Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines. We are broadcasting live from the beautiful Think Tech Hawaii TV studio in the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Honolulu. This show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and finding greatness. Today's special guest is an extraordinary leader and she's the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce here in Hawaii. She is Sherri Menor McNamara and today we are going beyond business. Hey, Sherri, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you for having me here. I had no idea that you played tennis. I did, I've been playing tennis since fourth grade. Really? I went to tennis camp on the mainland as well as played for my high school. Waiakea? Waiakea High School. Varsity tennis. Varsity tennis, yeah. Baby and varsity. Oh, nice. Did you play singles and doubles or one or the other? Mainly doubles, but I like singles too. Oh, defense. So tell me, Sherri, where did you grow up at? Sure, so some people, well, most people don't know I was actually born in Tokyo, Japan. Wow. That's because my mom, I was born and raised in Japan. She's from there and she decided to go back to Japan and have me. But I didn't live there immediately. I just, my mom came right back to Hawaii and I was pretty much raised in Hilo. So how was it growing up in Hilo? Yeah, when you reflect back, I loved it. It's a sense of community and the people there, I think in my opinion, are special. And just going back home to visit my mom, I just feel so relaxed and time to recharge. Oh, it's so relaxing and so nice in Hilo. It is, it is. And it's still a very strong and close-knit community, especially with the business community supporting each other. Totally. And what college did you end up going to? I went to, so from undergrad, I went to UCLA. And then I did some grad school programs at USC. Yes, I know there's better rivals. I always tell people it's the undergrad that counts. And then I took some time off and moved back home and went back to school to get my law and business degrees. Geez. So where did you get your law degree from? I went to University of Hawaii. Wow. Richardson School of Law, and then the Schuyler College of Business. Great. So Sherri, I want to ask, what was your first job that you ever got paid for? Well, I actually got a check. Yeah, yeah. Okay, UCLA bookstore. Really? Yeah, I was a cashier. Nice. And I love, for some reason, I love cash registers. So I wanted to do something to that extent. And so I applied to the UCLA bookstore and did that for a while, paid some bills. Yeah, so it was fun. Well, you liked making money. And now you're making money for all these businesses, too. It's about keeping the businesses healthy, keeping the doors open, and ensuring that the business can thrive in Hawaii so that they continue to provide jobs and opportunities. For today, tomorrow, and generations to come. For sure. Yeah. Now, you're married to John McNamara, and John is the longtime associate athletic director at the UH. Yes. And tell me about what John's doing right now. Right now, he's working for a communications firm called Compaq. Nice. So he's been doing that for a couple of years. As you mentioned, prior to that, he was at University of Hawaii as the associate athletics external associate, is it tongue twister? I know it is. Associate athletics director in external affairs. But he was in college athletics for about 32 years. So that chapter closed, and now he's still at Compaq and moving forward. Well, I met him before, and he's such a nice guy, so I'm so happy for him right now. Oh, thank you. He claims he's the Ohio guys, the Midwestern guys are supposed to be nice. Now, Sherry, before becoming the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, what other jobs did you have leading up to that? Do we have time for that? We do, we do. Okay, I had a number of jobs. Yeah, UCLA, as soon as I graduated, I worked in all kinds of different positions. And as you know, UCLA is an entertainment district in the world. So I worked for some entertainers, Elton John. Oh, nice. Yeah, and I also worked for an attorney. I just didn't know what my path was. I was still exploring. Then I did a couple of internships in D.C., one for Senator Akaka, and the other was for President Clinton. Wow, that's amazing. That was before when internships had a good, anyway, we won't go there. And then I worked for Estee Lauder in New York in public relations, and an opportunity in Japan came up to work for Sony Corporation in sports marketing. And so I decided to take that leap and did that for a couple of years and decided it was time to come back home. As I didn't quite want to move back to Hilo yet, so I decided to just move to Honolulu and start my new chapter there. Great. Well, you worked at a number of places and what great experiences you had. I've been very fortunate to experience a number of variety of jobs and positions and different industries. It's definitely allowed me to determine what my passion was and in all those jobs. I just didn't have that. I didn't have the passion. It was fun jobs. I got me wrong. It was fun. But I didn't have the passion. It wasn't until I moved back home and worked while I was going to law school and business school. I worked at the state legislature and that's when I thought I really enjoy and appreciate the public policy making process. So I knew I wanted to do something in government affairs, but not necessarily work at the Capitol yet. And that's when the job of the Chamber of Commerce opened up. I didn't want to practice law, so after the first year I knew right away, I didn't want to, but I decided to finish it. And like I said, I ended up as Chamber of Commerce and 14 years later, I'm still there. Oh, man. And you know, so you've been the president and CEO for the past five years now. Correct.  I talked to so many business leaders and they speak so highly of you, Sherry.   I think its challenge is obviously the cost of doing business. We see studies come out, the surveys oppose, constantly ranking Hawaii as one of the last. And so that's always challenging and we're a small business community, more than 90% of small businesses. We're talking about local mom and pop stores, restaurants, businesses. And so any time cost of doing business increases just makes it that much more challenging to keep their doors open. And that's where we see us as serving as the business advocate and being the voice of business, especially at the state legislature and we take our roles seriously. Totally. And you've done a number of significant improvements through the Chamber of Commerce for the past five years. What are some things that you're most proud of so far? Well, we've been very fortunate to get the support of our board membership and definitely a high-performing team who's constantly working towards the mission. And so we are constantly looking at and evaluating our products and services, our retooling, refreshing, re-evaluating because we cannot stay at the status quo. We need to ensure that we're prepared for the future as well as ensuring that our services reflects what our membership wants. So a few initiatives that we've implemented that have allowed us to elevate our efforts, one our advocacy efforts. So introducing a business agenda at the legislature every session. So rather than playing defense all the time, we felt we need to offer solutions as well. So that's one. So we've been doing that since five years ago. Another initiative that we are proud of is the Hawaii on the Hill initiative. So what that is, it's an initiative in partnership with Senator Hirono. Okay. We bring businesses to the Hill. Great. And we just had our sixth Hawaii on the Hill and it has grown exponentially. From the first year, we only brought 50 people. Last this year, we brought more than 150 people. Oh. Oh yeah, 150 Hawaii people flying up to DC for a two-day event. That's fantastic. Oh, it was fantastic. And part of the program is a Taste of Hawaii event. So other states do it, but Hawaii never had. And so that's when Senator Hirono approached us, the chamber, to see if we wanted to partner with her. I still remember my meeting with her. She heard that I was in DC. And so her office called and said that she wanted to meet with me. So I did meet with her, talk story, at the end of the meeting, she said, oh, you know, there's a Taste of Hawaii, a Taste of event. Would you like to partner with us? Because we've never done it before. And I said, sure, not knowing the details, not knowing when it was, not knowing what the expectations were. I said, sure, when is it planned for? Oh, in two months. And I'm like, oh, OK. Thinking in my head, how is my team going to respond to this? It was a huge effort. But you know what? The reason why I'm proud of this particular initiative is the participation of our small businesses and our large and business community in general in supporting the effort that showcases Hawaii in our nation's capital and to show that Hawaii is a player in our nation's economy as well. And for them to pay their own way up, contribute all the products, we're talking from Hawaiian chip company, to Spam Musubis, to Kauai Coffee, you name it. We had it there. All the good stuff. Yeah, all the good stuff. And that's why it's the biggest event on the hill. That's a proud moment to see that. Now, Sherri, you see, that's why you're a great leader. You see?  And you say yes. Yeah, I know, right? Without thinking until after I say yes. So last year, the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce got a national award. We did. Tell me about that. Thank you. So the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, the national organization, comprised of local chambers, regional state chambers. And we went through the application process. It was a very rigorous process, from first building out the application form, then doing an in-person interview. And so it was a rigorous process. Good. But it was worth the time and effort put into it. And Lori and I, we went to Des Moines. It was worth going to Des Moines for. I've been to Des Moines, Iowa. You have. OK, so you know what I mean. And we sat all the way in the back. We didn't think we were going to get it. We just sat all the way back. And all of a sudden, they called out our category, state and province category of the year. So Lori and I were just, OK, didn't expect anything. And the winner is Chamber of Commerce Hawaii. I think they're like, oh my god. And but from where we were to the stage was so long. They ran out of the music, didn't play the song twice to get there. Anyhow, it was definitely a proud moment. And it's a reflection of the support that we get from our membership and their contributions to our community. Such great recognition. And you guys also raised $57,000 for the Institute of Human Services. We have a public health fund that specifically for health and promoting health in Honolulu, the city and county of Honolulu. So every year we have two cycles and we make contributions to help different service organizations that are doing so good work in addressing the concerns of social side of concerns in Hawaii. So the most recent one is our contribution to the Institute of Human Services. Awesome. I love hearing that. Yeah. Now, Governor E. Gay, what initiatives has he been supporting for local businesses? So one of the initiative that he has supported is our manufacturing Hawaii initiative. We launched that a few years ago in an effort to support local manufacturers, as well as the Hawaii brand. And I will be