with it and on it. So maybe you could talk about the services and things that you're at. So I think, Stu, that's exactly what we're seeing. So if you think about the last year and what we're seeing with services and projects around open stack, I think the first thing to talk about is fact that it's been growing quite a bit in fact. You know, from a 2017 versus 2018 perspective, our number of open stack projects have increased 36% year on year globally. So we're seeing a lot of demand, but we're seeing the projects be a lot more comprehensive. So these are open stack projects, but they're open stack with open shift with cloud forms with stuff as an example. And this combination is really a very, very powerful combination. In fact, it's been so powerful that we started to see some common patterns of customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using open stack as their kind of private cloud infrastructure, but then using open shift as their way to kind of deploy applications in containers in that hybrid way that we created a whole solution which we announced two weeks ago when John was at our Red Hat Summit called Containers on Cloud. And that's taking all of our best practices around combining these products together in a very comprehensive, programmatic approach to deploying those solutions together. And I think it's really important. I mean, as you know, I think you and I met when we were both in networking. So coming from that infrastructure background, but we really all need to talk about the workload down, starting with the application, starting with the business goal, and then how the infrastructure is almost becoming a services-based abstraction layer where you just need it to be always there. And whether it's public cloud or private cloud or traditional infrastructure, what developers in the business want is that agility and flexibility and containers provide that. There's other kind of architectural fabrics that allow that consistency, and that's when it gets really exciting. One thing that's been interesting to me this week at OpenStack, as we've drilled into different customers and talking to different people, even at lunch, is one, one, it's real. Everyone I've talked to, stuff in deployment, it went quickly, it's rock solid, it's powering, you know, as we know actually a lot of, that is technical infrastructure that's powering a lot of the world's infrastructure at this point. The other thing that was interesting to me is some folks I've talked to were saying, well, we were actually, we have enough knowledge that we're actually doing a lot of it ourselves. We're going upstream. However, so that's great, it's great, and that's right for some people. But what I've kind of been interested both, just coming from Red Hat Summit, is both the portfolio, the breadth of the stack and all the different offerings that Red Hat, you know, it's not real anymore, right? It's not just Linux anymore, there's everything that's been built up and around and on top for orchestration and management. And then also, and then the training, the services, the support and that sort of thing. I was wondering, that's kind of a two-part question, but maybe y'all could tackle that. What does Red Hat bring to the table then? So let me just start with, again, just to kind of position, what we do as global services, our number one priority is customer success with Red Hat technology, that's the first and foremost thing we do. And second is really around building expertise in the ecosystem, so our customers have choice on where to go to get that expertise. So if you start to look at kind of what's been going on as it relates to OpenStack, and again, many customers are using upstream bits, but many customers are using Red Hat bits. And we see that when we look at the number of people who are getting trained around our technology. So over the last three years, we've trained through our fee-based programs, 55,000 people on our OpenStack portfolio. And in fact, from 2017 to 2018, that was up 50% year on year. And so the momentum is super, super strong. So that's the first point. The second is it's not just our customers, right? So part of my remit is yes to run consulting and yes to drive customer enablement and training, but it's also to build an ecosystem through our business partners. Our business partners use a program we called Open, online partner enablement network, which actually will just be celebrating five years just like OpenStack will. We'll be celebrating five years for Open. And our business partner accreditation on OpenStack specifically are up 49% year on year. So we're seeing the momentum in our regional systems integrators, our global systems integrators, our partners at large, building their solutions and capabilities around OpenStack, which I think is fantastic. No, and it helps a lot with the verticalization of that, right? Because every industry has slightly different things they need. The thing I would add to that, in terms of do-it-yourself community versus a distro that's supported from someone like Red Hat, is it really comes down to core competency. And so even though OpenStack has become vastly simplified from a day one, day two ongoing management, it is still a complex project. I mean, that's the power of it. It can be highly customizable, right? It is an incredibly