All right, so with that public service announcement out of the way we got several people that always joined us to from From the Militano team. So we got a couple of community members online. I mean melt on a melt on L For those of you that are familiar. It's a it's a like a startup within get lab So I'll let the experts describe what what the talent is. It's it's I got to see a demo from Yanis last month in London. I was like pretty excited So yeah, this I'll let me turn things over to you. I'll let you and the team members introduce yourselves and we'll go from there So go for it. Yeah Yeah, thank you, Ray. So hi. I'm Yanis from the Maldana team with me are also Derek and our from our team and I assume that a lot of people watching this stream Let me serve my screen first of all Okay, so and start The presentation here. I hope that you can check it out Yeah, we can see it. Okay, cool So, yeah, I'm I assume that a lot of people watching this dream have not had the time that sounds to check my dead melt I know in detail. So I'm going to start by introducing you to what we are building describe the problem That we are we are trying to show and go through a quick end-to-end demo of melt on so that you can get a feeling of What we are trying to achieve in the end. I'm going to also discuss how someone can help us out and contribute to melt on so I'm going to Start by presenting you how to use melt ono to extract data from your github groups and projects Load the extracted data to a database Transform the data and analyze the final results Yeah So Let's start with what is melt ono melt ono is github's open source product for the whole data life side All the way from extracting data from API's to run that hook analysis Generating reports and creating dashboards We run melt ono as a startup inside the startup with its own group and projects. It is a separate standalone product Not directly connected to the other github offerings We released last month our version one But we are still at a very early stage and we are iterating really fast through features So what's the status quo? The process I just described is called ELT Extracting loading and transforming data and preparing data to run for data analysis That process is challenging and demands a solid infrastructure People who don't really know much about the data management or data engineering are being forced to Learn how to do complicated things. I bet that anyone who has implemented or is responsible for running such an infrastructure Will agree with me that you have to be really involved throughout the whole process you have to find or implement and then maintain extractors for All the API's that you want to support For example, you may have data that you want to extract from Salesforce Zendesk Google Analytics or other software as a service platform and The same is true for loading data to your databases and data warehouse you have to also maintain loaders for Postgres or Snowflake or Redshift Then there is the data transformation part Most API's return raw data That with tens or even more than a hundred attributes per entity That data is not properly formatted for running data analysis You have to find a way to clean the data Transform the data to a proper format and then define the dimension Symmetrics that we are going to use for your analysis And when most people think that they are done the really hard part starts orchestration Everything must blend well All the steps working flawlessly you have to be able to define pipelines for extracting loading and transforming all your data and Then you have to find a way to run those pipelines schedule pipelines monitor pipelines running Know when something broke or automatically restart pipelines that fail Meltano's vision is to take care of everything. I just described We apply the best practices of DevOps to the data management workflow People in the industry call that data ops So we provide an integrated workflow for data ops data engineering analytics and business intelligence and Meltano is a convention over configuration products as we are going to see during the rest of my presentation you can set up Meltano and Start extracting data from supported APIs in a few minutes just using your mouse That was what my tongue can do I forgot to change the slide so who are we building Meltano for I Described a lot of things that we want to do but we have to take it one step at a time So we are in the current version of Meltano. We're focusing on a single use case Our target persona the founder is a busy person at the startup using Meltano in single player mode As I'm going to do you make demo they have access to all the systems and data across the company But they are new to data. They do not write code or know how to write the square They need to do analysis to run the business But they are not a data analyst and they need to do both the data engineering and the data analyst Tasks because there is nobody else there to do that for them So in the current version of Meltano, we are focusing on running Meltano as a standalone application supporting well-defined APIs and Providing an end-to-end flow using Meltano UI our web-based API interface so that Someone can extract data from those APIs and load the data to a local post So instead of tell you what Meltano is. Let me show you how Meltano works I have installed Meltano have the latest version of Meltano in my laptop I'm going to initialize a new Meltano project Let's call it githlab hackathon Let's go to the directory and I'm going to start Meltano UI So the moment I get back This is our starting page here. I'm going to select an extractor I'm going to load data from githlab I'm going to use as an example loading data from githlab false So here I'm setting my private token and the group is githlab.org and the project in this case is githlab false Let's say that that's extract data for a month and I'm going to add a loader Meltano is downloading those extractors and loaders as plugins and installs them locally And as a loader I'm adding Postgres So I'm going to load the data to my local Postgres that I'm running Let's wait for Meltano to install the loader The moment I click save, the last part is the transformation. I'm going to run transformations Meltano comes rebounded with a couple of transformations And the moment I click save, a pipeline is ready for me with githlab Postgres and to run once I can run it on a schedule if I wanted And I click save and that's it. I went from having nothing to start the Meltano project and start extracting data from githlab false So you can see here the process running. I'm going to leave it running And I'm going to go to the last step of the process. You can see it here. We can return back later Which is analyzing my data. So if I go to model Models are Provide the starting point to explore and analyze data for specific use cases. You can think of them as templates that Provide only what's necessary for each use case. So in this case, let's say let's say that we want to check project starts for githlab false If I click here Let me remove this and that and let's say that I want to say check by milestone here and date And I want to check the total comments. So I want to check the total issue comments in the total Merge request comments If I click run Not start date. Sorry, due date Because milestones have a due date. I'm also going to filter my data. So I want To be a due date here, so it's not null and I'm not so going to Add another filter. I'm going to say that the due date is less than September 19 When we merged the two projects, so if I click here run and Increase that to 100 because we have more than 50 milestones And click on an area chart. I can see how Comments went for issues in the Mars in githlab false This is a very interesting report for me. So I can save a report so that I can use it later. I'm going to call it Comments per milestone Click save And then I'm going to add it to dashboard. Dashboards allow me to To have multiple reports at once and check them. They can be reports from different sources or so. I'm going to call this community dashboard Because this is githlab false and a lot of community members contribute to githlab false and Comments help me check that. I can also check other things like for example, if I go to merge a Mars per month I can check by merge gear month and Mars per offer for example, and if I click that I can see How many Yeah per month how many average merge request we have per offer which is also shows How the engagement from the community So I go I'm going to save this as a Mars per offer Per month, let's say And add it to my community dashboard and also create a new one because average and Mars are Interesting engineering KPIs But I have a second dashboard with my engineer KPIs. Let me show you one more Dashboard here report. Let's say let's use The bug report that I also did in githlab commit So I want to check bug reports and how we deal with them in githlab. So for example, I'm going to filter issues by And only keep the ones that have a bug label in them and I'm going to check by created Year and month The date An issue is created is when the bug was reported and let's check how many bugs we have reported and average days to close So if I click run and they freeze this 200 because we have more than 50 months here We can see here for example How the total bugs Went throughout the githlabs history and how we decreased the time to address those problems So this is also a very interesting report for me. Let's say that we call this bugs per month And we cannot this to our engineering KPIs that dashboard So now I have my dashboards. Let me show you Somebody like our founding persona can come here and check The dashboard so check the engineering KPIs and have everything together So the last part is that now that we have our dashboards and we can check the data is to have the data up to date All the time so I can go back to my pipelines And schedule you can see that the last job Finished and you can see here Meltdown extracting all the data from githlab Loading the data to a database and transforming the data So I can create a new pipeline meltdown remembers my settings So I don't have to add anything new and I can schedule it to run daily so that I have up to date Data every time I start my meltdown So more or less that's the end-to-end flow of meltdown and you can see how we try to help People to extract the data and analyze the data by not having to set up anything using a CLI or create speech or whatever So let me go back to my Presentation so what I presented was meltdown or running as a standalone up if you want to check it In the cloud we also support meltdown around the cloud and you can use the one click up Of meltdown or in digital or you can find one day one click up meltdown in digital ocean marketplace So it's very easy to set up a droplet and this meltdown of that way if you don't want to set it up locally Finally a quick glance at the underlying open source open source components That we have in meltdown or meltdown always