Thank you everybody for coming here. We'd like to talk to you about how you believe that Limetop and data could be achieved in the cultural sector by, you know, getting into the co-creation world. So first a little word about PACT. So we are the Center of Expertise for Digital Heritage, funded by the Flemish government. And we started out as an institution for archiving of audio-visual heritage, but slowly grew into an organization that talks about all processes related to digital heritage, such as cataloging, such as publishing your data, but also reusing your data. So and our center of concern is doing this in a sustainable way that allows people to access your data, regardless of your institution sustainability. So before I want to make an argument for opening up data, I want to kind of consider what the museum is and who it is meant to serve. And I think if we take a historical perspective, this is probably a good way to see how this shifted throughout time. So this is a picture that shows an imaginative reconstruction of the library in Alexandria. And this is probably the earliest at the station of what led to the modern museum. But in fact it's actually much closer to university in modern terms, since they do not necessarily take after a collection. I mean it was a library, but it's mostly a place that gathers scholars. So the other example historically of the roots of the museum would be the Cabinet of Curiosity from Renaissance, where you can see a very explicit focus on objects, but it's about showing all of the objects because the point is not necessarily scientific study of these objects, but to show them how the owner of these objects has an influence in the world. And of course the audience is mostly courtiers or privileged visitors. And then finally we arrive in the Enlightenment era, which has the roots of the truly modern museum in a certain way. But we're not quite there yet because in the beginning I guess it was also mostly about scholarship of objects, but putting them into a taxonomy, but not necessarily displaying them to large amounts of people. But this of course changed in the 19th century where museums would open them up to large middle class audiences, also as a way to bolster national identity. So here we really see this combination of having a research community, but also doing outreach. And that is still very much reflected in the modern ICOM definition of what a museum is supposed to be. But we're going to try to make an argument for how this could be achieved, opening up your collection, studying it in the digital era. Because basically we believe that consumer demands are changing, and that's true in the commercial world, but also in museums. And I have two kind of central ideas that I think kind of link into this. So the first thing would be on the right, that's a book written by Lawrence Lessig, which is called Remix, Making Heart and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. It's mostly an argument for publishing public domain works under open licenses. But at the same time it also makes an argument for what he calls the ecosystem of reputation, which basically means that in the digital realm, museums are already in competition, which with quote-unquote unofficial voices that are writing about their collections that actually have a quite large audience. And I guess Wikipedia, which is what we're going to talk about later, is the prime example of that. And then apart from that, this graph represents the long-tailed. And this is also kind of an idea that in a digital world, basically shops that have no physical manifestations, such as for instance the Amazon Web Shop, they are able to sell a lot of things that are in very low demand. So things that are interesting for people with a niche interest, but altogether that creates a very large market. So if you look at the middle pie chart, so for Amazon apparently that's 75% of all their sales. And if you apply that to a museum content, we believe that apart from your best sellers, if we can extend the analogy, a true open data strategy would allow you to serve quite a large part of people that you are not giving the tools or the raw data that they would like to work with. So these are two central ideas that I think we want to argue for. So I talked about the ICOM definition earlier. So a museum is a non-profit, a permanent institution in the service of society and its development open to the public, which acquires, conserves, reach searches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. So we believe that researching and communicating is now still mostly interpreted as institutions controlling the quality of curated content that is made about their collections and also controlling access to their data. While we believe that in the future museums should profile themselves as data publishers who share their data, contextualize that data, but that also coordinate initiatives that do this and facilitate people who are interested in their data to do something with it externally from their institution. So my colleague Alina will tell you something about accumulation and registration of data. Hi, so yes, I will be talking about, we wanted to tell you about what is going on in the back office of the museums and some will talk later about publishing front office data. So about accumulation and registration of data. If I may make a generalization, it's not true for all institutions, but in overall for Flemish art museums, this is the situation. The back office technology and infrastructure is not a popular topic to invest in. It's not something that you can make quick wins, fancy apps. So it's often not thought of or not in the main vision of the institutions. There is often also no digital, sorry, digital mindset and often the IT services are external. So there's no IT personnel in the museum, so you're often very dependent on these external providers. The data is messy and not complete. We're talking about basic registration of art objects, but the whole context of it is just, there's just no time to do that. But there's a lot of knowledge in these institutions. The data is captured on different carriers, so in systems, but also still in analog paper dossiers on other Excel outside of the system. So it's a big chaos. They're often still used in closed and obsolete software. So when you ask questions about link-top and data, it's often very difficult to put it in the situation of this software. For audio-visual material, I'm talking about the reproduction, for example, of artworks. There's a lot of digital asset management systems in the market, all not good enough, and there is still an analog mindset of making a copy of the image for every project. You make a copy, you put it somewhere on one computer on the other computer, so you have a lot of different copies, and audio-visual material is not seen as a resource that you can always take for different projects. We at PACT had a chance to initiate a series of projects on optimizing this data in museums, and this is a project on a data hub that we did together with the Flemish Art Collection. It's a partnership between the Fine Arts Museums, KMSKA, Gruninger and MSKHENS. Some contemporary art museums also took part, and it was a project on analyzing the infrastructure that is now the outdated infrastructure and making a plan for the future for a better platform that can help museums to function as these online knowledge sources. And I will talk about the end goal of this project was making a data hub for these museums, which aggregates the data from the collection management systems and puts it via an API as open data for reuse. I wanted to talk about different projects around this data hub for you to see what's going on and what kind of open data principles we tried to implement in the cultural heritage sector. And so the first question was the persistent URIs, Persistent Identification of Artworks, which here is a link to an artwork from 2012 of SMAC, which of course doesn't work now because the museum has a new website, so if you're a researcher or I don't know who saved this link into your data set, you have a problem. What we did is looked for a way for this persistent URIs and persistent identification of artworks to be implemented by the museum workers themselves, so not again an external IT service, which you have to call every time for every persistent URI to be made, but is over a tool that can be used by the collection managers themselves, which we developed ourselves. It's an open source tool, the code is on GitHub, and now for example you have a persistent URI for an artwork that resolves to the, for now just the HTML page about an artwork, but in the future you can put whatever you want behind it. But the problem is that this resolver tool is still the persistent URIs, so concept that is too hard to process for collection managers, and this tool needs to be developed further for it to be a success in cultural heritage. We also played around with enrichment of data via external authorities, so you talked about taking data from external authorities and adding it to your data, which was very interesting to see how all of this, I think it's the example of Peter Brögel, that has different kinds of his name and notations, which you don't have to copy paste anymore as a collection manager, but which you can just take from other authorities. All this stuff, we also tested how you can internally reuse all this linked data from different museums, if you aggregate them in one data hub, for example visualizations like the acquisition source, like where do artworks come from into a museum, and you could see all of this artworks from the church, artworks from the artist, artworks from the king that were given to a museum, so fun stuff to see also just for the internal business process of the museums. The beta version is also on GitHub, so it is now tested by museums. The data is being aggregated from the different management systems, so we are looking forward to the feedback of the museums. For the other visual material, my colleagues looked into the situation on reproductions and made a blueprint for a distributed management of this material using IIIF and these kind of open principles. All this project made it possible for us to start testing the linked open data publication for the