remiss if I didn't mention the legislature too, because they have been very supportive in providing funding to help revitalize the industry and our local manufacturers. So they've been very supportive and the governor as well in terms of signing the bell and holding proclamation ceremonies for us, recognizing manufacturing week. That's awesome. Now, Sherry, some months ago there was a big roasting and toasting event to honor you, because so many people appreciate you and so many people honored you at that event. Can you tell me how that made you feel? OK, first, I have to give you some background information. So we do have an event called the Roast and Toast. And the primary purpose is to recognize an outgoing or past chair. So this year our chair, outgoing chair wanted to defer it to next year. So they're missing someone. And so he pointed at me, you're going to be our honoree. Well, you're legally bold. I know. So I had to, of course, I'm going to listen to my chair. It was a very humbling moment, because I had roasters, as well as toasters, showing pictures of me from small kid time to growing up in Hilo, from pictures from where I went to school, Hilo Union, Intimidant Waikia High School, Proud Public School, by the way. And just hearing stories about them. So I had my roasters included Toby Taniguchi from KTA Super Stores, Connie Lau, Jennifer Svaz in Stanford Car. And so it was, I had no idea what they were going to say. I didn't have a program read before. Usually I read the programs and the scripts, but my team did not let me do that. They surprised me on every single detail. I love that. Yeah, it was a very humbling moment. Sherri, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to continue going beyond business. OK, thank you. You're watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii with my special guest, Sherri Menor McNamara. We will be back in 60 seconds. Thanks to our Think Tech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Mon Lee and the Friends of Think Tech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, the Cook Foundation, Dwayne Karisu, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Wine Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group Limited, the Schindler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Polo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Welcome back to Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My special guest today is the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, Hawaii. She is Sherri Menor McNamara. And today we are going beyond business. Sherri, in my book Beyond the Lines, I talk about leadership and creating a culture of excellence. And you, obviously, have a great culture of excellence. Tell me about your culture. Thank you. Part of it is the reflection of my upbringing. As I mentioned earlier, my mom was born and raised in Japan. She moved to Hawaii not having any money, no experience in business. So for her, her value is all about this term gambate, trying your best and never giving up and always focusing on the positive. And so that instilled in me. And also, not too many people know that I actually worked on my grandparents' farm in Pahoa during the summers from picking macadamia nuts and cereals. You name it. Yeah, and we had to sell it in town. So again, it goes back to the hard work. And throughout my career, that's something I held on to. And so I have to attribute that to my upbringing and my parents, as well as my grandparents. So that has carried over, especially at the Chamber of Commerce, where we exceed expectations. We work towards exceeding expectations. Every year, we come up with a new model. So this past year has raised the bar. Yes, I like it. The previous year is grit, growth, and greater good, and bigger, bolder, better. So we're constantly finding different words, powerful words to encourage us to remind us that we need to do this because our membership is investing in us. So we need to ensure that if we excel, they will excel as well. I like hearing that. And hard work works. Work ethic, yes. Sherry, you're a great leader. So many people know that. And I want to ask you, how would you describe your leadership style? I would say my leadership style is from leading from behind, as well as leading in the front. Depends on the situation. And I also lead by listening. I listen to more than I do speak. Because when you listen to people, you get to know them and hear their perspectives. And the power of listening is that, hopefully, you can come up with collaborative solutions. Sometimes it may not work, but at least you're having this open discussion. When you listen to people, the more you understand. So I would say those, that's generally the way I lead. I like that you said that because in my book, I talk about listen first, speak last. Yes, yes. All great leaders do that. What are some things that you're passionate about? Oh, gosh. Personally, I love traveling. I love exploring. I love going to new places. So that's my passion, as well as my two doggies. From a professional standpoint, my passion is actually what I'm doing now. Because it's supporting the business community, ensuring that, again, that they can continue to thrive. My mom owns a small business in Hilo. 40 years later, she still has the doors open, not without its challenges, of course. So I knew what she had to go through to keep her doors open, the trials and tribulations, twists, tears, everything you name it. And my mom is not a unique story. It's a story that is common among many small businesses and businesses in general. So just reminding myself of my mom's story provides me the passion to go to work every day and work hard for our members. I can feel your passion. I can feel it. And you're so happy to be doing what you're doing right now to help so many businesses. Now, Sherry, a lot of people define success in a variety of ways. I want to know how you define success. For me, success is not just about winning. It's more about the effort you put into it and that process. Because the more effort you put in, regardless of the outcome, you try your best. And it goes back to what my mom said, gambate, always trying your best to work towards success. Sometimes the cards maybe not.  And it's out of control. But as long as you tried your hardest, that's all that matters. A lot of it, too, Sherry, is mindset. Because you have to look forward and expect challenges are going to happen, rather than hoping and praying that it doesn't. But inevitably, it's going to happen. So you might as well get in that mindset to look forward to challenges, welcome adversity. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. Just coincidentally, we have a team meeting every Monday. And we finish the meeting with a question. And one of the questions was about mindset. When you face adversity, how do you change your mindset?  And everyone on my team just had to think about it. But in the end, for me, it was more mindset, always keeping a positive mindset. Because with every challenge, there's something good out of it. As we've always heard, when there's opportunities, when there's challenges, there's opportunities. And I so believe in that. Totally. Yeah. I always told my team that when we have that challenge, that adversity situation, and we deal with it, and we get through it, then we become tougher for that experience. We become better. We become stronger. Absolutely. We become smarter for going through that experience. So we should look forward to all these adversities. Absolutely. It just makes you a stronger person. And once you train your mindset to think positive and take those challenges, those risks, those negative consequences into a positive one, it just elevates the power of, in our case, the organization and our work and our products. And it's a choice. I mean, it's a choice that we can make. We can choose to be positive or negative. And it takes the same amount of energy and work for either or. Absolutely. Now, Sherry, why are you successful? Oh, I'm successful because of the people that I work with, my family, the people I interact with. It's not a one-person job that makes you successful. So there's so many people that I have to thank because of where I am. And we can't do it alone. We can't do it alone. Who is someone that inspires you? Oh, God, so many. Who would be like one or two that you can talk about? Wow, so I still remember my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Deborah Miao. She, in fact, I just had lunch with her and she attended one of our events. And I wanted to recognize her because she always believed in me. Even in high school, I had a failing moment. My first failing moment. I can go into DSL there, but I won't. And but she encouraged me. She provided me with positive words and graduation. She gave me a book about believing in myself. And I saw that book 30 years later. So definitely one who I've always admired and who inspires me through her encouragement. But my mom, obviously, because she has worked so hard, pretty much as a single parent and putting her three kids through school and sacrificing so much. And it's so nice to see her finally enjoy and relax, even though she has her business, to focus on herself. So she's another inspiration of mine. And of course, my team continues to inspire me every day to ensure that I can become a better leader for them. Awesome. Now, Sherry, obviously, you've given many words of wisdom to other people through the years. What's some words of wisdom you've received from us, from someone else to you? One of my mentors, she had mentioned, at one point, I wanted to find my voice. And I wasn't sure at one point if I was right for the job. Because I was so comfortable in my own corner with my previous position at the chamber. And taking on a responsibility that's triple or quadruple, that doesn't work, and responsibilities. And even when I did take on that position, I still didn't have that confidence where I wanted to be, even though I was always focused and wanted to do better. So I remember having lunch with her. And I asked her, how do you have that confidence? And how do you overcome challenges? And I still remember she said, you have to ensure that you're comfortable wearing that hat. And no matter how challenging, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how you think you may not be good, you need to always focus on the hat you're wearing and that you believe in the mission. And after that, it gets easier. But you cannot let your thoughts go away from that. Just focus on that hat. I like that. The hat. The hat. The hat that you're wearing. Sherry, before we wrap, I want to ask you one more question. What gives you fulfillment? Well, I guess we're doing a good job. We're making a positive impact. And when people in the community mentioning that the chamber is helping them and supporting them, then we know we're fulfilling it and we're doing our job. Because each one of our team takes our job seriously and to heart. And we all believe in the mission. And so that's what fills us. I like hearing that, Sherry. And Sherry, you definitely go beyond the lines. I want to thank you for joining me on the show today. Thank you. You are definitely a great leader. And you have such positive energy. And I can see how you're making everyone around you better. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. And there's a lot of other people too that make me want to be better as well. Awesome. Thank you, Sherry. Thank you. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com. And my book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I hope that Sherry and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okitaya, CEO and founder of JSA. And along with me, my co-host, co-conspirator, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Evan. How are you? Happy new year. And welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the most influential folks in today's leading data center and telco world, supporting the network infrastructure requirements of this new normal. Jamie, are you a gadget person? Love gadgets. I live and breathe technology. Just... Of course. Well, we have CES at the moment, which has gone virtual and the biggest consumer tech show of the year kind of sets the stage for a lot of tech. Is that something you've been into in the past at CES? My husband definitely attends annually. I'm always traveling or prepping for PTC with my other data center telecom folks. So I don't get a chance to actually walk the floor ever, but do you walk the floor? Like, are you actually there? I'm always reading the headlines for sure. I am. I'm normally there. I'll be glued to the screen virtually this time. But I'm always looking for that next cool emerging gadget or tech that can somehow make my life better. Maybe, you know, this is one I acquired over the holidays. It's called Aura. It's a ring wearable and it basically tracks sleep and temperature and movement and steps and calories and all kinds of good stuff. And it's charged once a week. It's waterproof. So that was a CES discovery. And I'm sure there's something cool to find this year as well. So it's like an Apple watch for your finger. It is. It is. So wearables and digital health is a big area focus at CES. But let's get on to our guest. I think we have a good one this week. Yeah. And let's get right into it. We have one of the major data movers of our industry with us today. I'm so excited to welcome Mr. Avner, Pappachato, CEO of Serverfond. Avner, welcome to Data Movers. Hello, Jamie. Hello, Evan. Good to see you and welcome Avner, CEO of Serverfond. So Avner, how many servers do you grow on your farm? That's my first question. It's highly seasonal. Seasonal. You know, I thought that. But in all seriousness, we used to talk about Serverfond. Now it's all we talk about data center and cloud. And I love my Serverfond back in the day. So tell me what is and who is Serverfond? Serverfond is a company that we established around the mid 2000s. We're actually have been in data center business since the late 90s. And we started looking at this telecom boom. First was the, was more switching and Sealex and all that coming into our office buildings at the time wanting to rent space and not have people in it.  It looked interesting. We've done a couple of those. Then we saw that a lot of people had the same ideas, but not enough clients. So we stopped and it was the bust. We continued to buy telecom facilities for a while and then established the name Serverfond. It's our, we're farmers that mostly feed electricity and air conditioning. And we provide mostly wholesale services, but really we provide a lot of services to a lot of clients. Our goal is really to make the physical part of the digital world efficient. We see everything, we see data centers as a very young industry. And really a very inefficient industry right now as far as the physical part grows. And we have looked at it and studied it and developed a lot of software and practices around it and we'll get more into it later on. But really the goal is to make the physical simple and let people concentrate on running applications. Yeah, I love that. And that brings me back to when we first chatted in your office in LA, which has a beautiful view of a runway and knowing your pilot and your interest in aeronautics. Just the efficiency a pilot must have to lift off to launch a plane into the air and take those many people or things into the air and keep them safe during this whole passage. The efficiency, the checklist, the attention to detail. I feel like you bring all that to our data center space. Yeah, it's really about running critical operations. And if you think about critical operations, aviation is one of the most critical operations people execute, people do. And it's pretty amazing how many operations the aviation industry does and how good they have become at not crashing, at running critical operations safely. And that's through a lot of things. That's through a lot of learning through the years. It's through very good design, very good operation matrix, following checklists, learning from previous mistakes, maintenance procedures and a lot of things that us in our young industry we can really learn a lot from. And I love aviation, I love design, I love redundancy. There's a couple of things that aviation has that data centers don't have. Obviously the different industries. We're not that concerned with weight. Aviation is, so they have to bring redundancy, only the redundancy they need. And through the years you learn about it, the too much weight and actually too much redundancy can create problems. So I think as an industry, we can learn a lot from industries that have done other critical operations and help, learning from other people's mistake is always a smart thing to do in my book, paying less tuition. Yeah, great advice. And unlike the aviation industry, the data center industry is going through a bit of a boom, a boomlet, given this new reality we're in. And you've taken a nice approach of prioritizing this modernization over just buildouts and capacity. Can you discuss that kind of trade-off? Yeah, again, it has to do with the fact that we've been here, A, we've been here for a while, B, we like efficiency. We really have a couple of plays in the industry, but efficiency and being green is a part of it. There's a lot of buildings that are very good buildings that could be reused as data centers. And we looked for them early on, we have a number of them, some of them just couldn't be replicated today with dollars like our Titan building in Eastern Washington was built as the headquarters for the Titan missile program. It's built to withstand a 10 megaton atomic explosion within half a mile. You couldn't replicate it. And it's built to move air. You could not build a better data center shell and it's there now has the benefit of having three cent power when we use an existing building our greenhouse footprint is diminished by a lot as compared to destroying a building and building a new building. So we like that in a lot of other places like in Chicago, it takes us downtown where we can get better infrastructure, better electricity, better power and you just couldn't build this building downtown. And it just gets us into that environment. And I think it's gonna happen more and more. There's gonna be a lot of Greenfield data centers that we do as well in places where we can't get existing but a lot of the more inner city dense, last mile kind of data centers are going to be re-adaption of existing buildings. And that takes me to look back to 2020, obviously unprecedented year. I hate saying that because everyone calls it that but very difficult year for many companies yet server farm, obviously you guys were thriving. You launched in command knock providing data center management services for global brands. You added your Toronto facility during the pandemic. You accomplished a $200 million recapitalization. Can you tell us what do you attribute to this success? First of all, thank you. And really it's obviously the industry has been in growth but in our part, it's really great people. We have really great people working in the company in a lot of disciplines. We're very good at the basic design and operations of data center. We have Sam Brown running design and build. He delivered the data center in Toronto in the hardest time, on time, on budget. Couldn't be more appreciative to him. We have a great operating part with Jim Shanahan and Mike Whitman that built the crew there. And we have a very nice and basically the in command staff the people that actually take and get our customers as much information as they can about their operation and data centers probably as much as your sleeping aid and your body tracking gadget that you bought. We try to do the same for data center customers. We tell them how well the servers are awake, sleeping, how much electricity they're taking. If they're efficient, if they wanna bring more that they need more power, more space, we try to right size everybody. And all these disciplines together have a lot of demand and we see it, we just try to solve problems for our customers and it seems to be working. And talk a little bit more about that in command platform which as I understand it, it provides a cloud-like experience for data centers. How is this more than just another data center infrastructure management software? It's data center infrastructure management as a service. So we basically provide our clients, whether it's within our data centers or in their own data centers or other providers data centers as much information as we can about their physical layout, there's the physical implementation. So we let them know what each rack is doing, how much electricity is taking, is it really backed up? Are there any problems in the data center? Is there maintenance coming? What's gonna be affected with the maintenance? And we do a lot of, once we have all the information we do a lot of what ifs, what if I wanted to change these servers to the next generation of servers? Do I have enough space, do I have enough power, do I have, can I do it within my racks? Do I have to change it? Is there downtime? We do that for all the physical aspects of the data center, electrical, mechanical and network. And we're gonna have some very exciting network things coming, adding on to in command in the near future. And we really let people concentrate on running application. The physical is not a problem. We hear about digital transformation a lot. And the cloud is a wonderful thing and public cloud is a wonderful thing. But a lot of customers also have to run applications but don't run very efficiently in public cloud. We try to make running these applications and running physical servers as easy as possible. Whether it's in our place, another place and everything we do. And that's in command is basically we'll take care of the physical, you take care of it. We let give you the freedom to take care of your application layer and your virtual layers. Wow, very cool. It sounds like I could run my data center via an in command app on my smartphone. That would be, that would be dream. So you also recently announced an initiative to develop data centers in Israel, not necessarily known as a hub of data center technology around the world. So tell us about that initiative and when are you anticipating construction there? Yeah, so we have been research, obviously I was born in Israel, not obviously but I was born in Israel and speak the language most of my immediate family is still there. So I have long connections to Israel. Israel, as we know, is a technology leader and all the major companies have big development hubs in Israel. There is a lot of technology coming out of Israel. There's a fascinating book called Startup Nation that can give you a glimpse whoever is interested but Israel puts together a lot of technology. Israel now has some data centers in Israel. A lot of the cloud services they've been getting from overseas. These cloud services because of a few things are coming onshore and they're looking for places to develop in