powerful infrastructure capability. And so for most people, their core competency is not that. And they need that support, at least initially to get it going. What we have done is a couple things, is I've actually talked to customers a lot about doing that training earlier. And it's for a couple reasons. One is so that they actually have the people in house that have that competency. But two, you're giving infrastructure folks a chance to be part of that future cool stuff, right? I mean, OpenStack's written in Python, and yeah, there's other languages that are newer and sexier, I guess. But it's still kind of moving them towards that future. And for a lot of guys that have been in the data center and the ops world for a long time, they're looking out there at developers and going, I'm not the cool kid anymore, right?  So training them early in the process is a really powerful way to do a lot of things. Skill set, retention, as well as then you can manage more of that yourself. And then all the way up the stack, right? We're talking about containers. There's containers, but then there's container native storage, container native networking. You've got the rest of the pieces in OpenShift and the rest. That's correct. And I think, John, you were at Red Hat Summit, we had a number of different innovation award winners. So I think one good example of kind of this kind of transformation from a digital transformation perspective, but also kind of leveraging a lot of what our stack has to offer is Cathay Pacific. And so we talked about Cathay, they were one of our innovation award winners. And what their challenge really was is how do they create a new modern infrastructure that gave them more flexibility so they could be more responsive to their customers in the airline industry. And so what they were really looking for was really truly a hybrid cloud solution. They wanted to be able to have some things run in their infrastructure, some things run in the public cloud. And we worked with them over the last little over a year now, Red Hat Consulting, Red Hat Training, the Red Hat Engineering Team, and really building a solution that leveraged OpenStack, yes. But also a number of other capabilities in the Red Hat portfolio, OpenShift, so they can deploy these applications, these containerized applications now, both to the public cloud, as well as to the private cloud, but also automation through Ansible, which we're hearing a lot about Ansible and products like Ansible here at the conference. Well, the OpenStack and Ansible communities are starting to really work well together, just like Kubernetes. You've got a lot of this collaboration happening at the project level, not to mention when we actually productize it and take it to customers. So it's been super, super powerful and I think it's a good one where it really hit on what Margaret was saying, which was giving the guys in infrastructure an opportunity to be a part of this huge transformation that Cathay went through, because they were a very, very key part of it. Well, I think we're seeing that also with the Open Innovation Labs. So this is something which is really an innovation, incubation process, it's agile, scrum, whatever. And in those, we're not just talking to the developers, we're actually combining developers, functional lines of business leaders, infrastructure, architects who all come together in a very typical six-week kind of agile methodology. And what comes out of that, I don't know, I've seen it a couple of times, it's magical is all I can say, but having those different perspectives and having those different people work together to innovate is so powerful and they all feel like they're moving that forward. And you come out with pilots and we've seen things where they come out with two apps at the end of six weeks or eight weeks. It's just incredible when they're all focused on that and you start to understand those different perspectives. And to me, that's open-source culture, right? It's awesome. Yeah, Mark, I'd love to hear your perspective also on that hybrid cloud discussion because so many people will look at OpenStack and be like, oh, that's private cloud. And of course, every customer we talk to, they have a cloud strategy. And they're doing lots of SaaS, they've got public clouds, multiple, Red Hat, I know you play across all of them, big announcement with Microsoft last week. Last year it was Amazon, big partnerships with.  How do all these plug-ins and any customers? Kubernetes is one. And so, especially when you look kind of at the broader architectural level, OpenStack becomes obviously the private cloud and enables them to start to do things that are more cloud-native, even in their own data center or if it's hosted or managed, but more in traditional infrastructure. But it really has to be fluid. And a lot of customers initially were saying that their strategy was cloud first. And they would say, oh, we're going to put everything in the public cloud. And then you actually start going through the workloads, you start going through the cost, you start going through the data privacy or whatever the criterion capabilities are. And that's just not practical, frankly. And so, this hybrid reality with private cloud traditional and public is going to be the reality for a very, very long time, if not