built in Python And most of the components that we are using are also built in Python So for our extractors and loaders, we are using single IO taps and targets The senior eye community has done a great job of the great Reimplementing and maintain more than 50 Taps and targets and this is an interesting part that you can help us With contributing and adding more tabs that Mel Tano can support Mel Tano We are using for our transformation layer dbt dbt is an amazing tool that allows you to run transformations using pure SQL If you know you have not seen it please take it out. It's it takes care of everything for you So you just write your transformations with pure SQL and they take care of compilation Dynamic leaking testing and a lot more things We build at the moment ourselves the model and analyze part that you've seen Mel Tano UI But we also support other connectors like for example, you can use to Jupiter notebooks on top of our analytics database And finally for the orchestration part that you've seen with a great with Apache air flow that runs inside meltdown So how can you reach us Please join Mel Tano slack. I have a link. We have a link in Mel Tano.com. I don't post it here because it changes every month So go to Mel Tano.com and follow the link to join the slack Most all the team hung out on the general channel were very responsible Responsive please ping us there and you can also of course talk to us in issues in the Mel Tano project Or any other project in the Mel Tano group if you have something more specific to discuss with us How can someone help us First of all something that a lot of people forget and this is especially Important for us that we're at such an early stage. Please Use if you use Mel Tano and find it useful Please open issues for any bugs that you may find missing features or just ideas that you may have About what we can do in Mel Tano If you are good with Python, you can update one of our Extractors and not of the extractors that we currently maintain another missing API point endpoint For example in the github extractor are just presented. We don't export comments Notes as we hold them in github. So somebody could Go to the github extractor and not the API endpoint for getting comments from issues met request and epics and submit that Contribution if you are good with SQL You can play around we have ways to add more transformations and models The things I just presented if you build something interesting Please contribute back with transformations that maybe other people may find useful if you are You know some Python and after you understand how Mel Tano works You can help us by checking more extractors at it at the moment. We support more or less 10 extractors There are 50 more there We will get all the help we can get if somebody can check an extractor That means that you run the the extractor Check the configuration settings and go through the flow of adding an extractor to Mel Tano If you know of UJS you can contribute to Mel Tano UI and if you are feeling Good with Python you can contribute to Mel Tano code which is the core product of Mel Tano The core engine finally last but not least it's we always welcome any Contributions to our documentation and more tutorials for people to be able to onboard Mel Tano and Use Mel Tano in the optimal way If you're interested in contributing or doing a merge request for GitLab hackathon, we have a link here We have issues in Mel Tano group labeled as accepting merge request You can check them out. Let me open one So you can see here we have more than 20 accepting merge requests Issues you can jump into one some are Mel Tano core some are labeled as UI or testing or documentation So for example the one I was telling you is this one extra comments for issues, merge requests and epics you can get there And check the description and start working on a feature Or if you want to do something more UI based let's say for example, we have this which is pure UX It's a simple merge request Validate an extractor loader or something like that So let me go back to my presentation So who to ping we are a small team of six persons If you want to know anything about Mel Tano core or want to work on Mel Tano core It's being Mikael or me in Slack or inside GitLab Mel Tano UI is Derek and Ben For Vue.js stuff. It's also Ben and Derek and Ben is one of the most active Participants in the Vue.js community so he can give you a hint or two also For documentation me and Ben tutorials is me anything about extractors loaders transformations of models you can ping me freely And on what and how to contribute of course it's Dawe, Dawe is also one of the first employees of for GitLab So he knows well how to help people contribute and that guide people on that process And of course Danielle our general manager. She's very responsible On Slack and on our projects. You can ask her anything in here. Please contact us. We will be happy to help you out And I think yeah, that's it. Please visit Mel Tano.com and our projects check it out and get started Oh, thank you. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks for the talk and the demo And if people have any questions, I mean feel free to type them on the chat or or or verbalize him I mean the meantime I got a couple of questions for you, Janice, if you don't mind One is I mean so how so you're not Mel Tano doesn't follow the normal release cycle of rest of GitLab. Is that correct? Yeah, can you tell me about the release cycle and how it's done? Thank you very much for this question At the moment because we are at such an early stage with the rate very very fast. So we have one milestone per week So with targets and with the rate weekly and that means that shows how fast with the rate and also that there are Small things for everyone to get in and help us out or do stuff Cool. Cool. All right. Excellent. All right, so anybody else have any questions or I mean, Derek, anything else you want to add Nothing much to add. But yeah, definitely. I think down is trying to reinforce that we had just ping us on slacker in issues I don't want to hear from you Yeah, and otherwise, you know, it's a great job explaining basically everything you'll need to know but one of the big differences between the experience between Mal Tano and GitLab is that there is so much low hanging fruit in Mal Tano. So many things were just five minutes to work or half an hour could get us so far Well, of course, GitLab with the skill of it and just the fact that there's like at this point hundreds and hundreds of people working on this big time It might be harder to find that little thing, but if you just want to kind of work on your future skills or your private skills, you just want to try a new project where you as a contributor would actually If you become a Multana contributor, you immediately are one eighth of the people developing Mal Tano. GitLab is not the case anymore. So in that sense, it's a really great way to kind of become part of Get a contribution community of a new project and there's so much to do and so much to learn and we are of course more than happy to help anyone out Figure it out with us basically I appreciate it, Yanis basically listing everybody on the team on the last slide. So you can you can ping everybody in one shot, I think I mean, the other question Yanis was So I'm sure this is documented in the documentation. So what are like the system requirements like for for having Mel Tano on your on your system on your laptop. Oh, they are very low So because the iPhone and You can get started very easily. It's the requirements very low. The only part that requires something to be done is the Only part that requires some memories running Airflow and running a Postgres case, but you can do that even with a small droplet if because I would mention Cool. Excellent. So yeah, so it should be relatively easy for people to get started. Cool. Yeah, it works on my 2010 Linux using Google to 16 has no problems. Cool. Nice. Cool. Yeah, I don't see anything on the chat. Any questions or comments from wider community members. Maybe I can say something. I definitely want to be part of the one eighth of the contributors. I noticed that there were a couple of good club extractors. I was wondering whether Mel Tano started because of of a pinpoint that the club had internally. Yanis. So you want to answer that. Oh, feel free to. I mean, I think you have more context here, but Brian, I think it's a good question. Yeah, I mean, get let get like wouldn't be, I guess, in a way investing in this project if it didn't make sense at some point to also get in the business of solving this problem and that very much happened when Get Lab itself found that there wasn't a tool out there that did what get labels looking for. And then of course it's easy at certain points say, then why don't we build it with the community. But I know that Yanis actually, I mean, I only joined the Mel Tano team at this point two and a half months ago or so. Yanis has far more background information on how it got started and how he got involved with it in the early days, way ahead of me or Danielle or any kind of, you know, kind of more start the hierarchy system coming in place. Yanis has been there forever. Yeah, so we started Mel Tano with our general manager for a year was seed. So he was very involved. This is this was his idea, his vision of building a product and bring the devil's mentality and what we are doing in Get Lab to the to the data management world, because if you check how data management works at the moment, especially the part extract loading, transforming and all the stuff that are very complicated and they require a data engineer to run them and so we wanted to bring all the mentality of Get Lab to data management. And that's the core vision, the core idea. And that's where we are focused on and we are keep our vision still with Danielle and the rest of the team at the moment. And I would say it's not a coincidence that our persona is called the founder, because in this case the founder literally does kind of basically reference or for said, maybe not the set of today because of course the founder of we're focusing on a far earlier stage kind of people of the company know data team know nothing, but access to data sources and wanting to do, you know, something with it gets some dashboards get some insights out of it. So we are well sit one of this because he was a founder and he couldn't find it and now we're building it for founders just like so. Oh, awesome. I think I final closing, as I was saying, there are a lot of issues on Get Lab, but there's a lot of demand for them. So I'll definitely take on that. Awesome. Can't wait to see you on site, Brian. Yeah. And you too, Matthias is also in the, in the zoom. Cool. Yeah, Brian, I'll follow up with you on it. We have a call schedule a couple of weeks. So, I'll ask you how things are going. Cool. All right, if there are no other questions. Thanks everybody for your time and have a good rest of your day or evening. Have a good one. Cheers. Thank you.