Israel. Like a lot of markets developing in Israel you would need to know what you're doing in the market just the whole construction permit, electricity ability to build different places is very unique to the country. Luckily I come from a family that developed a lot in Israel and we've got a very good handle on that. We also have a very good handle on developing modern data centers. So we enjoy a unique benefit of speaking a couple of languages, speaking the international data center language, developing modern data centers. We also speak Hebrew, we speak Hebrew development and we can create a translation layer to what is becoming a cloud hyperscale and digital transformation way coming to a country who is one of the leader of technology in the world. So it's kind of a perfect storm that we're in the middle and even more exciting. The Middle East is changing and the Middle East is changing along with the world from a fossil fuel type economy looking to the future where it's going to have to find other sources of income, employment and wealth for its people. And they understand the countries around the Middle East understand that they need to work together, I think to achieve a better future for everybody. Therefore we see some peace treatments, we see there's a lot of geopolitical changes coming but what that means is that Israel being a technology leader is going to be in the forefront of providing its neighbors which is a beautiful story. It's the former enemies going to provide them a lot of technology in this road to the future. So that's another reason why Israel is booming, it's not only for itself, it's also as the technology hub to the whole area. Well, Avner, I can't wait to come over to Tel Aviv and take a tour of the data center and along the way spend a couple of weeks on the beach in Tel Aviv. So please keep us up to speed. You know what I love about your story Avner too is you're an Israeli-American, I'm an Italian-American and to bring that international data center language, like you said, I loved that, back to our home countries and to strengthen the economies there and foster those communities, especially in the Middle East. It's such a beautiful heart pole for me and I love that. I also, to get on to the more like personal side of Avner now, interview, I also hear you are an avid surfer. Is that right? Yeah, I surf. By the way, two of the cables coming into Israel are telecom Italia. Oh, I love that. See the connections coming straight from you to us. Love it. So we appreciate the service.  How did these all work together to build our Avner? It's, first of all, the aviation part is because I lived in Texas for a while. When I got out of school and I couldn't surf, so I had to do something and I'm not a very good team sport player. So if you're in Dallas, Texas, and you're not a very good in team sports and you don't golf, you're pretty much screwed. So I had to do something, so I started flying. That's because I couldn't surf, so that's how that happened. But surfing, I grew up surfing in Israel, which is kind of a weird place. It's like Florida for surfing, it's small wave, and it's definitely not Hawaii, where we should be now. But it's small waves actually create the best surfers in the world. The best surfer in the world is Kelly Slater, who grew up in the West Coast of Florida. And if you can create energy out of a small wave, you can surf a big wave. So it's about energy preservation and knowing how to get, get full without a big push. And I think surfing is a lot like business. You have to choose the right wave that will actually give you a good ride and not just wipe you out. You have to have a little fortitude to know what to get into, what to get out of. You also have to know every once in a while, you have to take a wipe out. So it's a good little analogy to how we live in this world. Phenomenally. Phenomenally answers. I love that. All right. So we are on to our rapid fire section. I love the section. So basically, this is some fun facts we want to learn about you. So tell us the very first thing that comes to mind when we ask you these silly questions. So, okay, here you are in the hot seat. Which instruments do you play, if any? I play guitars and pretty much every string instrument that exists. I actually, here you go, fun fact. I went to music school. I used to play jazz and blues and rock and clubs. I still do. I know you're quite the Renaissance man. It was very Steve Jobske here. Yes. I hear you've got a wonderful new addition to your collection, an Italian delivery during COVID. Tell us more. I had a guy who was a big fan of music. He was a big fan of music. He was. He was a big fan of music. He was a big fan of music. I want to know more about him. Tell us more about him. Tell us more about him. I've got a great collection. An Italian delivery during COVID. Tell us more. I had a guy that sent me an Italian guitar right at the beginning of COVID. Sent it to me from, it was like, from then was fried. When, when the package came, I get to have to wrap it down. There it is, look at this thing.  It looks like a violin, right? Yeah, look, this guy's the same. All right, favorite wave to surf. It would have to be a cloud break in Fiji, or restaurants in Fiji, but definitely Fiji. Wonderful. The most used app on your phone. Unfortunately, Zoom. That's the 2021, if I've ever heard of it. Yeah, we were looking to change that. All right, this one's Taff, favorite movie. Favorite movie, favorite movie would have to be Napoleon Dynamite. Oh. Wow. Not a traditional choice. The answer here for me is always the Godfather, but that's a good one, alternative. You and my husband like it. Yeah, I have kids. And that brings us to favorite hobbies. That's, there's a lot of competition for that one. I would, at the end of the day, I would still say music. And if you could have dinner with one person dead or alive, who would it be? I thought about this for a little while, and I think I'm gonna stick with Quincy Jones. Nice. Because that's a guy that's a trumpet player, which you wouldn't expect much from, being a trumpet player, that managed to play with all of the people that started jazz, the Miles Davises, the Dizzy Gillespie. Then you started writing and wrote for everybody, Frank Sinatra and so forth, and then jumped generations to producing Michael Jackson, bringing us the French Prince, bringing us, I've never seen somebody who took something and made it so versatile. We need a music podcast, Avenue, that this is far more interesting than a data center, frankly. So. No, I just want to even listen to his music and playlists, like I... Well, we'll put that in the show notes. How about that? Avenue's playlist. I'll actually send you, I'll send you my daughter did once, all of us. Oh, please. It's much better than what I would have done. That's awesome. And talking about daughters, what's your favorite, what's your greatest achievement? So I would say that initially is actually marrying my wife, which produced the other favorite achievement, which is my kids. So that's the sequence of things. I think that still is the favorite achievement.  And I think that's the best compliment you could ever get. I have a six month old and my husband and I were just saying that yesterday. Like, she just knows way more than I could ever in six months of life. Yeah. It's amazing. So mine are between 21 and nine. So we're the same wife. Oh, and how many three? I have four girls. Four girls, four girls. Oh, fabulous. Yeah. So that's a, and at some point they become this, they're six months old, they're amazing. You get, it's like a bundle of love. You can't, you can't describe it, right? Before, but they become people. They become real people with real personalities.  It's, it's, it's amazing. It's, to me, it's a beautiful thing to see. It is. And that's, it's a great way to end the show in this time of challenges and lockdown. So you're on my list of one of the persons I must meet this year, if not the end of the year or early next year. So we'll have that to look forward to. We'd love to do it. So, so the goal is to make your, you know, your, your physical things easier to run with a little bit of spirituality. I love it. I'm going to steal that quote from you actually. So that's, that's brilliant. So there you have it guys. Thank you, Avner for joining us, for giving us a fabulous insight to you as the businessman, you as the spiritual guru. And, and thank you everyone for listening in to today's data movers podcast. Be sure to check us out on jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data center, data movers episodes releasing every other Wednesday morning and other JSA podcast series. So go ahead and click around there. Yeah, I gotta keep the train moving and be sure to follow us on Twitter at JSCOTTO and Evan Kerstel and continue the discussion and chat there. And as always guys, happy networking.


Well, I heard a lot of noise coming from the base egg booth and Adam Mifferson says he's going to show us what this base egg actually is. Yeah, so what we have here is a portable Bluetooth speaker, except it's actually not a speaker. It's a transducer. So it's got no actuators in it or anything? Yeah. So there's no speaker cone. Instead, you have this vibrating foot here on the bottom. Those of you at home can't see, but there's a small circular foot on the bottom that's rapidly vibrating. That's not a thing. So there is an actuator actually. So that's known as a transducer or a voice coil, the part that's typically moving the speaker cone. So the thing he's got in his hand is it's not really an egg. It's sort of like if you cut an egg in half and flip the two ends around. That's right. If you can picture that. So you're going to connect it with any phone, computer, tablet, MP3 player, anything with Bluetooth or with a line-in capability. And once you're streaming your audio, this piece here on the bottom that's rapidly vibrating, when you apply that to a surface, it's going to turn that entire surface into the speaker. Oh, wow. So that's sort of difficult to understand if you've never seen it in person. But imagine banging a tuning fork and then applying it to water and seeing the ripples or to a surface and transferring sound through vibration. I like it. The engineering explanation. So right next to us, we've got a giant, what looks like cardboard box. Yeah. It's a plywood box. Yeah. Okay. And he's going to log in here. And he's got music playing on his iPhone. I'm actually playing the music right now, but you can't really hear much. I'm going to put this real quick. So if I put it here, you'll probably hear some sound coming out, but nothing impressive because there's no speaker cone. So if we come over here and I set it on this wooden box, now you'll notice that the entire box has began amplifying. I could pick up something else like this is just a small little wooden tray, for instance. The acoustics are going to change because the surface area is smaller and it doesn't have the same makeup as the plywood. So you're getting a full range of sound out of a small little device because you're not limited to a small speaker cone.  Right, right. So let's see. Wait, he wants me to go around the front? Okay, now we're just playing, Steve. Okay, let's go ahead and pull it off so we can hear better. So how much does the bass egg cost? They retail for $99.95. You can get them on our website, which is basseg.com, as well as Amazon and a couple other online sites. This looks very, very cool. Thank you for taking the time, Adam. I appreciate it. I appreciate that. Bye. Bye.