forever, right? There's always going to be things that you want to have better control of. And so, Kubernetes at the orchestration layer becomes really critical and able to have that agility across all those environments. But you have other fabrics like that in your architecture too. We talked about Ansible. It allows you to have common automation and do those playbooks that you can use across all those different infrastructure. KVM, what's your virtualization fabric? And can KVM take you from traditional virtualization all through public cloud? The answer is yes. So we're going to see increasingly these kind of layers of the overall architecture that allows you to have that flexibility and that management, but still the consistency, which is what you need to keep your policies the same, your access controls, your security, your compliance, and your sanity. Whereas before, it was kind of ad hoc. You know, people would be like, oh, we're just going to put this here, go to public cloud, we're going to do this here. And now people are finding standardizing on things like even Red Hat Enterprise Linux, right? That's my OS layer. And that allows me to easily do Linux containers in a secure way, et cetera, et cetera. So doing hybrid cloud means both the agility, but you've got to have some consistency in order to have the security and control that you need. So it's a little bit different than what we were talking about a few years ago even. And I think one of the things that, you know, we've learned in the services world has been, we started this idea about 18 months ago, we called these journey adoption programs, which were really the fact that some of these transformations are big. It's not about a single project that's going to last four to six weeks. It's a journey that the customer is going to go on. And so when we talk about hybrid cloud, we've actually created this adoption program. Which can really start with the customer in this whole discovery phase, or really what are you trying to accomplish from a business perspective? Then take them into a design phase, take them into a deployment phase, take them into an enablement phase, and then take them into a sustainment phase. And there's a number of different services that we'll do across consulting, training even within Marco Bill Peters organization, which is our customer experience and engagement organization around, you know, what role a technical account manager can play in really helping our customer in the operational phases. And so we've learned this from some of the very large deployments, like Verizon, where we've seen some very, very... And it's cyclical, right? I mean, you can do that many times. Well, you do. In fact, you absolutely do. And so we've created now a program specifically around hybrid cloud adoption to try and demystify it, because it is complex. Well, and the reality is there's somewhere around 30% of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy. And we see that in our own research, our own experiences, but, you know, industry analysts come up with the exact same number. In market, by the way, 70% the ink's still pretty... Yes, it is. It's still wet. Yes, I mean, I'll tell you, I love saying cloud first to people because they kind of giggle. It's like, yeah, that's our strategy, but we know, we don't really know what that means. Which cloud? Exactly, exactly. Exactly, I guess all the clouds. Exactly. All right, well, Margaret and John, want to give you a final word, key takeaways you want to have, or, you know, anything needed to show that you want to point out? I would just say, you know, we are still in early days. I think sometimes we forget that we, both in the open source communities, in the industry for a long time, tend to be 10 years ahead of where most people are.   And so we need to just now get to the point where we're all getting mature in this and really start to help our customers and our partners and our communities, you know, take this to the next level and work on interoperability, right, and ease of use and management. I mean, we're so mature now in the technology. Now let's put the polish on it so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level. Yeah, and I'll play off what Margaret said. I think it's very, very key. When I look at where we've had the biggest success as defined by, you know, in that discovery phase, the customer lays out for us, here's what our business objectives were. Did we achieve those business objectives? It's all about figuring out how we can create the solution and integrate into their environment today. So Margaret said, I think very, very well, which is we have to integrate into these other solutions. And every one of these big customer deployments has some Red Hat software, but it also has some other software that we're integrating into because customers have investments. And so it's not about rip and replace, it's about integrate, it's about leverage, it's about time to market. And that's what most of the customers I talk to, they're very worried about time to value. And so that's what we're trying to focus in, I think, as a whole company around Red Hat. I agree. Absolutely. Summed it up, you know, very well. John Alessio, Margaret Dawson, thanks so much for joining us again. Thanks you guys. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.