cultural sector and this is where some... Basically, PACT started with open data publication with a website called Open Culture Data in 2012 and it was not very successful in the sense that it's data dumps which have outdated information and also the developer community didn't really find their way to the platform, so that's obviously I think something I heard a lot of people talk about today. Basically, PACT started looking elsewhere and you are probably all... I don't know if I have to explain, but I'll say everybody is basically aware of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia, but apart from that, of course, there's a Wikimedia ecosystem of platforms that work together. Wikidata, the database, Wikimedia Commons, the audio-visual repository which provided us a possibility to start opening up collections and why did we choose for Wikimedia? First of all, it's a living system, so not only will people reuse your data, they will also engage with it so they might add data, they might link it to other sources and also, of course, very much to the country or the website, it has much larger visibility, so people will find their way to the data that you publish. So as Alina already explained, since persistent identification is a basic condition for linked open data publication, those persistent identifications are already there for a number of fine arts museums in Belgium. So the second step was to get them to publish a very limited amount of data fields such as a title, creator, some dating information, for instance, and together 27,000 works had their data published on Wikidata. So then the second step was how do we get images of reproductions for that because as many of you might know, the first decade of digitization was done according to a business model which made organizations claim a copyright on their images. So first and foremost, we started doing a crowdsourcing project with Wikimedia of Belgium which is called Wikiluf's Art, so this is still from it, where we would go to museums to ask them if we could go on a tour, if we could do, for instance, a real photography setup to make reproductions of their artwork. And I go mad if Wikimedia of Belgium is right there, so I help them a lot in the process. So this was an interesting format because, one, it didn't require the museum to change its right management statements immediately and it also didn't require them to give their reproductions. But, of course, these are not always the kind of images that have the same quality as, like, of course, a reproduction that's made in the studio in high resolution with the right color settings. So basically we are right now asking these museums to give us reproductions of a decent resolution and the coupling of the Wikidata information to images has already been done for the museum for 842 works, so that's a finished project that we're happy of. And we're trying to get all these other museums to also see whether they can do this, which is of course not always simple because of course there's also smug contemporary art museum in there. So what happens once organizations publish their data? So what's interesting is there are already a lot of very nice tools that are created by the Wikimedia community. It's a little vague here, but for instance right there you can see that this query is basically for this HUNI museum set that we just talked about. How many views these images got altogether for the month of January 2018? And as you can see below that is 44,987 views, which is quite impressive. So we're trying to make institutions to think about that kind of visibility, apart from what they are already used to. And furthermore these tools give you interesting information, for instance, in which articles the content is used. So that's not necessarily only an article about the specific painting, but it can also be a theme that's related to it for the French Revolution for instance, or a movement. So it can be kind of reapplied in many different ways. And you can even check when it gets peaked, because for instance if there's a temporary exhibition going on, obviously all the people are looking for that data. And yeah, you see a lot of interesting curating projects that are done by the volunteer community. For instance, this is a fur fashion in 1562. So we just noticed that one of the images that we uploaded was of a man. Yeah, it's over here, it's a little vague, but it's basically a painting of somebody with a medieval fur coat. And this is put into a collection that is curated on Wikimedia Commons about fur fashion throughout the century. It starts in the third century AD and it goes all the way up to the present day. And this is perhaps not something a museum would work on because they are concerned with their collection, but nonetheless it's a very fun example I think of something that happened almost immediately after we published the image. And apart from that, obviously content, data and images on the Wikimedia ecosystem does very well in Google rankings. So apart from the fact that it usually shows up very high in Wikimedia Commons, you have the Google search box which draws content from Wikimedia, but also images from Wikimedia Commons and some data over there. So it provides a very nice visibility. What we also noticed is that data does get enriched. So for instance, this data about exhibition history, this is not something we added, so that was added by somebody externally. And as you can see, European 280 there is referenced, so it's high quality data. And underneath you see that certain iconographical information is actually referenced using standardized codes. So it's the data that the heritage sector wants to work with. But the problem right now is how do you harvest this data to get it back to the data of the institutions? At the moment there is no automatized way and certainly not a way that a collections registrator with no particular IT background can just get it out of these data at least not on an automatized way. And we also, we didn't notice that some data definitely travels, so for instance this is the virtual international authority file, so it's information about creators of artwork for instance, or persons. And this is the record of James Ensur, and obviously that was one of the data sets that was released on certain creator and it's now used by VL, so they harvest our data. And furthermore there are all kinds of neat tools that are already there that you can use to visualize your collections. So obviously if you have reproductions images and data you can do all sorts of night stuff like bubble charts and timelines obviously. You can map your entire collection on a timeline like this for instance without you really having to write software or create something new. And this for instance is a tool created that's called CODOS. And basically if you do have your collection released with images you're able to automatically generate a catalog for your collections. So we would like to see more of those tools that are easy to use and that are interesting for the cultural sector to be created in the future. Let's go to the conclusions so we can go into that. Okay, so short the conclusions and the next steps. Why were we talking about linked open data in Limbo? It's because the institutions, the museums still struggle about this concept and it's often too extreme. Yes, between two extremes and the one is wanting to participate in this digital movement but having no digital mindset or no vision on how to do it. They want to reduce costs on IT apps but it often also can end up in an out of control IT budget if you don't do it sustainable. So you keep on adding stuff, you keep on the collection management systems adding stuff and it just goes out of control. You have the new digital audience that are good with smartphones but you also have an audience that still doesn't use any digital software and apps. So how do you interest both of these audiences? There is also a very hard pressure budget-wise also to show off with fancy tools and let's know that you're participating but often get locked up in absolute technology so you keep on creating new applications and you want to engage with the crowd but then you have a mass of abandoned web portals that nobody ever uses because nobody knows they're there. So this is kind of the Limbo situation. Our wish list would be for ASAP more IT profiles in the cultural heritage sector because we really see that if somebody with an open Belgium mindset comes into the institutions it really goes faster. This one is also talked about today. There should be more freedom to play around and to test things out. The budgets that museums get now is just you have one try and it should be good. If you fail then you don't lie about it, you don't talk about it but you should get the freedom to play around because the tools that there are now are often should be made or custom for institutions and there's not like one resolving service for everything so playing around is very important. Better open infrastructures and tools so for back office the collection management systems that are being used now are very often closed and obsolete. More tools that give the possibility to publish open data online. More examples of reusing like Wikimedia data reusing and stuff like that and I don't know if you see that more vocal and demanding audience because we are often find ourselves in the loop of yes but nobody is asking open data so why should we do it? And then the reusing community says yes there is no open data so we don't have examples of how we want to reuse it. So this is what we need to break out of. PACT for our future plans is to work further on this data hub project. We are giving our resolver tool to the open summer of code in the hope that something better will come out of it, a better usable tool. We have a set of Wikimedia projects like about publishing artworks that have come into public domain yearly like structural publishing of data and images. Also reusing this information in Wikimedia articles but also outside of the platform. We are also looking for the current, we wanted to do a survey on the current demand of cultural heritage data by various sectors so not only the traditional tourism but outside of it the research digital humanities communities etc. So if you see yourself contributing