Oh, great. Great. Hi, it's Theresa and I'm here to give you seven ways to show someone with depression and that you love and that you care about them. Now, the reason why I wanted to do a video on this is because mental illness is a very real problem among lots of people and especially with teenagers in high school because it can get to be a very pressuring environment and I feel as though some people develop mental illnesses or some people are just genetically born with that and eventually their illness comes out and they just need to be treated well and sometimes people neglect these people with these illnesses and they don't really see how real they are and how they are affecting them and it's just so important to bring awareness to illnesses like that and to understand that it will be okay and that no matter how hard it is you'll get through it and as a message to anyone that is depressed or is going through a rough time your friends are going to be the ones to help you out of it.  So mental illness is just as terrible as a physical illness and maybe even worse because it's something mental. It's not something that can be fixed with neosporin. It's a lot deeper than that. So the first thing to do is is to help them keep clutter at bay. People spiraling depression may feel like the world is slowing down while the world around them seems to speed up and some depressed people might end up having a lot of dirty dishes in the sink. They're gonna find it hard to clean up messes to clean up their room to do daily tasks that a person can normally do with ease or with just a little bit of effort. They find it very very difficult to do that. So if you're gonna be a really good friend, I would suggest maybe coming over to their house and being like, hey, I'll help clean up some of your dishes or some of the mess in your room.  To fix them a healthy meal. Now you're probably like, but you're talking about friends, right? You're not married to this person with depression. Well, it can go hand in hand.  They don't have to eat a whole box of Oreos, you know instead of Oreos, you could replace it with something healthy, but you can just be there for them to monitor and to help guide them to eat healthy to maybe possibly feel better because believe it or not, eating healthier foods can help you feel better and I find that when I eat junk, a lot of junk, it makes me feel really bad and later after I eat a whole bunch of pizza, I just sit there and I'm like, I shouldn't have eaten all of that. I feel so gross and all you want to do is lay around.  And believe it or not, eating healthy foods can diminish some symptoms of depression. It's been proven through specific studies and sometimes healthier foods can have mood-boosting properties. Number three, get them outside. Now, you're probably like, why should that matter? Well surprisingly enough, it's really important to get a lot of vitamin D from the sun and if you're inside all the time and you're in your bed and you know, you don't have a lot of light around you and you're just very sad and solitary, it's not good for your health. It's important to get outside, to get some sun, to maybe do some exercise, to release endorphins because believe it or not, there's things out there such as happy lights and things like that that mimic sunlight and sunlight can actually help boost your mood. By seeing the beauty of nature, it's also very refreshing and very relaxing to just go out there and see something like that. But it's important to tell them to go outside because sometimes a depressed person doesn't want to do anything, so you have to be the one to make the effort to help them out. Four, encourage them to focus on self-care. Now, depressed people often stop taking care of themselves. They might not brush their teeth, they might not brush their hair. You know, like I said before, simple daily tasks become a lot harder and they don't want to go through all that effort because they don't have that sense of worth. But self-care is super duper, duper important and you have to make sure that they're not self-harming, that they are, that they're gonna be okay, you know, tell them to take a bubble bath or something and help them up out of that funk. I know you can't be there for a friend 24-7 because you also have to focus on your own life, but sometimes being involved in a friend's life and doing these things for them and doing simple gestures, maybe a few of these rules will help them out tremendously. Number five, hug them. Who doesn't want to be hugged?  And it's still kind words into their heart, into their soul, into their mind and just be there for them. And hugs are the simplest, most wonderful forms of love and being a friend for someone. Six, laugh with them. So let's say you turn on the TV, want to watch a funny show or something, it's important to get the person who's in this depressed state to to smile, to laugh, you want to see that, you want to see their eyes light up at something that's funny and to get them in a more joyful mood than they have been. And seven, remind them why you love them. So, you know, you've become friends with this person or your significant other, whoever it is that might be depressed, you know them and you have to tell them how amazing they are to you. You have to prove to them that they are worth something even though they don't think it now. Something as simple as saying it will get better. I love you. You're such a great person. Thank you for being in my life. But having that kind of sincerity behind a message can mean the world to someone, can make them feel loads better. And I know it's really hard for someone that's depressed to get out of it, but it's not impossible. But it's just important as a friend to tell that depressed person that they matter and that you love them and that it's alright. Maybe look at some old photos of the two of you or just say, remember this time that was so fun? And everything was really great. And you know, we're gonna have more fun times like that. So it's just really good to have that reminder to them and to instill them with that. Hi, I'm back. I'm sorry. I forgot one thing. Thank you for watching this video, by the way. Make sure to give it a like, a thumbs up, subscribe to Psych2Go, or subscribe to my channel if you want. But I also just wanted you to comment below telling me what you would like to hear about in my next video. I want to hear a lot of responses. Give me ideas. I'm ready to take your challenges. Whatever it is. Really excited. But again, thanks so much and I hope you all have an awesome day. See you later.


Oh great, they're putting guns on RoboDogs now. So hey, they've started mounting sniper rifles on RoboDogs, which is great news for anyone who was hoping they'd start mounting sniper rifles on RoboDogs. At an exhibit booth in the Association of the United States Army's annual meeting and exhibition, Ghost Robotics, the military-friendly competitor to the better-known Boston Dynamics proudly showed off a weapon that is designed to attach to its quadruped bots made by a company called Sword Defense Systems. The Sword Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle was specifically designed to offer precision fire from unmanned platforms such as the Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadruped sword proclaims on its website. Chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor allows for precision fire out to 1,200 meters. The spur can similarly utilize 7.62 by 5.1 NATO cartridge for ammunition availability. Due to its highly capable sensors, the spur can operate in a magnitude of conditions both day and night. The Sword Defense Systems spur is the future of unmanned weapons systems and that future is now. Back in May, the US Air Force put out a video, link in the description, on the robotic ghost dog these weapons are designed to be used with, showing the machines jogging, standing up after being flipped over, and even dancing. All of which becomes a lot less cutesy when you imagine them performing these maneuvers while carrying a gun designed to blow apart skulls from a kilometer away. At one point in the video, a senior master sergeant explains to the host how these robo dogs can be affixed with all kinds of equipment, like communications systems, explosive ordnance disposal attachments, gear to test for chemicals and radiation, and the whole time you're listening to them list things off you're thinking guns, yeah guns, guns, you can attach guns to them why don't you just say that. The spur prototype is just one of many different weapons we'll surely see tested for use with quadruped robots in coming years, and eventually we'll likely see its successors tested on impoverished foreigners in needless military interventions by the United States and or its allies. They will join other unmanned weapons systems in the Imperial Arsenal, like the USA's notorious drone program, South Korea's Samsung SGR-A1, the Turkish cargo drone which has already reportedly attacked human beings in Libya without having been given a human command to do so, and the AI assisted robotic sniper rifle that was used by Israeli intelligence in coordination with the US government to assassinate an Iranian scientist last year. And we may be looking at a not too distant future in which unmanned weapons systems are sought out by wealthy civilians as well. In 2018, the influential author and professor Douglas Roushkoff wrote an article titled Survival of the Richest, in which he disclosed that a year earlier he had been paid an enormous fee to meet with five extremely wealthy hedge funders. Roushkoff said the unnamed billionaires sought out his advice for strategizing their survival after what they called the event, their term for the collapse of civilization via climate destruction, nuclear war, or some other catastrophe, which they apparently viewed as likely enough and close enough to start planning for. Roushkoff writes that eventually it became clear that the foremost concern of these plutocrats was maintaining control over a security force which would protect their estates from the rabble in a post-apocalyptic world where money might not mean anything. I encourage you to listen to the following paragraph from the article carefully, because it says so much about how these people see our future, our world, and their fellow human beings. Quote, this single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs, but how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew, or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival, or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers if that technology could be developed in time. End quote. Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself fervently hoping that the world will be saved by billionaires. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley's billionaires have invested in some type of apocalypse insurance such as an underground bunker to ensure they survive whatever disasters ensue from the status quo they currently benefit so immensely from. The New Yorker has published an article about this mega-rich doomsday prepper phenomenon as well. We may be sure that military forces aren't the only ones planning on having eternally loyal killing machines protecting their interests going forward. We are ruled by warmongers and sociopaths and none of them have healthy plans for our future. They are not kind and they are not wise. They're not even particularly intelligent. Unless we can find some way to pry their fingers from the steering wheel of our world so we can turn away from the direction we are headed, things will probably get very dark and scary.


I pledge to plant only drought-tolerant species in my yard because they require less water to survive. We pledge to turn off the sprinklers when it rains because rainwater is better for our plants than treated water. Also, because our parents do not like winter water or money. We pledge to water our plants early in the morning or in the evening to allow the roots time to soak up the water before it evaporates. I plan to sweep my driveway and patio instead of using the hose to save water and prevent runoff pollution. Join us and make your pledge for the National Mayors Challenge Water Conservation by visiting www.mywaterpledge.com. Let's show our friends across the country that in Columbia, South Carolina, we stand together in our commitment to clean water.