Hi welcome to NASA's Earth Day at home. I'm Kelly Brunt. I'm a glaciologist with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and with the University of Maryland. Hi and happy Earth Day everybody. I'm Tom Newman also from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where we study glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice and the frozen places of our planet. So while everybody's out there social distancing we thought we'd take everybody on a virtual field trip of one of our expeditions. We recently went to Antarctica in support of NASA's IceSat 2. So we thought we'd share with you a little bit of conversation and some videos and if you guys have any questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comments section of this video. So IceSat 2 is the mission that Kelly and I work on. And IceSat 2 is all about measuring the height of the Earth. As the name suggests it's really designed to measure changes in glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice. And so Kelly and I were down in Antarctica to collect ground-based data that we could compare with our space-based measurements to see how well IceSat 2 can measure surface height. So our expedition took us to the center of the Antarctic ice sheet. Ultimately to do that we flew down to New Zealand and then to the edge of the Antarctic continent to a station called McMurdo Station. And from there we flew into the South Pole. Ultimately both those stations are run and operated by the National Science Foundation. For this expedition we spent time at South Pole Station. Specifically we were there over Christmas and you might think that's a tough place to spend Christmas but actually the social world of South Pole Station is fantastic and they make the absolute best out of the holidays. So Tom and we're out there. There's only four of us for two solid weeks of driving doing the same thing every day. How is it to work with the same people in the same environment for that length of time? You know it is different for sure. At South Pole there was what 100 or 120 people there and that day where you all climb into your tractors or your tracked vehicles and drive away and you see South Pole receding in the distance it's like okay I guess we're doing this now. But honestly at least for me Kelly I kind of got into the routine of the days you know. It was typically forest or myself up earliest and starting coffee and that sort of thing. Chad getting up and getting the tractors ready to go and you joining us not long after and just the routine of like packing up the kitchen putting away all the breakfast supplies making sure you've got enough snacks for the day with you and that sort of thing. And then the reverse at the end of the day that you stop and it's like that clock starts ticking. Who's on dinner duty today and and you're fishing through boxes looking for looking for whatever it is you're you're going to make for dinner that day. So honestly for me at least the 14 days went by pretty quickly. I think when you're traveling for two weeks kind of with the same group of people you get to know people really really well. I think by the end of about the third day we all know how each other took our coffee or what they put you know were particularly fond of snacking on. Chad and I what I found was really getting to know him with respect to his mechanical capabilities and I enjoyed conversations. I learned a lot about piston bullies in my first year which is great. So I I think it was just you know tapping into that thing that people know the most about and kind of getting to getting to know them through that aspect. It was it was fun. You know one of the things I remember Kelly was that you and I did most of the of the food shopping if you will. Back at McMurdo of course is where they have all the supplies for all all these different field projects that come through including ours and including the food. And I remember we did some good serious thinking about what food we wanted to bring along and how we're going to plan this and that out and what would we do for lunches. And most importantly what we're going to do for chocolate. I don't remember eating any chocolate. I remember packing a lot of chocolate but what happened there. So we we ordered the maximum amount of chocolate you're allowed to order as a team and we packed it up nice and neatly into a box and these are great like Cadbury chocolate bars are just fantastic and you get excited thinking about oh my gosh you know we're going to be eating really well on this tour of things in addition to the chocolate bars but also just the chocolate bars. So then we got everything to the South Pole. We unpacked the stuff that we had put together in McMurdo and we repacked it into our sleds and all the cargo boxes on the sleds and somewhere in there it was like when you packed that one box in kind of that extra little panel space in the back of your station wagon you forget about it and we don't know where we put the chocolate and we we spent days in the field or evenings in the field say hey somebody go find that chocolate box. We never found it until we were ripping everything apart at the end of the traverse and then we found our entire allotment of chocolate. Hey so Kelly you've done a number of outreach events during the during our our quarantine tech talking to people about remote sensing and what you do for NASA and University of Maryland and fieldwork in the Antarctic. How do you describe Antarctica for a group of folks who've never really been there haven't thought about it much. I think you know when you show people photos from the Antarctic the first thing the kids want to see are pictures of animals and the weird vehicles and we have the weird vehicles you know obviously we've got these big track vehicles that we're hauling around on the ice sheet and those are pretty cool and it's not something you drive every day so that's really unique and people really like that. As far as animals we're in the center of the ice sheet so most of the animals in the wildlife are around the edge but then you show them these sort of really stark photos of the horizon just kind of like the white plane out there and maybe you know ice on one side and sky on the other and at first it seems like oh my god it's just a line in a photo you know defining the earth versus the land versus the sky and then you realize there's this amazing beauty to that this sort of stark beauty that you don't really get to experience very often places where you know anytime there's clouds or something dynamic in the sky that's providing the sort of interesting view that you're seeing the interesting landscape that you're seeing for lack of a better word. So I basically describe yeah you have this darkness but there is a real beauty to that and it's extremely unique. It seems flat and you're out there with just a handful of people and you're just kind of rolling through the the snow it's not perfectly flat there's these waves of ice called Sestrugi the wind kind of shapes the snow and creates these little waves. This is not unlike a long boat expedition where you've just got a flat horizon and you're rolling around on the dunes of ice for weeks. So it's really very similar to that so you know you kind of describe it that way and people get a little bit more comfortable with it and also see the beauty in the in the weirdness of the starkness that that we see. Yeah I totally second that I've had a number of folks ask don't you get bored out there just looking at the same thing day after day and I'm like no it's it's not the same thing you you start watching out the window and it's like I never really got tired of of watching just the surface change from day to day and from place to place. I think only one time on this trip I went for a walk back along our tracks I remember it was one evening after dinner I think you were up reading or you know cleaning up the kitchen or whatever it was and and I was I walked back out for I don't know maybe 20 minutes and that was far enough so that camp went from big to tiny little thing on the horizon and you kind of have a seat and look around and that was totally cool. After doing three of these you know there's nothing out there and you're just driving along the sort of the ice sheet and you don't really expect to see anything every once in a while on the you know the second and third traverse we would see the tracks from the earlier traverses and that's pretty cool. It gives you a sense that maybe we're not out here alone but it's it's just your footprints from here somewhere but that's pretty cool too to be out there just kind of driving by GPS no roads but you still encounter tracks from previous seasons. Cool hey let's have a look at one of those videos from the previous trips 14 days two piston bullies four people so yeah 750 kilometers you know door to door. Recently we just got back from Antarctica where we completed about a two-week ground traverse near the South Pole. We're basically driving piston bullies tracked vehicles similar to the ones that groom your ski areas. Behind those piston bullies were 60 foot long plastic sled trains and ultimately those trains carry things like our sleeping tents fully erected and left standing during the day while we were driving. Kitchen tent fuel generators all sorts of cargo. Everything we needed for the for the trip and first from a both science and survival standpoint. So this entire traverse was in support of ISET 2 which will launch later in the year. ISET 2 is all about measuring elevation and a natural question is how do you know you're getting the right answer. This is how we will know. We'll go out and collect a reference data set we'll be ready to compare and evaluate see how we're doing. 