Good afternoon and welcome to this special Facebook live event hosted by the Army G1 and the Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston. Today the Army G1 senior enlisted advisors and the Sergeant Major of the Army will discuss key changes to the Army Regulation 670-1 and announce significant changes to the Army grooming standard. Throughout the event we're going to take questions from you in the audience, both here in the Pentagon Auditorium and online. So make sure you get those questions into the chat box below and then here in the room we have a microphone set up. Come stand behind socially distanced of course and we'll do that throughout the event as possible. So we'll get to as many of those as we can but let's go ahead and get started. I'm Sergeant First Class Will Rainier. I'll be co-moderating today's discussion. And I'm Sergeant First Class Evans. Please help me welcome our panel today. So from Army G1 we have the policy branch Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major Brian Sanders. From Army G1 Sergeant Major we have Sergeant Major Clark. And gentlemen please help me welcome Sergeant Major of the Army SMA Grinston. We'll open the floor for opening remarks from Sergeant Major Grinston. So you looked at all the recommendations. I'm going to stop you right here SMA. It looks like your microphone is not transmitting out. If we can get that in the booth. We're getting comments that his microphone is not transmitting out on the stream. It's interesting. Hello. Hello. Can I hear you Sergeant Major? They can hear me. Okay. Okay. This is going to be great. Can you hear me? Somebody type of great. I know you can hear me in the audience. That's what happens you know. When you're Sergeant Major of the Army everybody's got to make jokes. Of course I can hear you Sergeant Major. I'm sitting right here. So I'm hoping everyone out in Facebook live can actually hear me now. We'll kind of work from here and see how this goes. So I really appreciate it. You missed my excitement in the beginning. I'm still excited about all these changes. So we're really excited about the changes that are coming up. And I wanted to thank the G1 team and the soldiers that came to do the panel. The G1, the soldiers that made those recommendations to the panel. They made them to us as the senior leaders. We said hey put this panel together. Thanks for all those folks that involved this to get us to this point so we can roll these things out. So we looked at the recommendations. The panel made those recommendations to the senior leaders and we said yeah these are great. And that's what we're going to roll out today. So I'm excited about doing this. But I just have to remind everybody with any good policy it really boils down to good leaders too. So once we change the standards we just got to make sure everybody knows about them. That's where given plenty of time to talk about these things. But without leadership any policy is not as good as it should be until we actually get the leaders to understand what this policy means. So leadership still matters. We have to have time to say here's what our standards are. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We have to know it. We have said it. And then ultimately we'll enforce the standards. And that's what's great about army and said well this is just what we do. And these aren't about male and female. This is about an army standard and how we move forward with the army and being a more diverse inclusive team. We take recommendations from our soldiers and then we move forward with those recommendations. So again I'm really excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Yes ma'am. We have a lot discussed today. So let's get started. On our about February 26th the army will publish the updated AR 670-1. Sergeant Major Clark what can soldiers expect from this new update? All right. Thank you Sergeant Evans for the question. So today at 1600 you will be able to go to the army publishing directorate to download the new AR 670-1 and DAPAM 670-1. But I want to preface my statements before I get into what's going to be in there with there's going to be 30 days before that regulation becomes effective. The purpose behind that is to allow for soldiers and leaders to read through the regulation, provide an understanding to make sure that their commands and soldiers are aware of the policy changes that will be made. And then it gives the organization 30 days to get within compliance of the new guidance that will be within the regulation. So some of the big changes that you will see in there as you know we're now wearing the Army Green Service uniform. So some guidance that we've been working on since June of 2019 will finally be published for you to be able to read and enforce within your organizations. Another big change that you will see is the soldier sleeve insignia for former wartime service formerly or normally called the combat patch. The name has now changed to the soldier sleeve insignia for military operations and hostile conditions. And one of the big rationales behind that change was for us to allow commanders more flexibility and efficiency in the process for recognizing soldiers who are engaged in combat operations that can be recognized with a combat patch. Some other things that we're also going to add is we created an insignia for the senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So things like that, big ticket items, you will see those items in the publication of the AR 670-1. Great. And in addition to that, Sergeant Major Clark, we are also authorizing more options for nursing mothers combined with the temporary promotion policy that we unveiled just a few months ago. Really excited to see these changes for our Army moms. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So what we will now authorize is for soldiers who are breastfeeding to be able to wear a specialized shirt under their Army combat uniform that allows for them to breastfeed. They will also be authorized to remove their Army combat uniform coat. Or if they are in ASU's dress mesh uniform or the Army green service uniform, they can remove the top in order to breastfeed their children if they need to do so. Great. Thank you. You mentioned that there was a panel that had convened, and so I want to just learn more about this panel and understand that. So Sergeant Major Sanders, that was kind of one of your main tasks in this entire process. So can you help us just understand what that process looks like, how we developed these recommendations, how they were given to the panel, and just really the entire process so we can understand how all this kind of came to be? Roger. So I will tell you, initially when the SMA gave me this guidance, I thought it was an impossible task of how to make this significant change for the Army. How do I figure this out? So the SMA, he gave some direction of utilizing our MAGCOM CSMs to get a lot of representation, a very diverse representation from throughout our force, that being force comm, trade-out, use of SOC, use of reckon, and a myriad of other elements that are out there, as well as grabbing SMA experts from Walter Reed, Officer of the Surgeon General, and even MAGCOM. So what we were able to do, there were some recommendations that had been receiving from the field for over the past six months to a year, and what I was able to do was provide these recommendations to the panel members that were given to us from these major commands, as well as give to the subject matter experts, and what they were able to do is really explore, deep dive, really look at how can we get after these and make the appropriate modifications if necessary, really just to sum it up a little bit. Okay, and then SMA, those recommendations were consolidated and provided to you. Can you speak to what kind of happened after that? I do want to back up about the panel and how important that was. What we didn't want to do is take recommendations throughout the Army and just give it to, you know, I'd say the more senior folks in the Army and look at it because we look at it differently. So it was really important for me and for all of us to have people on the panel that were somebody, you know, I'm a little over 50, not much, but to have, you know, younger soldiers to say, here's our recommendation. So we had 24-year-olds all the way to 55 on that panel and that was extremely important. But once the panel made those recommendations, then they brought them. We had the Assistant Secretary of Manpower and Reserves, one of his deputies, Mr. Williams, sit on that chair and they said, here's the recommendations. Here's how the panel voted and we accepted all the recommendations. I didn't go in and go, nope, don't want that, don't want this. I trusted that the panel had the appropriate information. We brought in the appropriate, you know, experts to explain why these things were important and we had soldiers on the panel. So when they brought them to us, it was fairly easy for me to go. I trusted that the panel had the right ideas and I just accepted what they had taken to me. Do you want to add some? Sure. I'll add to what the SMA is saying. Just as leading up to this event, I saw a lot of questions on social media about, you know, who's making the decisions for this panel. And just to kind of add to what the SMA was saying, there was representation from operations, operational support, and forced sustainment to even include, you know, females who were in combat arms, MOSs to really speak to their experiences and how some of these changes will impact their ability to perform their job. But most importantly, some of the points that they were driving home is to feel inclusive with their squad, the individuals that they're serving and training with. And I will tell you, those individuals who were handpicked by their leaders to come in and provide that information was really critical in helping the panel understand the decisions and how important they were going to make. And the SMA mentioned two-star generals all the way down to sergeants. And they wore civilian clothes so that every person in there didn't have to worry about the rank of the other individual. Every person had an equal voice to voice their concern on each topic that was presented to them. Thank you. Thank you for those comments. So the first change we're going to announce today is the earrings. SMA, let's hear about it. Let's hear about it. Yeah. There we go. You know, it was really another reason why I keep going back to the panelists. Another reason is, you know, I'm just going to be honest. If you'd asked me before a panel, I'd said, no, why would we need earrings? We didn't have them. And that's why I mean, I trusted the panel. I had a good deliberation. And they brought and said, hey, we want earrings. And I said, well, I trust the panel. And the panel says this is their recommendation. And they voted and everybody had an equal vote. We're not going to talk specifically on, you know, how the votes came out. But they, the majority ruled and this is one of those things. And our soldiers said, hey, we're going to wear earrings. Yeah, we wanted to do this. We're not going to do it in combat operations. But if you want to put some earrings on, I think there'll be more guidance to come out. But when we even had the deliberation about how we're going to implement this, you know, is the helmet on or is it off? If the helmet's on, you may take the earrings out. But I think this is really good for Army. And if you want to wear earrings in combat uniform, wear the earrings. Now, I know we're all excited about the earrings. I am especially, but we're not going to move to it yet. We're going to wait till the Allerite come out. Right? Sir Major Clark and Sir Major Sanders? Yeah. Okay. Let me just drive it home again. Somebody has to right now put it in their head. In their head. In my, Sergeant Alvarez, in my office, she's like, sir, major. So, yeah, I think that still applies. Thanks. Yes. 30 days from now, 670-1 comes into effect. And then an Allerac will follow after that, authorizing the wear of earrings.  