from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Insight 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to IBM Insight, everybody. This is theCUBE. I'm here with Paul Gillan and George Gilbert and we're going to wrap day one. We'll be here for two days. This is the first day of Insight. We heard the keynotes this morning. Big themes by IBM talking heavily about cognitive new era. Not a ton of product stuff today. I'm expecting we're going to hear some of that tomorrow, guys, but let me start with you, Paul. What are your thoughts on what you heard today? Well, you know, if you listen to what the stock market is saying, what the analysts are saying, the 13 straight quarters of declining earnings, 13 or 14, whatever it is, you would get the impression that this is a company that's on the decline. But I have to tell you, this is a huge crowd here today. You walked into the ballroom today. The opening keynot wasn't held in a ballroom, it was held in a stadium and it was absolutely packed. And there's a lot of customers here, a lot of business partners, a lot of IBMers too, but it was a very energetic crowd. They were excited about what they were seeing. It was a well-staged presentation. It was very coherent and very upbeat. And I have to say, those who would say that IBM is accompanying on the decline need to come to events like this and see that there's still a lot of customer enthusiasm for what they're doing. And they have made a lot of tough decisions about this business over the last couple of years, smart decisions, and they're putting a lot of wood behind this big data and analytics arrow. And it seems like the message is resonating. Yeah, I've said a number of times, IBM has to shrink to grow. And that's sort of exactly what's happening. So I don't get freaked out about the declining revenue. I, as well, I want to see that sort of bounce off the bottom. But to me, the more important thing about IBM, and George would love to get your take on this in terms of specifically where they're putting their emphasis, but is IBM spends on R&D? And it's very clear where they're going with their R&D dollars. They've made a zillion acquisitions. They said, okay, let's cobble that together into an analytics powerhouse. Huge bet on Watson. Let's pour money into cognitive. So then, okay, let's do cloud. Let's buy software. Let's get the blue mix thing going. Let's pour money into that. Let's get the developer crowd. So major, major initiatives, you know, and then put in mobile and some partnerships around that. Compare that to some of the other large tech players. HP now is splitting up. You know, what's HP investing in? The machine, you know, memrister. You know, public cloud. They just killed their public cloud.  Oracle spends a lot on R&D, but it's very focused, you know, on Oracle stack. Okay, fine. I'm okay with that because they're spending a lot of money on R&D. R&D is the lifeblood of the technology business.  And I think that's what we've seen with HP. IBM, I think, is in a position where at some point they can grow. But George, so what's your take on IBM's analytics business specifically? That's really what this event is all about. Well, I started the day thinking, you know, there was BlueMix, which was a little bit after the fact in terms of Amazon as a platform, as a service coming together, and that there were several databases with a little bit of overlap on them. And I also wondered, we talked about this when we did the kickoff, like what was Watson? What did it look like to a developer? And the thing that I came away with today was that Watson really is pervasive. It has become pervasive since last year. And what was actually really eye-opening was that they're talking about exposing it to developers and even business analysts and in users through something called WorkSpaces, which was pioneered many, many years ago for data scientists, frankly, and programmers. And now they want to make those as easy to use as spreadsheets. And that sort of brings it all together for me. So you have BlueMix, and underneath that you have SoftLayer, you have the databases on top of that, and then you have Watson exposed through what's essentially like a spreadsheet. Then there's a whole lot of go-to-market stuff after that, but take that as a tech stack that's very coherent now. So, I mean, the market has a gazillion databases, right, they're exploding. So IBM's got what, five of them?  To be fair, they're doing what Microsoft did, which was Microsoft was on a package software release cycle. So for every couple of years, another sausage would come out, you'd call it SQL Server 2012 or 2014. Now they have, I think it's quarterly releases of SQL Server on Azure, and then every couple of years they'll squeeze out another packaged version, and that's how IBM does it with DashDB. So they've integrated capabilities from Natesa, they've integrated capabilities from DB2, and basically DashDB is the tip of the spear, and so it's not quite as messy as it sounds. But, I mean, owning a database, there's so many databases out there, there's a lot of open source alternatives, it's not a great growth engine for any company, including Oracle. It seems to me, Amazon has got a huge amount of coverage over re-invent and over all the products they announced there and just a huge lead they have in the cloud. People say, well, where's IBM and all that? Well, IBM doesn't have to compete with Amazon in the cloud, because Amazon's got a coherent hybrid strategy, they've got a good cloud story, they're in the top four, they're going to stay there, and they have to be in the race, but they certainly don't have to challenge the leader. They have to have one good coherent story to tell, and I think it's clear that between Watson and the analytics portfolio, they are lining up around this analytics as really being the place that IBM leads. And that's as good a story as anybody has right now, certainly as good as what Oracle has to tell, and maybe what Amazon has to tell. I think the question I have about IBM Analytics is just pulling together all these piece parts. You know, there's been 25 acquisitions in analytics, they have a very fragmented portfolio of different products that are oriented toward different markets, and I don't see a coherent message yet about how you sort all those out if you're a customer. I think they're good technologies in their own right, but why is Tableau able to build the kind of head of steam that they have? Why doesn't IBM own that space? I think there are still gaps. They have not really lined these technologies up in a way that they all fit together. So we've got, I'm just pulling up the Wikibon cloud forecast for 2015. It's got Microsoft number one, Amazon number two, Salesforce number three, IBM number four. And the reason why IBM's number four is they participate in all those markets. I think IBM said in the last 12 months, in the last earnings call it said they've done nine billion in cloud. Now, the way they count cloud is maybe different than what we count cloud. And I know that what Amazon counts as cloud, 100% what we would count as cloud, same thing with Salesforce. And I think actually, for the most part, same thing with Oracle. I think Oracle's got a pretty clean accounting of cloud. I'm not sure if IBM's is as clean. HP really doesn't have a public cloud, but so their cloud business sort of comprises a lot of on-prem stuff. Generally, I think that when we talk cloud, we're talking about public cloud capabilities. But so, and so we've attempted to sort of strip out the kitchen sink stuff and IBM comes up fourth. This is the forecast for 2015, so it's still to be determined as we got a couple months left in the quarter. But I think IBM does have to be a major player there. I think IBM's actually looking pretty smart right now getting rid of its x86 business. We were kind of negative about that. But you look at the hard times and hardware and you look at a company like Dell who actually is embracing the collapse in hardware pricing, great, come on into our world, taking EMC and driving its cost structures into the EMC culture that's going to be interesting to see how that all works out. But I think Dell's the right company to do that because it's unsustainable. You talk about a slow-motion collapse in infrastructure software pricing, same thing's happening with hardware. So IBM, somebody said on theCUBE today, you can, it was the guys you interviewed from the micro factory guys. They told the car, 3D printed car, yeah. He said he trained under, the CEO trained under Michael Porter. He said you could either go high volume, low cost, or you can go differentiable. What do you think of IBM? Mercedes or Volkswagen? So clearly IBM's not trying to, when does IBM ever won really in the volume market? Kind of lost in PCs and micro electronics, disk drives, those are schlocky businesses. And IBM's not a schlocky company. That's a quote from Al Shugart, actually. So I think it's the right play. Street's not buying into it though, George. But it's so, I mean I go back to something I said earlier in the kickoff, which is IBM's business model is to solve hard problems for big companies and also at high margins. And when they get in trouble it appears is when they lose sight of that margin issue or they thought with PCs that they could maintain high margins cause they were like, well why would anyone buy a PC from anyone but us? So to your point about IBM going through a transformation, I mean just think of a metaphor. You know you got a caterpillar curls up, goes into a cocoon and out comes a butterfly. It's just a little bit of a process and yes they'll shrink. But you don't measure a company by its revenues. That's not how you value a company. Well it's a revenue. We got a lot of revenue selling dollar bills for 90 cents. Yeah, well you're right. And we're seeing that a lot of companies are out there today driving revenue with dollar every dollar revenue takes two dollars of expense to get there. Well that's the more relevant metric when you put the two together. I mean I do like, I think there are times when revenue multiples, when you get a market that's kind of settling down nicely and starting to throw off some profits. I think revenue multiples are actually a reasonable thing to look at. But they're very misleading when you've got these so-called unicorns that are growing like crazy and not making any money. You know it's going to be interesting to see, you got guys like you mentioned Tableau, you got ServiceNow is another one doing very well work day. These guys are not profitable or they're barely profitable companies. It's hard for them because as public companies they've got to report earnings, they try to earn some kind of profit. At the same time they've got to grow globally, they've got to invest in R&D so every dime they make goes back into the business. And oh by the way a lot of that is you know they're always reporting non-gap. You know they're doing a lot of stuff to you know stock options and the like and stock buybacks not so much these smaller companies but it feels like we're in the middle of this transition and something's giving. You know the Dell EMC acquisition is a sign of the times and we've talked about this at Big Data NYC last month. I said it was overcrowded, overfunded and profitless. Peter Goldmark I thought had a great analogy. He