319 is uh so the big measurement we were making was to measure the elevation of the ice sheet surface around our traverse and we had the two GPS running one on each vehicle measuring that elevation. One of the other experiments we were doing is leaving out what we call corner cube reflectors to get an assessment of the pointing of ISET 2 when we make an elevation measurement how are we sure it's in the right place. So in this picture here you can see a bamboo pole with a little white cap on the end of it and embedded in that cap little piece of glass about as about as big as your your pinky nail and calibrated to return green laser light from the satellite bounces off of this thing and goes right back up to the satellite again super reflective. So these things as as Kelly has demonstrated show up in data with altimeters like ISET 2. When you first get to South Pole and you're coming from McMurdo which is a nice seaside town right at sea level and South Pole is what about about 10,000 feet and yeah you notice it pretty quickly the temperature is a lot colder than than in McMurdo it's probably 30 degrees 40 degrees colder and 10,000 feet higher. Walking from the from the camp to where we're putting in an array for example would be 10 minute walk maybe five minutes a couple breaks on the way you know it's uh it's still pretty high. The plan is to repeat this traverse for the next three years so four years of data total and that would last the mission lifetime the mission requirement lifetime for ISET 2. ISET 2 has 1,387 orbits and so it's cruising around the world and it's got these unique tracks that repeat every 91 days and all those tracks converge right here at 88 South and so our route crossed what 20% of them so we can calibrate data from 20% of our tracks with this with this stretch that that we drove and by repeating it every year about the same time a year we'll we'll have uh overlap at exactly the same time but we'll also be able to figure out what's been going on in between because we'll measure it in 2017 and then again in 2018 and you can see how it changes from year to year so that'll be pretty cool too it'll quickly become the best surveyed piece of piece of either of the ice sheets. Hey everybody we hope you've enjoyed our virtual trip down to Antarctica where we were socially distancing while traversing keep those questions coming in the comment section and we'll do our best to answer them. So ISET 2 is actively collecting data on orbit uh we have another traverse coming up in the near future uh in the meantime you can keep up with all things going on in cryospheric sciences at NASA by following us on either Twitter or Facebook. Happy Earth Day everybody!


How can you get clients quickly or fill your workshop or online course or program quickly and yet still do it authentically? So that's what I'm gonna talk about in this video. I'm gonna share with you a couple of methods of how you can do this. So the question came to me from one of you, some actually in one of my courses and said, well, George, I love your philosophies about being authentic and doing business from a higher place, from a deeper place, but I still need to fill my workshop, my next workshop on a deadline. So how do I fill my workshop quickly? So that's sort of the genesis of this discussion here. So basically, the way to do it authentically is to get into the space, your energetic space of caring rather than manipulation because typically the way we try to do some, get, right? Because essentially what you're trying to do is get other people to do what you want them to do, right? Well, that's the traditional way of thinking about it. You get somebody to salivate based on your juicy offer. I mean, literally this is the words that marketers tell us, juicy offer, get them to salivate like a lizard or like an animal and it's very manipulative. The whole thing is very Pavlovian, right? The way that most marketing is done.  You spend money with me, right? That's typical conventional marketing, especially when you need to do something quickly. Like, oh, I gotta fill my program, I gotta get lots of clients now. So if you don't wanna manipulate people because you don't like to be manipulated either and it's not good for the soul, it's not good for your soul, their soul, it's not good for the planet, what we need to do is care more. We need to care and love instead of fear and manipulation, right? Because fear and the manipulation is like, oh, I'm so scared, I can't fill my program. And so out of that fear and anxiety and desperation, I will do things that I typically, in my sense of secure, if I'm a secure self, if I'm a loving self, I wouldn't do these things. But a means to an end, I gotta just fill my program and then I can be loving. But first I gotta just be in desperation and fear, maybe greed, whatever negative lower vibrational stuff. Let me just do that lower vibrational stuff first. And then I'll be a good higher vibrational person and serve them, et cetera. You don't have to do that, it's BS because there is no such thing as a means to an end. In the world, in life, the means is the end. There is no such thing as feeling off about doing something so that you can get something you want because the very way you're doing it is actually producing results in the world that create a world that is less aligned with your dreams and visions and values or more aligned. There is a lie and a falsehood that you need to recognize and break about this means to an end crap. There is no such thing as a means to an end. It is all means and it is all ends, all of it. Every single moment is both a means and an end and we need to care for every single moment. We need to care for every single way that we do outreach. So instead of fear and desperation and greed and, oh my God, how am I gonna get taken care of if I don't fill this workshop? Oh my God, what am I gonna do? I don't see when the next client, how the next client's gonna show up. Fear, okay.  Honestly, you should get a job if you're afraid you don't know how to pay the bills. Now, these days I should say getting a job is not that easy and getting a secure job is less easy. So maybe the quickest way to get a job is to get the next client or the next 10 clients, right? That might be easier. So we'll see, but we need to shift every single day. Today, right now, you need to shift from fear to love, from darkness to light, from desperation to security. You need to do whatever you need to do and feel free to comment below. How do you, how do you, I'm talking to you here, how do you shift from fear to love? How do you transform the feeling of desperation and lack and anxiety and don't know how I'm gonna pay my bills? How do you change that insecurity to a deep feeling of security? How do you do that? I'm curious. I do what I call an energy reboot. I do that multiple times a day. I feel gratitude as much as I can. Now, honestly, if I were in a situation of, I don't know how I'm gonna pay, well, if I can't pay the next month's bills, I'll do what I'm gonna tell you in this video to get clients. But if I'm like continually month after month, not being able to pay my bills and just barely making it, it's a pattern and I might wanna go get a job, you know? Or I might, you know, it's, yeah, so it's not good to continually build a business, trying to build an authentic business from a place of lack because it's just, you need to find a financial footing. You need to either spend less. Some of you need to spend less.  You have to get a massage every week or even every month. I get a massage every quarter. Maybe I should do it more often. But you know, like self-care doesn't have to mean spending money. It doesn't have to mean living in your expensive apartment or living in your expensive city. I was seriously thinking of moving to Mexico a couple of years ago. I did all the research. The only reason we didn't move is because my wife then, how dare she, built a successful business here. Now she has clientele here and she doesn't wanna leave her clientele. So that's why we didn't move to Mexico. But I would have moved to Mexico so that we decrease our San Francisco living expense down to like a quarter. And then I have much more financial footing to build an authentic business.   You can live on a lot less, okay? A lot less somewhere else in the world. Be open to that. Don't be so tied and attached to your current lifestyle. Seriously. And so, okay, all right. Enough with that part of it. Let's talk about the tactics of how do you actually then fill your next program, get your next 10, 20, 80 clients, okay? All right, so here's how we do it. The first thing is your marketing copy.  