to any of these questions or the wish list that you have seen do you have ideas or feedback please contact us we are very eager to hear it. So thank you, do you have any questions? I mean why are you trying to use your cell phone to develop your museums? Because it seems to me that museums in different countries especially in the new exchange are supported all the time. So would you expand for other countries and try to create a regional part of museum data? Well there is already, of course, the European, this is the big aggregator of the data from all European cultural heritage institutions but what we have seen after the years of this project is it's also it's very hard to build this one big aggregator. For example nobody thought of asking for persistence to arise to reproductions when they took data in so now a lot of museums are just showing like the error with the picture because so now they have to do it again. The data hub which is built in this project is I think the future is behind smaller data hubs which then go higher and higher because if you create one big thing then it is hard to make it sustainable to control it to let it be accessible on long term. So and the code is open source I think it is a possibility that more museums could go into this data hub but of course also one of the problems that we are working with it's because it's project budget. So you have one project and you need to fit it in some kind of which is really a risk for sustainability of this kind of project but we hope by doing it in open source that it will create a community around it. Quick question. Does it have a sparkle at the point of data? Can we interface with it? I think it's the OIE. I think it's the you have to be with my other colleagues for this kind of questions but it is the possibility there is an API which you should get possible to get that out of it but I don't think it will be sparkle. I think it's the data that is in there is Lido XML and I think to get it out So there are no triples? Yes I think it is like a triple data but you really should be with my other colleagues I'm sorry. To answer maybe part of the question wiki data query is actually sparkle. If I want to carry another museum and link it to ours I have to go through wiki data which is absurd. Also maybe it wasn't clear from our presentation the data hub and wiki data tests are next to each other So you have the data hub where more data will be available the wiki data was a test to show how you can also use platforms, free platforms that are already available. Maybe be clear on the wiki media ecosystem it's a way to display and open up your collection but it can never serve as the same service. Yes as your own online source because also everything that's on wiki data should be referenced so you cannot create, you cannot put original content on these platforms so it's always important that your own source online keeps existing as a source of the original information.


Okay, I'm starting the live stream of the discus thing, you know, we would rather people be here. Hi candle. Hey, are you doing good. I tried to start it, you know, like other sessions and showed me the failure so I jumped here. It's interesting because it, it says failure, like in the, the web client pop up, but then it'll say that it's actually streaming in the zoom client and then if you go and check in like summit that opened up or whatever you like and actually see the stream so like, I don't know why it keeps saying it's failing because I've definitely had that too, but it's like ended up streaming anyway. Okay. We want you to be here anyhow. Exactly. All right. So the service is all of the security and, you know, we're a maple configuration. Is it do you think it's screen screaming at this point. Oh, it is good. Yeah, it should be. Okay. I'm going to hit record if I'm a host, just so that we get a copy of any chat comments later. Yeah, go for it. Cool. I think we're ready to go. We didn't prepare a particular specific presentation because we had done the one on one in the keynote. But if folks are not familiar with open info lab we certainly can give you guys a sort of a high level overview. And it's something in an earlier, in an earlier discussion at Project Harris that I thought was really summarized well some of what we've been doing and that was that the existing cloud providers. They're already doing things that cross the go across multiple open tech projects, and they can do that because they're running it all within their own space. And the goal here is to create a space like that for for the open source cloud. Yeah, so, so in some sense, by being prescriptive we limit sort of options on the other hand, we add more options because we can now optimize across the layers in a way you can't if you're assuming that it could be deployed in any arbitrary fashion. And that's kind of what project series is about is specifically on the computing storage interfaces doing those allowing those cross optimized layer optimizations, but I think it's much broader than that. I mean, it's really young people here is Arkady and me. I know there's Jacob. Oh good. People but I think everybody is quiet except us. Oh, so, so, maybe we should just ask people to at least raise their hands do you guys want kind of Michael to give an overview quick overview again of what open info labs is about. Yeah, I think that will be fair enough. Okay, give me a second and I will hunt down my presentation and run through the first couple of slides for you. I did link the etherpad and the zoom chat if everybody wants to go ahead and put their names as like attendees in the etherpad. It's going to take me a second to get it to share properly share screen. So, one kind of question I had, after the presentation is trying to understand the differences between having multiple zones, or multiple sides which zone or site is a different configuration per zone versus the federated model proposed. I guess like quick quick question to kind of maybe help drive that resolute that question resolution that question. If the presentation states the original context in which all of this started. It does talk a little bit about where it started. Yeah. Okay, cool. Then that will probably do it. So, the original mass open the this all came out of work that started with the mass open cloud, which is a partnership between Boston University Harvard MIT northeastern and you mass in one data center. That's in the western part of the state of Massachusetts where power and and space is less expensive. The goal, the original goal that we had six seven years ago when Iran first hatched the idea with with Peter was to create a self sustaining at scale public cloud based on an open cloud exchange model, so that we can have a marketplace for industry partners as well as researchers and industry to innovate and expose innovation to real users were sort of driven by this pain point that we couldn't see the underlying data that you need to do cloud research. That was I think what was sort of an initial an initial pain point that the researchers were feeling that led to this and Iran jump in if I'm if I'm slaughtering the history at all. The partners of the MOC specifically include the five research universities, the mass green high performance computing center, Intel, Red Hat to Sigma US Air Force IBM in the open stack foundation. The folks who are involved in open info labs are a broader collection and I don't know if I have that picture in this slide but I'll get to it. We currently, it currently has hundreds of servers. There are hundreds of students who are taught using it annually. There's CI CD for us, a couple of open source projects at the moment. And we have been deeply involved with using open stack since the beginning or on as has mentioned in some previous talks, how he was asked to talk it open at an open stack, meeting with a group of other people running clouds, any afterwards they started talking and that was what Iran realized that all of the folks who he was on the stage with were using a product he had helped create which would be which was the cloud director, as opposed to running it in pure open stack this was five or six years ago. But one of the main pain points that we run into is it's really hard to run an open source cloud and so when we started the MOC, and we didn't realize how hard it was going to be to actually stand up and run it on a day to the basis and, and the reason for that is because there's no commonality. Each project has its own method of each project within open stack tracks the data differently, and there's not a common flow between them. So for example when we wanted to do billing or monitoring, we had to sort of create it from scratch. And when you stand up an open source cloud typically you're doing it on different hardware configurations unique installation steps, different services. There isn't any commonality there either. And so what that means that there's no way to encapsulate as practices. There's no easy way to compare information between the clouds, each of us solves the problems we encounter in a different way, and we typically end up doing it by ourselves. It also means that for the open source developer of the software they don't have any visibility into how their software is actually being deployed, how it's been operated how it's been used. And so the community may be working on problems that the operators don't want. And when the operators come to the community for help. There's really no way to reproduce it or debug it. And so that's a challenge as well. The public clouds in some ways have an easier way of dealing with it because they're prescriptive. They solve their problems the same way if you look at one rack in one data center it's probably identical to the rack in another data center. They have real visibility into what users are doing, they can evaluate their software with real usage, they can evolve things dynamically with CI CD. And this, this thing that we came to realize was that we really believe that if open source clouds are going to be successful in the long run that the community needs its own cloud. So back in about 2018 we we reached out at the open stack foundation explore this thinking that they were going to be really pissed off but but what actually happened was Mark and Jonathan were like yes. Finally, this is this is what we recognize we need to do.  