basically for those of you who didn't see it he said that and you remember this George I think you did the interview with me. There are a lot of companies that it looks like the nose of the plane is pointed up but they're losing altitude and when funding dries up the nose of that plane is going to point down and it's going to get ugly and then you're going to see companies like IBM and others who are strong at M&A, swoop in and start picking up assets. But the question I have for you George is with all this open source where's the IP? And that's why people complain. The ecosystem complains about IBM and its behavior in open source. We know IBM's committed to open source but they'll say oh yeah but it's insisting on doing its own Hadoop distribution for example. But that's IBM trying to protect IP isn't it? Well I don't know if I'm answering exactly your question but let me give it a shot. The model that people who subscribe to an open source business model believe in is we'll get the design win with the developer typically. You know someone who downloads it, gets it up and running. And then when we have to go to support to put it into operation or I'm sorry to go to operations to get this thing up and running in production then we'll sell them some technology whether open source or not that helps keep it running at low cost. The problem is if you have a whole stack of different companies who are going to go to IT ops and say we'll help you keep this running and just buy our little console. You know you're like in Alice in Wonderland or some kaleidoscope with all these random mirrors. And it doesn't do you any good. And so there has to be consolidation. And I go back to why we see Azure, Amazon, Google, IBM providing a management framework that others might be able to plug into. Otherwise the economics of open source where the value comes from helping people run your software just won't work. So IBM of course talks about business outcomes and we of course always want to say okay but how do you get there? So we were at Pentaho World a few weeks ago and we had a couple of customers on. We had FINRA on, we had NASDAQ on, a couple others. And what they were doing they were taking diverse data sets Paul and they were ingesting them into the cloud and then they built out the sort of end to end data factory, data pipeline and they would blend all these diverse data sets of data integration and clean the data and then they would operationalize that data by embedding analytics into their systems and putting access to the analytics giving access to the end users. This whole citizens analytics thing that we talked about we said wow that's really impressive, it's unique. Pentaho is a really pretty robust platform. Company Hitachi just bought for their internet of things play and we said the only company that we think has the capabilities to do anything like that is IBM. The question we had is but we didn't know how integrated it was. Certainly Pentaho made it sound like it was highly integrated. You talk to customers it seemed like it was. How integrated is IBM and can you answer that question any better today than you could three weeks ago? I did come away with two questions from Pentaho which is when someone says they're integrated it's their definition of integrated and it sounded pretty integrated. The other one was embedded analytics which worked for the OLAP cube but if you needed sort of machine learning or something you had to sort of slide something else in there so you lose the collaboration magic between the data scientists. And security was kind of a bolt on as well. Yes, the IBM was talking about really sort of cradle to grave integration and I can't remember off the top of my head all the levels but it did appear to go further. The point they made was the moment you drop out of your integration pipeline into something like Tableau you know snip all your governance is gone. Now it's possible that Tableau and Pentaho can do proprietary integration just the way Tableau did it with Informatica but there's one thing that Pentaho did not talk about that we heard about here which was data wrangling is not a matter of trying to tie together a couple dozen data sources where you would have them coming from operational systems. When we talked to Inie Cho Su she was talking about data feeds coming everywhere externally internally when you're talking 100, 200 more you need machine learning to figure out how they all come together and there's not too many companies offering that. And you're saying IBM has that depth. Paul, I wanted to ask you for the CIO CDO perspective I thought that was an interesting conversation that we had and you were kind of defending the CIO's position of this really should be the CIO's job but my question to you is the CIO sort of narrowed his or her scope and sort of failed to be able to take on that job of I would tend to agree with you. When I started Wikibon we started with this whole notion of information asset and liability management that is the CIO is your job to manage information manage it as an asset and protect the company from liability. That sounds a lot like the CIO CDO's job that's evolved so should that be the role of the CIO or is it too late? Are they just sort of keeping the light of the disk drive on? I mean the words data and information are interchangeable so why do we need a chief data officer or we have a chief information officer? Well maybe it's because the chief information officer is not doing his or her job. That's why I think there's a turning point right now for CIO's I just got back from a conference with about 70 CIO's from very large companies and this was an undercurrent that I sense very strongly that they are at a point now where they either have to get strategic or they're going to be forced back into a niche where they're just doing infrastructure and they don't want to do that. But how many CIO's have the skill set, have the time, have the vision to be able to step up and deal with data more strategically? I think that's always been a tough shift for CIO's to make going back a couple of decades but now it's kind of like the rubber needs to meet the road because data finally is strategic to these organizations and somebody has to define strategic value from that data and if it's not the CIO then it's going to be somebody else. Now my personal opinion is I think it is going to be somebody else. I think the role of the CDO is to be a change agent to help companies get to the data driven organization. I don't see the CIO doing that. I do see the CIO however, the imperative is to have a strategic role as a business enabler. The CIO really should be a business person that says okay, you got to get stuff done. Because everything in business is a project, it's an initiative and it's got a beginning and you got to fund it and it's got to throw off an ROI and there's a technology component to it. The CIO in my opinion should be somebody who really understands that business imperative and can support and facilitate that business imperative. I see the CDO as more somebody who's really trying to understand how to transform the organization, not that the CIO doesn't have transformational role as well, they do, but specific to using data as a competitive advantage. I don't see that as the CIO's role. That's not the skill set that has gotten CIOs to where they are. What defines a successful CIO historically has been budget management, uptime, availability, stick to the numbers. Not getting in the way. Don't get in the way, ideally everything just works and we don't even have to be aware that you're there. So that's what you need for success and now you've got this transform the business that really the skill sets don't align very well. Well, and what about the Chief Digital Officer? Well, I just don't think that's happening. Well, should it be happening though? No. Well, right when you disagree, right? You would come on and say, oh no, the Chief Digital Officer. This is an obsession with C titles. The C title is a corporate officer. It's a very important person. We had the Chief Customer Officer for a while. That was hot. Chief Innovation Officer. These titles come and go. I think CDO may actually have some legs, but I'm not. Well, I think it may. I'm not in favor of creating a lot of new C-low titles. Especially in financial services, healthcare, and government. To me, the Chief Digital Officer is really the Chief Strategy Officer. Right, and it's fine to have it or whatever, if you want to call it CFO, the VP of strategy. Somebody who runs strategy and your strategy is to enter the digital age and digitize your physical assets. That's a strategy play. Now, do you want to put somebody in charge of that for a period of time? Maybe, but is that sustainable? No, because eventually the whole business becomes digital. You know, I'm listening to you guys, and I think you're answering your own questions. Like when you talk about the CIO being responsible for our availability and uptime and all those things. To me, that means CIO now spells Chief Infrastructure Officer. And when you talk about CDO being the Chief Data Officer, when we talk about, we don't use really the term anymore, the API economy or sort of exposing microservices for your company where people plug in and deal with your company programmatically. But that's what a CDO would deliver. You would be part of someone else's supply chain.  And so yes, that's very strategic. That's top line sensitive. Whereas someone who just cares about keeping stuff running is the Infrastructure Officer. Hi, gents, we have to wrap. So that's it from day one. What are you guys looking for tomorrow? I mean, anything you didn't see today that you want to hear from tomorrow or any kind of closing thoughts? Let's start with you, Bob. I think we have a great lineup tomorrow. We have Bob Picciano, who's huge.  He'll be a great interview. We have Joel Colley of Information Insights as a Service. We have Merv Adrian from Gartner, who's on the schedule. And Jason Silva from National Geographic's Brain Games. I can't wait to hear your own thoughts. He's been on before. He's going to be great. So really good lineup tomorrow. IBMers, non-IBMers, Jim Harris, best-selling authors. I think it'll be a lot of variety. And I'm looking forward to it. The only thing I would add is, in the areas where we said, OK, so we had questions about nailing them down to specifics, we'll get another shot at it tomorrow. Yeah, and from my standpoint, I always love the business angle. And IBM's last public statement was they had a $17 billion analytics business that's huge. It's been growing 20% a quarter for the last three quarters. This is a $20-plus billion business on the way to $25 to $30 billion, a third of the company's revenue and a real engine of growth and margin, because it's high-margin business. So I'm really interested in learning more, particularly from Bob Picciano about that. So very gracious with his time, really thrilled that he's coming on. And a good lineup for you tomorrow. So check out ibmgo.com. ibmgo.com is the digital experience for IBM Insight. There's a crowd chat on there, which we're hosting as part of that site. Or you can get there directly at crowdchat.net slash ibminsight. Join the conversation, tweet us, text us. Thanks for all the support. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.