You need to have the market. So the way that the marketing copy is typically taught is again, it's about Pavlov. You need to trigger your audience into salivating and therefore buying. Okay, that's how marketing copy writing, copy writing is typically taught. It's persuasion tactics. It's just not good for humanity. It's lower vibration stuff. It's manipulation, persuasion, hype, deception, fear, it's fear driven. So instead, what we need to do, like I said, is to care and love instead of fear and desperate and anxiety. So how do we do marketing copy that is caring and loving? What we need to do is we need to understand our audience, our ideal client even better than we do now. If you're writing, if you've been trying to present an offering to your ideal audience and they're not buying it and you have their attention, now we need to talk about the attention part next, but if you have the attention of at least 100 people, by 100 I mean you have an email list of 100 people or you have a Facebook fan page of probably 300, 400 to get 100 people's attention maybe through Facebook ads, but people aren't buying from you. It's because you're not selling what they want. You are selling based on your own intuition and that's not good enough. I know this sounds strange, especially from a spiritual authentic marketing. Your intuition is not good enough, okay? Until, until you have regular conversations with your market, with your audience, understanding a couple of things. What are they really going through right now that is relevant to what you could offer? Okay, what have they tried already that didn't work that your offer is better than? Okay, or better fit for them? What concerns do they have about an offer like yours? Well, I'm thinking about signing up for your workshop or your program or your coaching, but I'm just concerned I won't work and I'm concerned I won't work because I'm not sure I'm the type of person that you can really help. My situation is unique. Do you understand my situation? Oh, you don't? Well, that's why your marketing copy isn't working. You see what I mean? Like I'm not, I'm probably not your ideal client. For most of you, I'm probably not your ideal client, but your ideal client is saying that, saying that to you. Like, well, you don't get my individual situation. That's why your marketing copy doesn't work for me. Like, you don't get me. That's what your clients are saying to you. That's what your perspective clients are saying to you. So you need to do the work. It's work, okay? And the work is to talk to them, is to get out of your office, get out of your home and talk to them. Now, I don't mean this literally because I do everything from home, okay? But for me, I mean, I need to reach out to each of you. Now, I've already done this and I'm doing this regularly already. I have these kinds of conversations with my course buyers. If you don't have any course buyers, talk to the people who like your Facebook posts. Talk to the people who comment on your Facebook posts. If you don't have any buyers yet. But once you have some buyers, talk to them specifically for market research purposes. It's not good enough just to have client sessions. Because in your client sessions, you are serving them.  You see. So I call these fan interviews or audience research conversations. You need to understand, basically you need to understand this. Where are they willing to spend their money? And for what kinds of products or services have they been already spending their money? And therefore, how should you tweak your offer and frame your offer closer to how they're already spending their money or what they've tried before, it didn't work. Well, your thing is a benefit for them. Why? Okay. Oh, your thing? They're concerned that it's not gonna work for them because of this, this, this and that reason. What do you understand what those reasons are? And are you in your marketing copy? Are you lovingly assuaging those concerns? Not twisting arms, not persuasion tactics, not persuasion, not convincing and converting. Lovingly assuaging their concerns. It's a different energy. Okay. All right. So resident marketing copy is one. By the way, I'm gonna later, as I usually do, a couple of hours after each of my videos. I don't know if you know this, but a couple of hours after each video like this, I always post the entire article that is sometimes has more details. A lot of times these videos have more nuances. I kind of go off script and talk about this or that, but the article also will give you a more organized way of going through this. Okay. The second thing, first thing is resident marketing copy, which requires more empathy, more understanding of really what's going on.  You don't have a connection to God in a way, you have a connection to God in your own life, but not in for the lives of your clients. They have a different connection to God, at least slightly. And so a lot of us intuitive people are like, oh, my intuition says this. It's not, you're applying intuition wrongly. Okay. Intuition doesn't work like that. Intuition doesn't go, well, I think I should write this. Yeah. Based on your own experience, so your intuition is based on your own background, but unless you're talking to your ideal clients every single day in marketing research conversations, your intuition isn't marketing based. Okay. It's not market based. It's yourself based, right? So, and you might say, well, George, my ideal client's just like me. Okay.  If your marketing copy's been written for yourself, you should have more clients and you know what to do with. So if you don't have enough clients, something is wrong. Not something's wrong. Something is not aligned. And the misalignment is your understanding of your intuition. Your intuition is good for your spiritual growth. It's good for your, you know, whatever, you know, food intake, it's good for yourself, but it's not good for your marketing. Okay. Your marketing has to be in the market with people that trains your marketing intuition. There is a marketing intuition, but it comes from a lot of audience research conversations. Okay. Let's go to the second tactic to do, which is relevant content.  Okay. So a couple of ideas of what you could do. One is, can you tell the story of a success with somebody using your offer? And if you don't have anybody using your offer yet, by the way, offer, I mean your service, your product, your program or your event. That's what I mean when I say offer. It's basically what thing you're selling, the thing you're selling. Okay. Has somebody used it yet? Has somebody gotten success from it yet? Can you tell that story? What were they struggling with or what were they yearning for? What did they want basically before they used your offer? And then how did they use it? Give us some color, some story about how they were using your offer. How did they use your services, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, what happened after they used your offer? How did they transform? What benefit did they receive? How was their life different? Can you tell us a story? Tell us that story, okay? But if you're not, if you don't tell us that story, how does the ideal client see themselves using your offer? They can't see them, they can't imagine it until you explain a story that helps them imagine it. Right? Can you talk about the story of why you created this offer? Are you doing it just for the money? Probably not. If you're in my audience, you're not doing it just for the money. You're doing it because you care. Tell us about the care. Tell us about the story of why you created this thing. Why is it so important to you? Okay, why don't you do something else with your life? Why this? Okay, so tell us that story and don't expect that we're gonna go to your website, go to your About page. We're not gonna do that. You have to tell it to us where we are. You can't expect us to go find your website and your About page. Yes, of course, we can do that and some of us do that, but most of us don't. Most of us aren't reading your About page. You've got to share that story with us on a regular basis, regular meaning, once every quarter, let's say, once a quarter, share that story with us. Where we are, where we typically see you. Do we see you on Facebook? Do we see you on Instagram? Do we see you on YouTube? Share that with us, because otherwise we forget. And probably every time you share it with us, some of us don't even, didn't even catch that piece of content, okay? Okay, and then share it with us. Share these kinds of stories with us and I'll have more story ideas for you when I post the article in a couple of hours from now. Share the stories with us in different formats, sometimes with a long text, sometimes a short text, maybe a piece of the story, sometimes a long video like this, sometimes a short video with just a few minutes of one piece of the story, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, I'll have more for you. The next one, third thing is distribution and repetition of your offer and of pieces of content. But particularly when you're in a rush, which again, we should talk about why are you in a rush? But anyway, when you're in a rush, a deadline, you got to fill a workshop, you got to get some clients now.  You're probably not, honestly. It takes us several times of seeing your offer before we even think about considering it.  