We had a great MVP. It was a it was a fun meeting. It's hard to argue with it avoid do that should be the MVP for every project we all work on. And then we had a pretty clear goal and it's, it's still around that original Federation model. It's to create a federated large scale cloud starting with academia. We're going to start with the MSE. We want to create a highly prescriptive cloud and about solution, deploy it at the MSE, and then replicated it multiple at multiple academic institutions. And then we want to federate that into a large scale cloud. So that's sort of the high level. We picked academia. We picked academia because it's, it's a really good starting point, but like we needed to have success in one spot. It requires massive scale, it increasingly is depending on rich cloud tools. There's a history of collaboration and Federation across institutions. For example, the MSE itself is a collaboration of that type. The mass green high performance computing center is actually a data center run by the same five group of university, the same five universities. The New England research cloud is being created between Harvard and Boston University. Another example, there's just, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of, of experience doing that. And that's the part that's kind of even more exciting to us and that's thinking about what it would be like if every class that's using the cloud was being trained using an open cloud. And if the academic researchers could actually get access to all of the data that they needed to do their research. And I'm going to really quickly skip through some of the research that we've done because I don't want to take too much more time. Some examples are world map, which is used by tens of thousands of users around the world. There's smart cities projects that combine information on multiple cities. Cloud telemetry that identifies and stays problems in the cloud. These are all projects that have been going on at the MOC on on the cloud itself. But then there's, there's also the research into an open cloud. And that stuff like cloud federation, cloud security, cloud storage research, integration of data repositories, network research, monitoring cloud services, integrating FPGAs, elastic secure infrastructure, which is actually going on in a separate form right now, at the same time. And that last capability started out as a, as a thing that was going on in research at the MOC as a product in DMI. It's now being productized and integrated into ironic. And that's actually going to be an interesting part because what it allows us to do all quickly run through this. And MOC enabled all this research is that you have access to the real cloud data. You've got access to the metadata of the cloud. You can engage via the MOC with industry partners in the open source community. Then NSF funded open cloud test bed, or we call it the OCT, allowed us to create a new national test bed for this. We're using cloud lab with the MOC to enable reproducible cloud research. And this is the ESI part we can move the, the infrastructure around between the NERC, the MOC, the open cloud test bed, so that as we have the requirements and the needs. Ah, Jen just mentioned the ESI was been moved. Cool. And as, as we have, for example, paper deadlines, we can move hardware around to meet that. So a quick summary. That's, I think you skipped over the last, maybe most important part that all this stuff that we're doing. So we move forward one in the animation is that this this ability to grab a whole bunch of hardware and do terms experiments and access cloud telemetry and is actually going to be all available through to open source developers as well as cloud researchers because a bunch of infrastructure came from other sources. So this is something we're really excited for this community to engage with and try to kind of blur the boundary between I guess the research community that's using it for research and the open source community. That way, thank you. I was burying the lead and I, in fact, skipping over it. So, essentially, what we're, what we're trying to get to is starting with the MOC, creating a prescriptive cloud in the box that bridges the gap between operating system development and operations. We're going to deploy cloud in the box, we're going to gain real experience. And when it's ready, we're going to work with other institutions to replicate and federate it. And what we learned from academia and the other cloud operators. We're going to get reflected back up into open info labs back into the releases. And the goal is that with a common code base, we think that the institutions are not only going to be able to, to take, take advantage of the learning that goes on at each of the different institutions. So, for example, if you learn that you should be monitoring something at day 100, and you're using the same monitoring infrastructure as other universities or other cloud operators, and it becomes much more much simpler to move to a model where you can start to replicate that up into open info labs, back out into the cloud in the box, when you do your next update to it, you sort of automatically get those reports. Also, one of the things that we think is going to happen is when we start having a really common code base between these different institutions, they're not only going to be able to federate, but they could also potentially share operational skills and staff. That already sort of gone around. I just want to add one thing so one of the in the actual full part of the keynote that Michael recorded of which it was cut, unfortunately for time. There was a presentation by Scott Yoko and Wayne Gilmore with heads of research IT at Harvard and BU. So they're sort of leading the NERC effort, which is to create is going to be the production arm of all this, at least in sort of the Northeast region, where so now we have sort of this team, just give you context for the scale that these people operate at. They have 300,000 cores of compute in the MGC right now, with over 50 petabytes of storage so it's not quite you know the public cloud scale but it's a lot larger scale than even most enterprises. And so they're going to be kind of operating production arm. So things will kind of roll from the prescriptive offering we develop in the MOC can roll it out the first one will be NERC. And we're going to have them working as facilitators with this product community. So we're really hoping that this community, you know, our eventual goal is to have these operators being able to both work to take that to take academia and have them help them use the services here, but also to go back and give to the open source community feedback on how things are used. And this open source community have access to the telemetry of a real cloud that's being operated at scale this environment. Because frankly, I believe that while they have 300,000 cores of compute with these HPC environments, it's going to be even larger as as we start moving into this cloud environment, because it's not just for a bunch of specific computational uses but it is for the purposes needs across the universities. The other thing that is not in this set of slides that I wanted to draw attention to is, there are already a couple of projects like Project Keras, like the elastics or infrastructure that are beginning to move their home over to the open market repository, because they cross multiple projects and it starts to become our goal is to create an environment where people who are dealing with those sorts of issues where you're crossing projects, have a place to talk and work together and figure out ways to do it in a way that that is helpful and that I mean Julia has been wonderful at sort of making sure that we're doing things in a way that that that make that is a positive and not and not her tearing her hair out and yelling at us. And that's sort of the goal is to create a place where that can go on within within the existing structures that that exists. And I feel like I might be speaking out out of turn, but I, where some of some, I guess my, my original understanding is that what helps spawn some of this read the original research was this idea that, hey, I've got this data center that's basically a DR site that has no running hardware but I need to keep it running. Why do I, why don't I provide some of these resources to other people that use them. I might have to reclaim it really fast kind of scenario, and I think that's part of where this whole model really has a major potential impact because that forces you to take that in a box mindset, or that repeatable pattern mindset and have all the tooling and mechanics to be able to go. I don't know if it's going to build really push all this, or it's being taken from me. Right. Sorry, somebody else was speaking, I'm going to mute. Yeah, I was. Yeah, I kind of understood understood that model also that you would like to be able to have the full description of the cloud and be able to replicate it. Maybe on the same site or multiple site as needed.  