Hello. I am the storyteller. And today we will talk about Barcelona. The city is also the capital of the province of Barcelona and the Barcelona's Comarca. Barcelona is governed by a city council formed by 41 city councillors, elected for a four-year term by universal suffrage. As one of the two biggest cities in Spain, Barcelona is subject to a special law articulated through the Carta Municipal. According to this law, Barcelona's city council is organized in two levels, a political one, with elected city councillors, and one executive, which administrates the programs and executes the decisions taken on the political level. This law also gives the local government a special relationship with the central government and it also gives the mayor wider prerogatives by the means of municipal executive commissions. It expands the powers of the city council in areas like telecommunications, city traffic, road safety and public safety. It also gives a special economic regime to the city's treasury and it gives the council a veto in matters that will be decided by the central government, but that will need a favorable report from the council. The comasio de govern is the executive branch, formed by 24 councillors, led by the mayor, with five lieutenant mayors and 17 city councillors, each in charge of an area of government and five non-elected councillors. The plenary, formed by the 41 city councillors, has advisory, planning, regulatory and fiscal executive functions. The city council has jurisdiction in the fields of city planning, transportation, municipal taxes, public highway security through the Guardia Urbana, city maintenance, gardens, parks and environment, facilities, culture, sports, youth and social welfare. It is made up of departments which are legally part of the city council and by separate legal entities of two types, autonomous public departments and public enterprises. The seat of the city council is on the plaza de Sant Jaume, opposite the seat of Generalitat de Catalunya. The PP hold eight seats, ICV-5 and ERC-2. Since 1987, the city has been divided into 10 administrative districts, Chutant-Vélia-Chample-Sant's Montjuic-les-Courts-Saries-Saint-Cervais-Gracia-Ordeguin-Ardot-New-Barris-Saint-Andreux-Saint-Martí. The districts are based mostly on historical divisions, and several are former towns annexed by the city of Barcelona in the 18th and 19th centuries that still maintain their own distinct character. Each district has its own council led by a city councilor. The composition of each district council depends on the number of votes each political party had in that district, so a district can be led by a councilor from a different party than the executive council. Barcelona has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Barcelona, a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city. Barcelona is also home to the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and the Neuropompo-Fabri University, and, in the private sector the Eda Business School founded in 1957, became the first Barcelona institution to run manager training programs for the business community. East Business School, as well as the largest private educational institution, the Ramón Lúl University, which encompasses internationally prestigious schools and institutes such as the Esad Business School. The Autonomous University of Barcelona, another public university, is located in Belaterra, a town in the metropolitan area. Toulouse Business School and the Open University of Catalonia are also based in Barcelona. The city has a network of public schools, from nurseries to high schools, under the responsibility of a consortium led by city council. There are also many private schools, some of them Roman Catholic. Most such schools receive a public subsidy on a per-student basis, are subject to inspection by the public authorities, and are required to follow the same curricular guidelines as public schools, though they charge tuition. Known as the Schools Concertates, they are distinct from schools whose funding is entirely private. The language of instruction at public schools and the Schools Concertates is Catalan, as stipulated by the 2009 Catalan Education Act. Spanish may be used as a language of instruction by teachers of Spanish literature or language, and foreign languages by teachers of those languages. An experimental partial immersion program adopted by some schools allows for the teaching of a foreign language across the curriculum, though this is limited to a maximum of 30% of the school day. No public school or escala concertata in Barcelona may offer 50% or full immersion programs in a foreign language, nor does any public school or escala concertata offer international baccalaureate programs.


and she's also an award winning ladies and gentlemen two, who play the glasses how are you Doris? thank you thank you for your advice Remember I am really humbled But Karee bani usitwa wo bejani All right Now, Tell us, what is Doris Doris K K means Kareda Doris K is a Minister of the Gospel She is born and brought up in Meru County and she is born again She is married she is blessed with children No child She has been married for 14 years Say what now? She has been married for 14 years I love the Lord I serve in my church In prison worship I serve in many ways I want to look like this with 14 years in marriage and many children But take us through If you serve Muwa na kupia gris He don't age Renews you Na kuri new everyday No no ko ile level ya Israelite, kwa kwa wilderness Those that never grow old Moses did not grow old Their clothes did not wear out Their shoes did not grow Bigger or smaller than them They just grow Anyway, it's the grace of God Yes, when you trust in God He renews you Yes, now take us through your musical journey When did you start singing How was it paid for you What are the lessons that you've now thrown out? I would say I started singing when I was young I remember when I was in Sunday school Way back from my home church I used to sing I used to lead choruses I used to be called so many times To come and present And sing I didn't realize because You see those days Wazazi awaku wa na realize talent ya mu toto They support But I continued serving I joined youth Shule high school and all that And when I decided now na takaku ifanya Actually I didn't decide Me, mine was It's one day after church After service a friend of mine told me I'm going to the studio Can you take me At least you try and do a backup for my song So I joined him Ika Fika studio Then the brother told the producer She also sings She has a very good voice But I was like no So the producer said Mama wimbe kendo kutu niske Nita kuwambia if you can sing Ama uta ezaku wimba So I told him I'm good in life When I'm doing it in church Mambe aku record apana Kani ame ni imbe That is 7 years ago That is when I did my first song In Takatifu So I recorded And from there the rest is history But I have not been consistent Like I'm doing One, two songs a year, ma three There is a time Niliyenda break ya two years Nasa inu na na takaku Tupelika break ya one year na two takis At least this year I've tried Mwaka ikiansa na kwa Every month It's actually a song But again you find Mambo ni mingi kazi Mambo mingi na kuja Sometimes discouragements It has not been easy It is not easy to be a minister It is not easy kwa chiliya music Sometimes we lack Support Una pata una toa song Akuna support Then you're like But at least this year I've done two So far and I'm planning to do like two to three Before the year ends And ya it has It has not been easy Especially if you release some music Then I will put your support I will put the support that you need Inakwa ngumu Inakwa ngumu But we keep pushing because We are not doing business We are serving God So Atakama ni mtumoja na fikiwa na song So you know you feel like giving up But then una sema That one song Uki pata mtua na kwa mbiya No worries ni mboza kozi na ni bless Nya mbiya mungu For that one song I'll continue serving I'll continue ministering So ya kumekua na challenges I decided to do Kimeru songs because Sisi Tuna mbiya kwa tuji kwa mba Then again Nili kwa nataka What we are doing As Meru's we can sing We have good voices We have good content So I decided to do in Meru because I realize we listen To South Africans Nigerians Atwele we change wana sema We get the music We get blessed And actually for me Nili kwa nataka kufikiwa na paka What we are doing Sila wana skia And they are very proud of As Meru's Those who sing in Kimeru Sorry to cut you So you have heard your songs Ya Wana furayanga sana Wana furayanga sana waki skia Then we have a reception Kwa TV Pale Kila gitu ikasi mama kwanza Daughter in law amaliza kuhimba Namuza yasa hi amewa ezoa So that is how Proud they are Nwana furayanga sana because Now they can listen to Meru music They are very proud kuna metuka Meru Naimba They are very happy actually And I get a lot of support From Meru County So kwa radio stations TV stations Nimo zangu cheswa sana wuko And I have gotten a lot of Supporter around And I really thank God for that And not only at home as well Kenya Actually there is a day I think a man that go A friend of ours from our church He works in South Sudan Ali tu pigi ya simu Aka pigi ya bibi ya Nimeski ya nimbia duriski Inachesu kwa Radio stations in South Sudan Wow Yes International International Nani kimi Meru So when I hear those Kind of things Zinani per moral Zinani tia moyo Sana So I keep pushing An award winner Yes Yes First I won Best female artist Ya Meru County That is back in 2015 I was the best female artist That is back in 2015 Last year But one I was Second kwa Eastern Fema Last year 2022 I was the best female artist Fema awards Congratulations to that Glory to God Amazing So you said there is more project That you are going to release this year Yes And we are looking forward to that I don't want to sit here I'll sit here That's what my promise Right, we are looking forward Sometimes I have so many projects Pending, audios Actually it's a studio like 10 But now We are making videos That A simple person That I hate complications Life So I imagine Mamboa video Director And I say 20 days I will come But I will come I will come I will come I will come We will come We will come We will come We will come We will come 100% Living K�a Minister in jubther We will come So to this Work needs a lot of time We may say That You can say I want to work On cheese coils We'll keep advancing Work needs a lot of demand Work needs me I do a lot, I have some shops in town doing other businesses, so I do not have one, I have like three or four businesses that sometimes But for me, I will not really say it's my business because I do a lot of videos, I do a lot of work Because if I want to get a day, to do a video is just a day, so I'll get that one day Because events mostly they are seasonal and then they are not everyday So I can decide what I'll do on Monday, so the thing here is I don't have any complications in my life But now you know you're denying us, what God has given you And us you want to listen to it I'll try, I'll try I'm planning to do like three or four projects before the year ends And we'll count you for that We told you that That you will play EVU We'll do it in December In December I'll be there You'll be there to do your work Yes, I'll do it I'll do it in December Anyway, we're looking forward to that Maybe you can comment on your social media handles and your YouTube channel Social media, Facebook, Doris K. Narangwe IG Doris K. Official YouTube Doris K. Official Twitter Doris K. Official Narangwe I'm also on TikTok Please mention Doris K. Official But I'm not active I don't have a job It's not complicated It's not complicated Actually, this is what I do Once I take those things Hi, where? When you are in a car, you are in a car When you are in a car, you are in a car Doris K. Official I've never asked that You're not interested I'm not interested I'm not interested in TikTok I'm just trying I'm trying I'm just trying Commitment Commitment needs to be consistent as well Yes, exactly If you want to make a video You can come back You need to be consistent I'm trending on Twitter And jump on it That's the secret Any great team Salamuzu I would want I know my babies are not watching But in Toa Salimia But in Toa Angu I know also my Yabi is not watching But in Toa Salimia My group, my team Present worship team My entire church My own church I know they are watching And if I don't say hi to them I will say hi to them All my friends, my fans Thank you for the support I really appreciate it God bless you God bless you as well Thank you for honoring us with your presence Continue doing the music Don't stop We are here to thank you We are here to thank you Thank you Ngaimu ne ne Ngaimu ne ne Thank you so much for coming Thank you