Do you look at every single ad and go, wow, let me think of, maybe I should buy this. Hmm, let me have a good thought about this. Let me think about why I might not, hmm, no, most ads are like this for you, right? You just scroll, you just keep going. You don't even, you could barely even see it. And maybe it's the third time you see an ad, it might finally catch your attention because you kind of have some recognition of it. Like, who is Gail Blair? Oh, oh yeah. I'm mentioning one of your names who's on the live video with me here. So thank you, Gail. It takes several times of your ad or your post for them to finally recognize that piece of content enough to go, maybe I should pay attention to it. This is the third time I've glanced at it. Now let me actually read it.  It might take three to five times for your client, your ideal client to finally go there. And then once they go there, they're like, oh, yeah, that's kind of interesting. Oh, my husband is calling, my wife is calling, my friend is calling. Oh, I gotta go do this thing now. And then they've forgotten about it already. It's the seventh time they see it. They're like, oh yeah, I was considering that. I'm so glad I saw it again. And now they're really thinking about it maybe. And then by the eighth or ninth time, they're like, okay, either a yes or a no. I'm gonna make a decision now. Now I'm not saying it takes literally five, seven and nine. Marketers sometimes say it's 15 to 30 times. 15 to 30 times before someone makes a decision. Now, again, let's talk about authentic marketing. You don't necessarily want to, you know, by the fifth, seventh and ninth time, it might be too much for an audience to keep seeing the exact same post. That's why you need different ways of talking about it, different formats also. So that it's the same offer, but you're just talking about it in different ways with each ad. Now, each ad, maybe I'm fine showing the same ad to you three to four times. To me, I think that's okay. Do you get tired of seeing the same ad for me? Maybe like recently I've been promoting my book creation course a lot. So, okay, I'm just do a quick check.  Maybe you're a no, that's okay too, because maybe you're not ready to write a book or you know, I think you should buy it anyway. I'm kidding. I think everybody should write a book. That's why I think everyone should do some kind of book creation all the time or in process of it, but you don't have to buy my course. But I'm just curious, have you, how many times did you see the book creation? That's right now, that's what I've been selling. How many times did you see it? See the ad, okay? You probably saw it three to four or five times. And some of you didn't see it enough, which is then my fault to say I didn't promote it enough. Distribution and repetition in different formats to make it more delightful, to make it less onerous for your audience, okay? All right, yeah, Elisa says three to four times, yes. And now she's considering it, right? Like this is the fifth time she's heard about it. Now she's considering it. She's asking me a question. Does your course work for children's books, right? So the answer, Elisa, is maybe. It's really meant for, it's really meant more for adults, but maybe because I really teach a blog to book method. I think that that's really the best way of writing books these days is blogging to a book. Now, if you write a blog and parents read it and then they read it to their kids, then that might work, but yeah, that is, and Lindsay says, I haven't heard of it yet. Yeah, see, I'm so, I will tell you this, I err on the side of minimalistic marketing, right? And so that's something you need to know about me is I err on the side of not distributing and repeating enough. So whereas most marketers do it too much, I do it too little. So just know that about me and that's why I needed to tell you about the importance of distribution and repetition of your offers. Okay, the next thing is personal invitation. I have a client who has successfully filled her women's group every single year. It's an in-person group, which is even harder to fill and she fills it every single year and she does it by calling people on the phone. No, I'm not talking about cold calls. I'm talking about calling people she knows. She calls them on the phone. How many times, when was the last time you called somebody on the phone? Well, that's very special when you do, right? Now you might be shy of doing that and so you don't mind do that. You might just email or Facebook message or text message or something. But if you've got the guts, if you're willing to care enough to call somebody on the phone, not say, hey, Lindsay, will you buy my thing? But hey, Lindsay, I'm starting this women's group and I thought about you because of this and that reason, very specific reason because I know about, I know this and that about you. And when I formed the group, I had you in mind to be part of this because I thought that. And so I'm wondering if you'd be interested. And you don't have to. I want to make sure you knew about it. Maybe this is a voice message or something like that. So personal invitation, that's how she does it. Another client, she's running her retreat right now. Every single year she fills the retreat. It's an in-person, I'm talking about in-person events because it's really, really, really hard to sell in-person events. It's much easier to sell online courses, much easier. In-person events are really hard to fill. And this other client fills her retreat every single year. And how does she do it? She has enough distribution and repetition. She talks about it on Facebook all the time, leading up the retreat like every single week. She for three, four months, every single week, she has something about the retreat coming up. So something different, something different picture, a different thing, a different reminder, something. Yeah, maybe three months every week, maybe four months every week. Anyway, she does it enough where those of us who are in her audience see, oh yeah, that's right. Diane's retreat's coming up, Diane's, that's awesome. And she fills it. And she also does personal invitations. That's part of what I'm talking about here. She reaches out to people. I don't think she calls them. I think she does some texting and she does emails for sure. She does Facebook messages for sure. So that's, so personal invitations. When was the last time you personally invited somebody to become your client? Personally, individually. Not like, oh, I sent it out to my email list. Not like, oh, I sent it out to 30 people with the same exact message. Personal. Ah, Mary, how are you doing? How did it go with this project that you mentioned last time? How is it going with your whatever thing that's going on in your life that I know about from Facebook? And I wanted to let you know, I wanna make sure you knew about this thing that's coming up or that I have a client spot open right now and I was thinking about you because, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Personal. Care.  Are you willing to do that? Because if you're not willing, nobody's willing, nobody else is willing to do it. Really, very few people do personal invitations. Almost nobody. And when they do a personal invitation, it's very templated and it's not thoughtful to that person. It's just, it's kind of generic. And so if you are willing to care more than other people who are not willing to care, no one wants to care like that. Even though it doesn't take that much effort. That takes me half an hour, 15 minutes maybe, to research what's going on with Mary, to think back, to look at my email threads that I had with her, to see what we've talked about in the past or to see what's going on with her on social media. 15 to 30 minutes, okay? And then I reach out to her thoughtfully with that kind of research. Nobody is willing to do this, just about nobody, honestly. And so if you do it, you're standing out in a loving, caring way, got it? So we're not pressuring anybody, we're just making sure they know. We're not saying, oh, you've got to sign up now, you've got to, please sign up, please Mary. I'm desperate, no, no, just, hey, Mary, I want to make sure you knew about this. Either way, I hope you're doing great. I hope you'll write me back. Let me know how things are going, okay? So, okay, and then the last thing is influencers and promotional partners. This was how I filled my programs in the beginning when none of my friends and family would buy my thing. First couple years, none of my friends and family. None of the people I knew, my work colleagues, my schoolmates, my friends, my family, nobody bought my thing in the first couple years. Now still barely, like maybe one or two. So really I've built an entire business from cold audiences. And the way I did that in the beginning, I made $10,000 a month very quickly. In the first year, I made my first $10,000 a month, whereas a lot of my peers were still struggling after two, three, four years. So how did I do it? It was through influencers and promotional partners. I was able to personally, thoughtfully, with research, reached out to people who had an audience, okay? And I was willing to reach out to enough of them to get a yes, but I reached out to them and when I reached out to them, I