No surprises there. It's kind of understandable. It's a little bit different from what I understood the earlier work was kind of the cloud as a service, where you kind of creating for lack of better name private cloud out of the, you know, larger cloud carving out for individual institution, user community, and creating exactly the configuration and the setup they need. You know, and then kind of bringing it back into the larger pool when it's longer needed or you need to reclaim it back from them and reconfigure it for, you know, whatever next cloud would be. You know, is potentially scaling the resources, you know, from one cloud to another is needed. At least from my perspective you guys are both right and wrong. So you're right in the sense that that that. Yeah, a fundamental goal was to create highly elastic. And in fact, being able to stand up new, new environments rapidly part of this was because we ourselves, you know, have because it's interactive the MOC, a lot of the uses are really highly interacting with their, the resources we have strong kind of, you know, general patterns we'd like to give up the resources to be used by other environments and we'd be able to like to steal resources from these HPC clouds. Similar to the open cloud test bed is was actually experiments then before publication for OSDI or SSP or as plus, you know, these cloud test beds have massive demand. They're pretty idle the rest of the time. So being able to having everybody that works in the same community have exactly the same share a common silo of equipment is the worst idea I've ever heard of, because it's impossible to get any resources when you actually need it. So, and we've actually worked with the Air Force here that has all kinds of infrastructure that is highly underutilized which is exactly like what you want right. You don't want the fire trucks in your area to be not 100% used when you actually have a fire even though we normally think of high utilization is a good sign. So there's lots of infrastructure that for example is there to deal with national emergencies where they'd like to be able to have other good uses of it when they're in national emergency, which is 99.999% of the time. So there's this elasticity, but there's also the very fact that the MOC is sort of taken off we have like 10,000 users of people on top of this. And we other academic institutions want to, we now it's gotten to the point where there's production offering, and we want to replicate it and federate it, and we'd like to be able to reach out to you guys to the open source community, and say, look, we had this failure, you know, but it's like so impossible for people to reproduce problems when they don't have access to the logs and all the information everything. So we want to expose all this information. And in a sense that's, that's where this is started is the idea that you know Michael was talking to Jonathan and markets are saying, Hey, you know we think we should be a cloud that you have full access to.  It goes through a CI it gets rolled out into through a CD to some portion of the MOC and then federated out to nerc and then to other clouds. I mean, that agility has been what's driven the public cloud so successful. And we'd really like to see that we really think that that's really important for the open source community and it doesn't really have it today. Does that make sense. So, again, this is sort of a bit of an elephant but this is a real cloud. We've had problems because every other cloud that we've talked to does things a slightly different way than us. Getting just a complete solution with show back to academic users with everything you need end to end to create cloud a box solution is part of the thing. And we want to have the whole thing highly elastic and growing and shrinking on demand. Because in our environment, it's it's critical to achieve high utilization. So, in order to achieve the high utilization, especially for the running workloads are usually the configurations of the cloud are optimized for workload classes. I expect that's what will happen and you kind of extract and think of that you have a blueprint which you build out of that center key for this class of the workload. This is how the cloud would look like and obviously it's shareable across multiple organizations so somebody want to take that and you know adopted for their use cases makes perfect sense. I think the more where I'm less clear is how to federate those you know what exactly will be federated what information what sharing will be done kind of identity management we should be required for that especially cross institutions who have no common identity management. Is a little bit questionable for me. And the one wish to me, you know, is more interesting is that extracting the data to kind of understand what data need to be collected, as you need to reconfigure those clouds for specific use cases. So we can clearly understand when you do in this, you know, you know, building the cloud continuously many different ways, you know what data you need to collect. We have some data, but I don't think we are ever targeted those kind of use cases. I think there's one thing that we that might be a case and that is if you understand what you have and the configuration and the differences, and you're able to measure that then. And you're able to understand the measure measurable this difference between the different configurations and you're at least able to extrapolate and not necessarily have to force a full reconfiguration of everything. And that might be some of what they're doing, based on research helpful. Yes, I think that's part of it. I think that I'd rather, I think we probably want to air somewhat in terms of having a number of prescriptive solutions that are reusable. Because, you know, the more that we allow full full sort of opening is really problematic. I think we're starting with academia for a number of reasons first of all because we're here. Because it's a lot easier to get telemetry information out from the cloud. It's a lot easier to get people to agree to exposing the telemetry information from the mass open cloud than it is from say the cloud internal to State Street. And, and to make that available to the open source community. I think that it's also the fact that in our environment. Identity is a solve problem because of a variety of efforts that have gone on between academic institutions. So that there's certain things that are easier to solve in this environment. And to get off the ground with Federation. That's not uniquely necessary, but to, to adopt what academia is done but generally I can go to any university in the United States and get on edgy Rome and and beyond wireless and so those those capabilities allow us to get off the ground a lot faster. And I think that in Federation, there's a, I think that the first thing is to develop these cloud of box solutions fully automated or as automated as we can, and building the community of sres across universities that are supporting that, which were that there are stages of, but the more this open source communities involved in helping us automate those, helping select a set of offerings that might be prescriptive even down to the hardware in the first releases. And replicable to reduce the barriers to deployment, the better. I think said that the other part that you guys both mentioned, we do need to carve out solutions for particular domains that are themselves elastic like. For example, Boston Children's Hospital wants to use this for a whole bunch of use cases they have a set of streaming compute demands and they need to have the compliance for some of the stuff. And so we want to create a repeatable environment that uses exactly the same models as the other parts, but that actually has a much higher compliance regime that kind of poofs appears when needed, or may grow in shrink. But is a small part of that larger cloud even within a region for these compliance requirements. Sorry, I kind of went on for a while trying to address comments you both made with that. So I guess, for me it feels like the next questions. How can we help. I'm going to let Michael lead that. So, so many ways. So, let's keep it less simple and short please. I know, I know, I know. So one, one thing that I thought about as as you and our cutting we're talking about the gathering the info from the cloud. We have a we're in the middle of trying to set up a working group that is focused specifically on telemetry. Very likely an area that that and and one of the folks involved in it is from academia and one of the folks involved from it is from industry. I think some of you may know, Marcel Hill from who said red hat, he agreed to participate on the condition that it be a an active working group with goals, not a talking group. And so that we're going to try and reach out to folks to participate in if folks who are on this call have a specific interest in that area. If you can drop your name into the etherpad that would be a huge help because we'll make sure that we include you in the initial kickoff meeting. The other thing is for those, and I haven't looked at who's on on the call. For those of you who who are affiliated who may be affiliated with hardware companies. We're running on fairly old hardware, and we believe that there is going to be a fairly huge demand. If, once we move all of our current academic workloads or many of our current academic workloads over to the NERC. We start to have a lot more capacity at the mercy to handle CI CD for open source projects. I'm aware of the fact that we're going to start running into hardware issues, both because of the age of some of our hardware. Some of it just isn't supported by some of the latest versions. And also because we expect there's going to be greater demand than there is capacity. If we're successful, there will be greater demand than capacity. So for folks who are who are involved with hardware companies. That's always an area that we're happy to get help on other areas are really would we know that there are a lot of operators out there who have their own internal solutions to a lot of the problems that we're facing. So for example, how do we get to a common monitoring solution. That is used across multiple projects and products. There are a lot of groups that are focusing on that. But I'd like to go more broadly within the community of operators. If there are people who you guys know who you can connect us with, we can get involved. So far the discussions about that have been more of a talking shop than a working and doing shop and what that's changed. It's interesting you mentioned this because at least in the bare metal community, the bare metal SIG. We've, we kind of talked about the same similar things and try and how to move, move from talking to actually doing or producing something. And we think we have a plan and it interesting enough someone brought the point that, well, it's kind of sounds like the operator group that's part of open stack community is kind of trying to nibble on the same idea. How do we approach this problem? How do we spread this knowledge? And how do we, you know, possibly provide the product feedback loop. So I think it this is a really good opportunity to try and. Get to circle us all together and go, hey, we may necessarily not have the same solution, but if we have the same basic goals, maybe we can kind of cooperate work together, cross advertise for whatever it ends up being. Yeah. And