thought about it in this way. It was a win, win, win. The first win is that my offer is personally interesting to that influencer. By influencer, I mean somebody who has an audience. It could be somebody who has a blog, who has a website with an email newsletter, who has a Facebook business page, fan page, who has, who's an Instagram celebrity, personality anyway, who has YouTube channel with tens of thousands of subscribers, somebody with an audience, okay? That they can reach out to. Who, based on my research, is probably personally interested in what the thing I'm trying to sell, the thing I'm gonna offer right now. They probably are personally interested in for themselves. And secondly, their audience would probably love it. So you need to do the research until you find that intersection. They themselves probably would be interested because based on their tweets, their posts, just you're reading their blog, whatever it is, you're like, no, I think they actually might be interested in this personally. And then their audience is probably going to love this too, if we're grateful to know about it. Okay, win, win, win, the third win is obviously you get to serve a new audience that you haven't before. And so reaching out to people like that thoughtfully with some research first, just about nobody does this. Because I'm an influencer and none of you reach out to me, okay? Now, I always say, every time I say this, I have to say, please don't reach out to me because every video like this, you're motivated now, you're everyone's gonna reach out to me. So please don't, okay? At least wait six months, okay? But what I mean is seriously, every single year, I can count on one hand, actually probably more like two or three, out of an entire year that I get a thoughtful outreach. Now I get more like 10 or 20, but even so, out of a single year, out of thousands, millions, thousands of emails at least, right? Probably tens of thousands of emails. I don't know how many emails I get per year. Probably I get 50, so probably one a week, somebody reaching out to me to try to promote something to my audience. Out of the 50, probably 47 of them didn't do any research on me, except they knew my name.  I don't know, I mean, just really basic stuff. Like, so come on, give me a break. You went to my website, you saw a dog and you saw a cat and you said, okay. 47 out of 50, don't do any research or they do lame research, and then they reach out to me with this template and a message that shows me they don't care about me. They're just trying to sell something through me. That's all they care about. They care about themselves. They don't love, they're in fear, right? They're in fear and desperation and they're reaching out to me to try to solve their fear and desperation, right? And I try to help everybody, but obviously I have a very limited number of promotional spots, just so you know, these days I do promote somebody every week, but nowadays I have so many clients. I just, all my promotional slots are filled. So it's one client a week that I promote now. So if you want me to promote you, I will just sign up to my one-on-one or sign up to my group coaching program and I'll promote you. So there you go. But yeah, three out of 50 every week actually did some research and actually reached out to me and those are the ones that really get a thoughtful response from me.  So influencers, promotional partners, very few people reach out and when you do it can be very special. Okay, the last thing I'll say is when is the best time to plant a tree? If you want the fruit of a tree, when should you have planted the tree? You should have planted the tree. I don't know how long it takes fruit tree is to blossom, but I don't know, a year, five years, 10 years before the fruit tree, whatever fruit you're thinking of, blossoms into enough fruit. So how did you let yourself get to the spot? I mean, because you had this, maybe this mistaken notion that when you have something to sell, you can just suddenly use Facebook ads to sell it to people who don't know who you are and they're gonna buy.  How did you let it get to this point of needing clients now, of needing to fill the workshop now? It's because you didn't understand that marketing is a process. It's like planting a tree. You can't plant a tree in the ground and go, come on fruit, you pulled the branches, oh, come on. And that's how most marketing does it. Conventional marketing, pesticides, right? Fertilizers, and that's how fruits grow more quickly. I've talked about organic versus conventional marketing in another video, you should check that out. That's why the land is destroyed. They don't have a long-term thing. The farmers are sick. The consumers are sick, so they don't have a long-term business there either. And now everyone's shifting to organic food or hopefully more or more, at least less pesticides anyway, because people are conscious and aware now and they're shifting. Same thing with organic marketing, people are now shifting their spending dollars away from the pressure tactics of marketers pulling on the branches to get the fruit out, right? It's terrible. So please understand, don't get yourself. So think about the you of a year from now. You're still gonna need clients a year from now, don't you? You're still gonna need to fill that workshop a year from now. You're still gonna need to fill that program. And so the you from a year from now is begging the you of today to please, please start building an audience now. Please don't wait for one month before you have to fill the workshop or program to try to build an audience. The you from one year from now is begging you to start and plant the tree today. So that is why I always preach authentic content marketing. I always say, please, it is never too early, never too early, you know, to start building your audience now. Imagine if you've gotten my message five years ago or a year ago and you said, okay, I'm gonna dedicate, I hear you George, I'm gonna be consistent with my content starting today. And then the year one year from now, I will have fruit to harvest, okay? Cause I will have trust. I will have understanding of my audience. I will have understanding what they want from me. I will have a large audience start today. All right, this video has gone long enough. I had a lot to communicate. So I hope this is useful and I wanna thank those of you who were able to join me live here. Let's see here, Shweta, Gail, Captain, Sabine, Stefano, Jan, Lindsay, Gudrun, Diana, Elisa. Who else is here? Let's see here. Dagny, thank you. Okay, I think I mentioned everybody. They're missing, okay. And I wanna mention a couple of comments here. Shweta says, fruit naturally falls with ease. Beautiful, that's it. When the nurturing is done lovingly, and it's done well, the nurturing of the tree and the timing is right, the season comes around, the fruit falls naturally, right? Of course, your work now is to gather it. And hello, Laurie, thanks for joining me and Karine. Let's see, okay. Yeah, and Shweta mentioned, I saw four on Facebook ads and other other posts promoting it as well. So yeah, talking about the thing I was promoting. So Captain says, yes, I saw it once. So Captain, that's interesting. Somebody like you who knows my content, you only saw it once means I probably need to promote it more often, right? So yeah, and Gail says, I have to get out of my head to be led. So thank you, yes, that's beautiful. And Gail says, means to an end, giving to get, it's all based on fear, blocking the natural cycle of giving unconditionally and receiving unconditionally as well, right? And Gail says, I did go get a job while I moved from fear to faith. So thank you, yes, that's a great example. The faith that I can give up to a universe, the nuts and bolts of how my good will arrive. I will stay focused, yeah, what the source, the source of all good and knowing will put me together with my highest best. Absolutely, beautiful, yeah. And Shweta says, the way she transforms fear is to the yogic practice of Mubanda. Never heard of that, Shweta. So maybe you could tell us a bit more about that. So transforms fear to take action and faith that we all, I and we are all taken care of, yes, absolutely. True, very true. If you, that's what I practice every day. My part of my energy reboot is to have this deep understanding that I will be taken care of. And I was doing this years in advance, right? It takes time to transform our inner insecurity into a deep security. And from that deep security comes beauty. It comes courage. It comes content, you know? Or more authentic content, anyway. Okay, all right, I'll let you go. Thanks for watching. I hope this is beneficial for you. As always, if you have any topics you'd love for me to cover, a lot of these videos came out of your messages to me about, hey, I'm thinking about this, but I'm concerned about that or, hey, I have a question about this. So feel free to ask me. And until then, I'll see you in the next video. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day and evening coming back to your genuine and truth, the highest truth, which I believe is true for you as well, of profound security and goodness and your destiny, inevitable destiny toward complete wholeness and power and love. Be well.