go from there. That would be great. We haven't really done enough outreach to that operator group. I only learned about it. I think from you about a month back. But in some sense, one of the things about this project is that it's the operators that are serving the driver seat. We want this to be the place. So, you know, Scott, you know, we have, we have the MOC and it's got a lot of users, but we expect NERC to rapidly, you know, these are the production IT groups with facilitators that work with researchers. We expect this to kind of explode the usage. And as it goes past this proof of concept and we sort of put Scott and Wayne and Michael in some sense of the driver seat of playing what we're going to accept. So we're trying to create this cross. And this organization, which will directly, not as a general thing, not just as an operator community as a, as a, we'd like to eventually have this go all the way to, you know, we really know strongly in the open source community and in fact in the research community, what the usage of this environment is. So what do you want, maybe turning this on its head because we want the open source community to really want to push this forward. What are you lacking in terms of visibility into how, at least in one environment and may not be representative of everything but it is real. What telemetry do you want? What, what would be important for your project to allow it to evolve? Yeah, that's, at least from my perspective and if there's anyone else that wants to answer this question by all means interject. But I feel like it's, it's a mixture of use cases. It's a mixture of problems. It's a mixture of, as you said, telemetry data. It's a mixture of the logging actually that we can view with the telemetry data trying to correlate a problem and investigate something back and I can tell you from experience the hardest thing to do is a try and get people to provide all that logging when there's an issue and be able to reproduce it. So when we have all this information be collected, captured, even continuously, even if it's only like a two week span of this high resolution data, then at least it's easier to dig in and understand and as long as it's easy to get at that data. So we're, we're in a great position to give you that in the sense that we can stand up and it might not be the whole thing. There's certainly some privacy issues to be concerned about. I guess we have already started, and this kind of came out the chameleon project adopting some of their stuff to anonymize, but I have, I have limited belief in how well the we should also, we're talking about saying up a cluster, which is, which people can only use if they sign off in the first place that all information is totally available to a community and it may not be to, you know, we'll have the question is what restrictions do we put other people have access to it, but we'd like to make it really, really modest right we'd like the open source community. Maybe, maybe, maybe there's sort of some requirement that each group in the open source in, in, you know, this community sort of vets a person, and that person signs something to say that they're not going to use it for nefarious purposes. But it should, we should try to give the minimum barrier so that you have full access to all the telemetry and logs. And part of what we think was going to help a lot with that is that the HPC systems already do a lot of that. And so there's, there's a history of that already. And the university has already have the concept of data sharing relationships that they really clearly understand pretty deeply. And I'm pretty hopeful that it's going to be a fairly straightforward process. Yeah. I guess kind of going back to beyond or before the day that it's also kind of, it's almost like those wants needs and dreams. And someone needs to write those down. And when it's not a developer doing it. It's intimately involved in a project. It has a little more weight. When it's someone that brings a compelling hard problem. Sometimes people actually pick up and run with it. We actually were in the current outreach cycle. And someone, one of the applicants that they're not getting paid. They're still in the applying phase. And when they started with the tooling, they actually noticed they like click the back button notice one of the items we had in our backlog is like a fairly easy task and we're like, I'm going to take this on. And then they actually really enjoyed it apparently, and point where they have talked about it, but it's just those are the kinds of things that we kind of need to track and understand you and revisit. I guess kind of the habit of also just logging them in a bug tracker or whatever also doesn't really help, because it loses that identity it loses that emotion behind it, and loses a lot of the appeal of the problem. Why is the thing hard? Why is this not already been solved? Or is this a really simple problem? If you turn that if you, if you take the water bottle and do this, does the problem become easier kind of thing and that's sometimes it just takes a different perspective. So how do we do that? How do we get our problems, you know, in to this community. It's really, really visible. So to make things really visible in this community, that's a good question. I mean, because what you have is you have each project has its kind of own entry path. And when I say each project, it's probably better to say each project of each sub project or each sub project of each project, because if you look at ironic for example, you have one process one way. And that's kind of where people build consensus with no you have another process in the somewhat different way with another library might be just put the patch up. So I think kind of what the thing is, you kind of build it. I keep using this word and it's kind of what this event is a forum on a regular basis where you're kind of exchanging these thoughts ideas and reaching the same page. And for example, we had so much CERN, they have a rank they like to kind of go on every year, or every six months. And they start going on the rant today. And so I was like, well, I'm almost there. I just haven't gone to yet. So we need to get them to work together and kind of take that next logical step. I think catalysts there has to be some way to track and some way to bring this stuff together. The best way I think is probably collect people together and give them a reason to somehow cross cross project. You know, maybe at PT PTG meeting and then let the TC try to figure out how the best way to program across I wouldn't even think that because I think that it's putting more work on their play and more weight. I think it needs to be informal. I think it needs to be roughly structured. And I think it needs to also be kind of fun. So I, I think that I want to back up one second, Julia, did you say it needs to be formal or informal, somewhat informal but also have structure. Thanks. I think that partly, you know, we sort of had this early conversation, I don't know, two years ago now or something, or a year ago, about how we were. We were doing a lot of the stuff that the ironic was doing with this, our research, a bunch of code written by a bunch of graduate students, and it was being used in semi production basis. And then you guys from the ironic team said, Oh, no, we want to actually integrate this and it's being sort of a one year effort but now we're rolling out replacing all of the hill BMI stuff with ironic and doing our first experiments with that. And assuming this is as successful as we hope it is, we then want to have ironic on top of ironic and the HPC clusters on top of this, and you can see a 200,000 cores of compute, shifting over to using this if all goes as planned. And that's like a massive experiment, I think that the same, we have the same kind of really close interaction with the Keystone group. My hope is just that we're showing these proof points of, you know, you kind of can visibly see something, and then specifically ironic you can have full visibility into what we're doing because of that. I'm hoping that it just becomes. I think that success is the way to do this is have particular communities that we're able to interact with and then we're rolling it out for real here. And so I also think that if there are questions, and maybe there, there should be answers, and my mean by this is the idea I kind of had an ironic session for the Burmese sick was we have a topic areas that there are subject matter experts for that are very complex that people try to avoid. And it's like, people don't have a good understanding of them, because it's, it's kind of nebulous and doesn't, it's not clear. So we're thinking our thought is we make little 10 minute videos, and they do on a month, and have as part of this gathering. So people can ask a couple of questions, and someone can do the five minute. Here's how this works and here are the pieces or layers and maybe it's only two minutes, but you know it kind of we generate some thing and we generate interaction and also have a record output. Yeah, I like that. I think beyond the ironic one I think you'll probably need to have deeper interaction with triple O guys, because ironically set up your hardware, but, you know, deploying the cloud itself and the configuration of the cloud with each of the components right that's really falls on the tree.  And I think Kendall just noted that we are out of time. So we should continue having this discussion so how do we have this discussion do we just schedule a call or meeting and start tweeting or something. So, a couple of things. I'll drop into the, I'll drop the various IRC and other channels into open info labs. We have a group of PTG slots next week that we have not necessarily associated with anything but it feels like this is one that we ought to associate with with the PTG slots. Another quick thought that I had as we were speaking was one of the things one of the ways that we could use help. Maybe at a metal level. We're very small team, figuring out how to incorporate help into that small team in a way that we can know what's going on. And so maybe I'll make that as a separate topic. I think it all comes down to just somehow we have to bring the people together. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I don't necessarily think that it's bring one person or a couple of people into yet another community or another room. It's more bring them everyone to the same neutral place if that makes sense. Is email a good way to reach you right now, Julia, or are you over this week. I'm overwhelmed at the moment, but emails probably the best way. Okay, the reason I asked that is I was going to ask you. I'm going to send it out to all the folks who added their name in the ether pad. Talking about potential PTG meeting times, but it sounded like there were some other people that we might want to include in some of these discussions that you knew of. I'm just getting their names, either in the ether pad or an email would be great. The operators on the tube a guy specifically it's probably the person to talk to and also Arnie at CERN. Arnie, I can't think. John's last name. I just noticed that I was the guy. Thank you. No problem. If you can drop those in, since it sounds like you know the names, if you can drop those in somewhere in the notes, that would be a huge. Yeah, I think what really is talking about the maybe kind of a joint session between the bare metal seed. And this work. Yeah. Not working group yet, but you know, I think one of the notes was in the chat was also probably also see if the scientific working group has interest because it seems like we're all kind of talking about similar really things. Let's talk to about them together. Yes. Stig generally attends the open info lab meetings as well. So, so we have at least that relationship that relationship at least we figured out the rest we're going to figure out. Okay. Oh, thank you. I appreciate the time. Thanks.


Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm currently in our studios outside of Boston as we prepare to gather for the first in-person Dell technologies world since 2019. One of the major structural changes in the technology business during the pandemic was IBM's spin-out of Kindral, a world-class technology services provider that lived inside of IBM. Kindral is a large business with trailing 12-month revenues north of 18 billion. It's got 90,000 employees worldwide. Kindral has long-term contracts, predictable cash flows, and in my view is one of the most undervalued companies in the technology sector. As a separate company, Kindral is able to turn many of its former internal IBM roadblocks into tailwinds. And ecosystem partnerships are one of the best examples of new opportunities that are opening up for the newly separate company. In this next segment, we're going to dig into a new partnership between Kindral and Dell technologies and what is the most critical priority for organizations today, cyber resiliency. And with me are two really impressive and talented guests. Chris Lovejoy is Global Security and Resiliency Practice Leader at Kindral. Michelle Weston is Vice President of Global Offerings for Security and Resiliency also at Kindral. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and spending some time with us. Thank you. Okay, let's zoom out a little bit and start with a big picture. What would you say are the one or two major trends or changes even in cyber that you've seen since the pandemic? Maybe Chris, you could start us off and Michelle, you can chime in. Sure, happy to. And I think part of this actually preceded the pandemic. And the fact is, a lot of organizations have been engaging in the adoption of new technologies be it cloud, AI, IoT, whatever that may be. And they've been introducing that technology without adequate security control. And during the COVID pandemic, when technology transformation happened for existential reasons, what we were seeing is organizations throwing out even more technology at cyclic rates with absolutely no security control whatsoever. And in the meantime, the regulators who are watching this in horror are introducing new requirements in and around what we're calling cyber resilience today. And it's all based on this concept that, conventional cybersecurity assumes that the adversaries could be kept out of organizations. You could protect the organization and sort of block it. As rising numbers of disruptive attacks like ransomware attacks have shown, those approaches don't work. And so what we're seeing is that the market is really moving toward this concept of cyber resiliency, which goes beyond cybersecurity. It assumes that the advanced adversaries, or frankly, many adversaries, can overcome conventional protections and that organizations need to prepare to recover. So our approach, the approach that we're taking to the market is really to help organizations in binding security, plus continuity, plus disaster recovery, when giving them the ability to anticipate, protect, withstand and recover from any adverse condition associated with their cyber real estate. And this is why we're so excited to work with Dell because they're really paving the road for us to actually work together in solving these needs for our clients. Got it, that makes sense. Now, Michelle, as Chris was saying, these worlds are coming together, what used to be adjacencies, oftentimes afterthoughts bolted on. And now you've got the work from home and hybrid work, not to mention, as Chris was saying, you're injecting AI and all this data. This is a complicated situation for a lot of people, isn't it? Yeah, and it was only even more complicated during the pandemic as well. I think another trend that we saw is the enterprise was outside the enterprise, right? Everyone was working from home. They weren't in the data centers. Their own resiliency and security protocols were already at risk because they were so manual and people-intensive. And yet we know the bad actors actually took advantage of that, right? Data centers were less monitored. We had all of the employees working from home. Now the enterprise is outside of the enterprise, but you still need security and resiliency for all of those endpoints, right? And I think that's driving a higher need coming out of the pandemic. And even with this hybrid model of, okay, we'll return to work, but not in the same fashion that we did prior to the pandemic, that's the new reality. The other thing that I would say is that those customers that had adopted cloud already and cloud enabled their business, they were able to fare the best during the pandemic. They were able to sustain their businesses. Alternatively, and it's kind of a different lens to it, I think the pandemic actually drove new ways of working and some really creative solutions. I mean, if you look at food delivery services that proliferated during the pandemic or gyms that are now offering fitness online, fitness classes online, people had to think intelligently and creatively on how they sustained their businesses. So I think all of that's coming together, but certainly this need of, as you said, not thinking of security and resiliency as an afterthought, but as a forethought, planning for those things efficiently and effectively that we find customers that do that, do it the best. And I think that Kendral offers a unique value proposition here because bringing both together is a journey that we started a couple of years ago that we've only accelerated with the spin of the Kendral company. Yeah, interesting. So I wanted to talk about that partnership because Dell's got this massive channel, it's got infrastructure, technology, expertise, but Dell's a product company. Kendral is a services company. So it's a really good match in that sense. Maybe you could talk about how the partnership came together and what are the critical aspects that folks need to be aware of? Yeah, I would say Dell's an excellent partner for us and they have been for a number of years. So in a lot of ways, that's not new, okay? We've been partnering in market together for quite some time. In fact, the solution that we'll talk about today was first put into market in 2018. And you're absolutely right. We come together in the best ways. They're leveraging our strengths with regard to managed services, professional services. And we're certainly looking at them as a key technology provider for our portfolio. We've worked together for years. We manage backup environments based on their data protection solutions, including data domain, but what was unique? And I think we were both ahead of the market at the time was the 2018 solution that we put into market and have only enhanced and augmented it ever since. It's called Cyber Vault is the solution from Dell Technologies. We certainly manage that solution in market for them today. And then we have unique differentiation in our Kindrel portfolio that we've integrated with that and add to their cyber incident recovery features. Dell initially put the solution in market coming out of some of the ransomware attacks that they had, cyber attacks that they had. They realized there was a need to protect the large data domain install base around the world. They developed some proprietary solution software on top of their large data domain boxes. And in any cyber incident recovery solution, you need a few things. You need the ability to assure a mutable storage. A copy that you can assure has not been altered so that when you initiate the recovery, you know that you've got a clean copy and you're not propagating whatever is there. So the solution has that, it has the other component that you need, which is the ability to scan the data for anomalies. So they're scanning the backup files continuously to look for anomalies. And then lastly, you need some form of data mover, which the data domain solution offers. So they came to us in 2018 and said, look, we've got the solution. We think we're ahead of the market. We were also investing in cyber incident recovery with a key asset that we acquired in market in 2015 that we've continued to bake cyber incident recovery features and functions into. And they said, let's marry the two and let's have you provide all of the managed services capabilities around this for clients. That is a key piece because when it comes to cyber, there's always a level of confidence that customers have. Yes, I can recover from any adverse condition. If you ask them, can you recover from a cyber attack with 100% assurance? I don't think there's a customer today that could say given how sophisticated and how much these attack vectors are changing that they have that 100% confidence level. So a managed service provider, a phone a friend in the event of is a unique value proposition. And that's what the two companies are bringing together for customers today. Thank you. So Chris, maybe as a services company, you have to be agnostic to technology, the best fit, et cetera. But prior to the spin, we never would have heard of something like this. And so maybe you could talk about the partnership from your perspective. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I do want to sort of double click on this a little bit and you mentioned it in your opening, headwinds being tailwinds now. And I think this is incredibly important. What people don't realize about Kindrel is that we were never able to as the services organization that was really focused on strategic outsourcing and providing other kinds of services to clients while under the IBM banner, we were really never able to talk about the technical depth that we had across any number of platforms, including the hyperscalers. And we have thousands upon thousands of people with hyperscaler certifications. We have experience with pretty much every security and resilience technology out there. We have broad and deep relationships with organizations like yours that we were never able to speak about. Now, when it comes to a client, let's be realistic, everybody is engaged in some sort of IT modernization program. And while, and we have to realize also that those IT modernization programs, oftentimes they have no destination per se. We talk about them as a journey, but with no destination. They just keep going and going and going. And the directions change every day depending on what the strategic requirements are from whatever C-suite you have sitting at the table, what the competitive trends are, what the market is telling you, et cetera. And so what clients are saying to us is that the value we offer is that we can untangle the mess that is their environment. We can meet them where they are, we can get them where they wanna go. And so, when it comes to a relationship with Dell, we believe that, particularly in the area of security and resilience, that there is a unique proposition to be had around the services and the cross-platform experience and certifications and skills that our teams have, married with the technology advances that Dell has made in the world, as well as our experience in sort of the two that have been frankly hidden over the past few years, I think we have something unique that we can offer to the market, particularly as I said, in this space of security and resilience where all of our clients are looking for some sort of solution to this, I can't spend enough money to protect myself. I need to make sure that if the worst happens that I can bring myself back again, that's what we can do for our clients. Great, thank you. Michelle, I want to go back to the solution for a moment. You mentioned a number of things, integrations. I got like a zillion questions here. I'm interested in what kind of integrations. You talked about immutability. Where does that occur? Is that in the cloud? Is that Dell technology? Is scan for anomalies? Again, what is that? Is that some kind of AI magic? You got a high-speed data mover. Is there an air gap involved? Maybe help me fill in some of those gaps. Yeah, and I think you've netted out the solution. Any cyber incident recovery solution, in my mind, would have those three things. They have some form of immutable storage. This could be cloud object storage. In the case of the Dell solution, they're actually using their retention lock feature on the large data domain devices, right? So think of this solution as having two data domains. They both have this retention lock feature. That's the immutable storage. They're able to move data back and forth between the two. That's another key piece. And then finally, for any incident recovery solution, you need the ability to scan and make sure that there aren't anomalies, in this case in the backup files. So they're using a third party to scan those files for anomalies. And when one's detected, that kind of gives the indication that something may be there and then they can go in and triage it and clean the environment if needed. So we certainly manage that end-to-end, and that is one approach. It is an on-premise approach. It uses the data domain technologies. We know that clients have a lot more than that, right? So where Kindrel comes in with its cyber incident recovery solution that also integrates with Dell's cyber incident recovery solution, is we support cloud, multiple infrastructure. We have also immutable storage that we leverage. And then in terms of our anomaly scanning capabilities, in this case, we're using technology that we had originally developed in IBM Research that we integrated into the software product. Again, this is based on an acquisition we did in market five years ago called Sinovi. It's a software product. It ingests and automates all of your workflows in the event of any failover, failback, any outage, including cyber. And that technology underpins a lot of what we do on the incident recovery perspective. Dell's used data domain. We've used the software. Both solutions have all three components of a cyber incident recovery solution. When they're integrated, there's real power there, right? Because now you're looking at protection, not just of the backup environment, but all environments, including production. You're looking at being able to scale beyond on-prem. And more importantly, you're looking at the speed to recover, right? Not needing to rehydrate the data, but to be able to recover with the RTOs and RTOs that are expected of our customers. On the resiliency orchestration side, the Kendral solution, this is push of a button, failover, failback. In the event of an outage, you can recover the entire hybrid estate in the matter of minutes. And what we know with respect to any outage, it's costly. We know that downtime is costly, but with respect to cyber, we know that that's more costly than a typical outage, sometimes forex. You don't always recover from the brand damage, from the loss of customers. So being down and coming up as quickly as you can with the additional data verification, data validation and assurance that you're not propagating whatever is there is the value prop that both companies are really serving. And where does an air gap fit in into this equation? Is that yet another layer of protection? What's the best practice there? So think of the air gap is just between the data movement and the immutable storage, right? You need to be able to cut connection in a way, right? That is an air gap solution. And it's based on the immutable storage that both have. Okay, and that would be, it could be local, I guess, but it also could be, it should be maybe remote, yes? Mm-hmm, exactly. And the ability to manage and orchestrate that air gap is a key value prop again of the Kendral solution. Okay, and so I've mentioned local or remote.  So a lot of layers is what I'm hearing is that's all security pros in this framework. Let me give you another example. The reason why this is so important, most of our DR processes today, they all rely on people, right? We had a large client that was impacted when we Rybia and they were impacted with Petia. They had a great DR plan. They were a customer of ours. We managed that service for them. Their DR plan was still people intensive.  And then if you look at going back to the very beginning of our conversation, COVID being sort of another way that that happened with access and the ability to continuously monitor and have the people on site, that ability was impacted. So this is where you need to invest in technology, people and processes to make sure that you are as robust as you can be. And as Chris said, your ability to anticipate with stand and recover from any adverse condition, that's the value prop that our global practice brings. To your point, the adversary is well-funded and motivated. Chris, we'll give you the last word. Where do you want to see this partnership go? What's next? What should we look for in the coming months and years? Yeah, I think very simply, and I'm going to put my CISO hat on for a minute because I think it's important to speak for the customer as a customer. At the end of the day, I think most CISO executives don't realize the extent to which security, continuity and disaster recovery have been separate silos. And what is shocking to our clients when they get into a ransomware event in particular is the fact that they have their systems, their services, their data is locked up. Their backups have been sort of implemented or have been sort of subverted. They call on the pros. They call on the folks that help them with the incident response. The incident responders are able to identify the ransomware strain. They're able to contain the ransomware strain, but the damage is done. Now what?  How do you know that the data is good? How do you find the system configurations and load them again? In what order do you load them? What they don't realize is that security and recovery, they have to be merged together. And so what I think that we can do, it's not just build customer demand. It's not just sell a solution. We can really help clients. And so my hope is that we are able to bring cyber resilience into every organization, every large enterprise out there that needs to continually service their clients and their employees. They need to stay in business. That we're able to bring the solution to them in such a way that they're able to bring back their environments to serve their clients when the worst does happen. Great, yes, thank you. We're definitely seeing that data protection world and the cybersecurity world, they are adjacencies, but they really are coming together and part of a comprehensive plan. Okay, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much folks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and your insights. Thanks for having us. And thank you. Thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Keep it right there. We're running all week with live coverage from the show floor pumping in deep dives like this one throughout the week. So don't go away.