Good afternoon. Q is live at VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here in San Francisco with Dave Nicholson. This is our second day of coverage, talking all things VMware and its ecosystem. We're excited to welcome from DXC technology, James Bion, Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud offering manager to have a conversation next. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. Welcome. Talk to us a little bit about before we get into the VMware partnership. What's new at DXC? What's going on? So DXC is really evolving and revitalizing into a more of a cloud-orientated company. So, you know, we are really driving change in our customers at the moment. We take them on that cloud journey, but we're taking them in the right way, in a structured mannered way. So we're really excited about it. We kicking off our cloud first type, cloud rights sort of story and helping customers on that journey. Yesterday in the keynote, VMware was talking about cloud, customers are on this cloud chaos phase. They want to get to cloud smart. You're saying they want to get to cloud right. Talk to us about what DXC cloud right is. What does it mean? What does it enable businesses to achieve? That's a very good question. So, DXC has come up with this concept of cloud right. We looked at it from a services and outcomes. What do customers want to achieve and how do we get it successfully? This is not a technology conversation. This is about putting the right workloads at the right place at the right time at the right cost to get the right value for your business. It's not about just doing it for the sake of doing it. There's a lot of changes. It's not technology only. You've got to change how people operate. You've got to work through the organizational change. You need to ensure that you have the right security in place to maintain it. And it's about value, really about value proposition. So, we don't just focus on cost. We focus on operations of it. We focus on security of it. We focus on ensuring the value proposition of it. And putting not just for one cloud, it's the right place. Big focus on hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. In particular, we're very excited about what's happening with VMware Clouds on, maybe AWS or et cetera. Because we see there's a real dynamic change for our customers where they can transition across to the right cloud services at the right time, at the right place, but minimal disruption to the actual operation of their business. Very easy to move a workload into that place using the same skill resources, the same tools, the same environment that you have had for many years, the same SLAs. Customers don't want variance in the SLAs. They just want an outcome at a right price in the right time. Right. What are some of the things going on with the VMware partnership? And anything, here we are at the event called, the theme is the center of the multi-cloud universe, which I keep saying, sounds like a Marvel movie. I think there needs to be some superheroes here. But how is DXC working with VMware to help customers that are in multi-cloud by default, not by design? That's a very good one. So DXC works jointly with VMware for more than a thousand clients out there. Why diversity of different clients? We go to market together, we work collaboratively to put roadmaps in place for our clients. It's a unified team. On top of that, we have an extremely good VMware practice, joint working VMware team working directly with DXC dedicated resources. And we deliver real value for clients. For example, we have a customer experience zone. We have a customer innovation zone. So we can run proof of concepts on all the different VMware technologies for customers. If they want to try something different, try and push the boundaries a little bit with the VMware products, we can do that for them. But at the end of the day, we deliver outcome-based services. We're not there to deliver a piece of software but a technology. We show the customer the value of the service that they can receiving within that. So we bring the VMware fantastic technologies in, and then we bring the DXC managed services, which we do so well and we look after our customers and do the right thing for our customers. So what does the go-to-market strategy look like from a DXC perspective? You know, we say that there are a finite number of strategic seats at the customer table. DXC has long-standing deep relationships with customers. So does VMware. So do, and probably over a shorter period of time, the hyperscale cloud providers, how are you approaching these relationships with customers? Is it you bringing in your friends from the cloud? Is it the cloud bringing in their friend DXC? What does it look like? So we have relationships with all of them, but we agnostic. So we are the people who bring it all together into that unified platform and services that the customers expect. VMware will bring us to the table and we'll bring VMware to the table. Equally, we work very collaborative with all the cloud providers and we work in deals together. They bring us deals, we bring them deals. So it works extremely well from that perspective, but of course it's a multi-cloud world these days. We don't just deal with one cloud provider. We'll normally have all of the different services to find the right place for our customers. And one thing that's been mentioned from DXC is this idea that Cloud First, which has been sort of a mantra that scores you points if you're a CIO lately, maybe that's not the best way to wake up in the morning. Why not, why not, why not, why not saying Cloud First? So we have a lot of clients who've tried that Cloud First journey and they've aggressively taken on migration of workloads. And now that they've settled in a few of those, they're discovering maybe the ROI isn't quite what they expected it was going to be. That transformation takes a long time, a very long time. We've seen some of the numbers around averaging, 100 apps can take up to seven years to transition and transform, that's a long time. It makes you almost less agile by doing the transformation quite ironically. So DXC's Cloud Right program, it really helps you to ensure that you assess those workloads correctly, you target the ones that are going to give you the best business value, possibly the best return on investment using our cloud advisory practice to do that. And then obviously off the back of that, we've got our migration teams and our run services and our application modernization factories and our application platforms for that. So DXC Cloud Right can certainly help our customers on that journey and get that sort of hybrid multi-cloud solution that suits their particular outcomes, not just one cloud provider. So Cloud Right isn't just cloud migration. No, people sometimes confuse digital transformation with cloud migration. So to be clear, Cloud Right in DXC has the ability to work with customers on not just, oh, here, this is how we box it up and ship it out, but what makes sense to box up and ship out? Correct, and it's all about that whole end-to-end lifecycle. Remember, this is not just a technology conversation. This is an end-to-end business conversation. It's the outcomes are important, not the technology. That's why you have good partners like DXC who will help you on that technology journey. So let's talk about, in the dynamics of the market the last couple of years, we saw so many customers in every industry race to the cloud, race to digitally transform. You bring up a good point of people interchangeably talking about digital transformation, cloud migration, but we've saw the massive adoption of SaaS technologies. What are you seeing? Are you seeing customers in that sort of cloud chaos as VMware calls it, that you're coming in with the Cloud Right approach saying let's actually figure out, you may have done this because of the pandemic, maybe it was accelerated, you needed to facilitate collaboration or whatnot, but actually this is the right approach. Are you seeing a lot of customers in that situation? We're certainly seeing some customers going into that chaos world. Some of them are still in the early stages of their journey and are taking a more cautious step towards, in particular, the companies that would die on systems to be up available all the time. Others have gone too far the other extreme are in the chaos world. And our Cloud Right program will certainly help them to pull that chaos back in, identify what workloads are potentially running in the wrong place, get the framework in place for ensuring that security and governance is in place, ensuring that we don't have a cost spend blowouts in particular, and make sure that security is key to everything that we do and operations is key to everything we do. We have our own intelligent platform, X as it's called, our service management platform, which is really the engine that sits behind our delivery mechanism. And that's got a whole lot of AI analytics engines in there to identify things and practically identify workload placements, workload repairs, scripting and hyper-automation behind that to keep available here and there. And that's really some of our Cloud Right story. It's not just sorting out the mess, it's sorting out and then running it for you in the right way. So what does a typical customer engagement look like for a customer in that situation?  They do all the discovery, they run it through our engines to identify what workloads are in the right place, should go the right place, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And that's an important thing. So we will come back with that and say, this is where I think your Cloud Roadmap journey should be. And obviously that takes an iterative process, but we then can pick off the key topics early at the right time and that low-hanging fruit that's really going to drive that value for the customer. And where are your customer conversations these days? Are they, I mean, from a Cloud perspective, digital transformation, we're seeing everything escalate up the C-suite. Are you engaging the executives in this conversation so that they really want to facilitate? Let's do things the right way that's the most efficient that allows us as a business to do what we're best at. So where we've seen programs fail is where we don't have executive leadership and bought in from day one. So if you don't have that executive and business driver and business leadership, then you're definitely not going to be successful. So to answer your question, yes, of course we are, but we also work directly with the IT departments as well. So you just brought up an insight, executive alignment, critically important. Based on what you've experienced in the real world, contrast that with the sort of message to the world that we hear constantly about Cloud and IT. What would be the most shocking thing that you can share with us that people might not be aware of? It's like, what shocks you the most about the disconnect between what everybody talks about and the reality on the ground? Don't name any names of any one, but give us an example of the like, this is what's really going on. So we certainly are seeing that big sort of move it to Cloud quickly. And then the big build shock comes. And just moving a workload across doesn't mean you're in Cloud. It's a transition and transformation to those SaaS and MPOW services is where you get your true value out of Cloud. So the concept that just because it's in Cloud is cheap is not always the case. Doing it right in Cloud is definitely going to have some cost value, but it's going to bring other additional values to that business. It's going to give them agility. It's going to give them resilience. So if you look at all three of those platforms, cost agility and resilience and live across all three of those, then you're definitely going to get the best outcomes. And we've certainly seen some of those where they haven't taken all of those into consideration. Quite often it's cost is what drives it, not the other two. And if you can't keep your operations working efficiently, then you're in a lot of trouble. So Cloud wrong comes with sticker shock. It certainly does. What's on the horizon for DXC? We're certainly seeing a big drive towards apps modernization and certainly helping our customers on that journey. DXC is definitely a cloud company. May that be on hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud. DXC is certainly leading that edge and pushing it forward. Excellent, James, thank you so much for joining us on the program today, talking about what cloud right is, the right approach, how you're helping customers really get to that right approach with the people, the processes and the technology. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily, so don't change the channel.