That's very key. Yeah. It's a very important note that the grooming standards are separate from AR 670-1. And so if we could, Sir Major Clark, just explain why those two things were separated. Absolutely. So one, to make sure that we don't cause confusion. As mentioned, we've been working with the changes for 670-1 since June of 2019. And so the process for publishing a regulation, it's a very deliberate process and it's that way for a reason, but it takes time. So as the regulation is going through that process, decisions are still being made on the wearing appearance of the uniform. And in order to insert any of those decisions in there, we would have to start the process all over for that regulation. So to avoid delaying that regulation any further, we have to wait for it to be published before we can release any additional guidance. If we were to release an Allerac for grooming standards prior to the regulation coming out, what would happen is once the regulation is published, it would then supersede the Allerac. And then you would lose your ability to wear your earrings. So we have to be very deliberate and strategic in how we roll the information out to ensure that we don't have basic policy fratricide. All right, we've got our first question from Facebook. So that didn't take very long. So Sir Major Sanders, I'll give this to you. Can you explain the restrictions on the earring first? And then the second one, was there any discussion? Is this a gender-neutral standard? Can you just discuss the man versus woman as it related to earrings? Let me sound bad with a man versus woman. So I'll definitely start with the other guidance. So as far as the guidance right now for the Army Service Uniform for the dimensions of the earring, it's still the same for the Army Combat Uniform. The only difference is female soldiers will not wear pearl earrings in the Army Combat Uniform. You can still wear pearl in the Service and Dress Uniform, but not the Army Combat Uniform. And you will not wear earrings in a tactical training setting or a combat deployment. As far as gender-neutral, that's a negative at this point. Right now it's strictly for female soldiers. Can't say what happened in the future, but for now it's for female soldiers. Are we ready to move on to the next one? It's by me to kind of add some of the why behind. So as we discussed, there were several medical professionals brought in to brief the panel on different things.  And I will tell you, learned quite a bit from those individuals on how certain policies that we had in place impacted female soldiers. So as we are trying to get our arms around the corrosives in the Army, things like suicide and sharp, we've learned some different things that may impact female soldiers in reference to being a female in a masculine Army.  And as we started looking into those things, we realized that the need to feel as a female and be a soldier at the same time earrings kind of helped bridge the gap in soldiers who want to serve and be soldiers but also want to feel like a female at the same time. So that was very educational to us and how some of that can impact individuals who may be feeling depressed because they don't feel like a female. That played a very large part in helping educate the panel when they made their decisions. All right, we do have a lot of topics, so we'll keep the conversation moving as it pertains to women and women who are serving our country and the ways that we're becoming more inclusive. One of the things that came up was minimum hair length. We saw this as we opened up Ranger School to women and seeing, you know, if they didn't make it through while they were leaving Ranger School and now they were out of regs. So let's do Sergeant Major Sanders. I'm sorry, no, Sergeant Major Clark, back to you to discuss the minimum hair length for women. Absolutely, I'll touch on this and I'll also let Sergeant Major Sanders jump on this. So what we found is we implemented policies such as Soldier 2020, which is basically where we begin to bring females into combat arm MOSs. As female soldiers were going through certain training such as Ranger School and decided to shave their head again to be more inclusive with their peers that they were training with, technically they were out of regulation during that timeframe in which they were doing it. And so we obviously saw that there was a contradiction between what we had in place and really where the army is going. And there really was no rationale on setting a set minimum length for the female hair. So the change in the regulation will now allow females to not have a minimum length requirement for their hairstyle. I'll jump on. You know, when you go through Ranger School, and I'm sure maybe a little different than when I went, I don't know, 1990. But, you know, that was one of the things, you know, be no hair, be no child, be no sleep. So I happened to be in Bravo Company and that was just one of their models.  So it is really important to be inclusive, to be a part of that team. And we shouldn't, you know, punish anybody who says, hey, that's a standard. And why do we have that standard? That was the whole joys of looking into this, is that we had an opportunity to go, is that something we need to do or why are we doing that? And, you know, another thing too, if you look on this slide too, the female soldier down there with her children, she was actually one of the first women to graduate from within West Virginia Army National Guard. And she was one of the ones who brought this topic and, you know, something for us to explore. And at first we looked at it from the realm of, you know, special forces selection, you know, range of school, now that our female soldiers are breaking barriers, but we wanted to take it further. You know, should we just only be for school? It should be for women's identity overall. It's a woman's choice to have hair or not. And that's something we really wanted to get after as well. Thank you. Thank you for those comments. So the next changer we're going to discuss is ponytails. I know there's been changes to the ponytails' hair length and it not having to be encapsulated for a certain length. So let me just say, Andrews, can you expound on that? For the short ponytail? Yes. Correct. So yeah, the short ponytail, this has been a one that's been up for debate. Like how can you force something out of nothing? You know, if you don't have the texture or length of hair to form a bun, what do you do?  So this was one of those ones that the panel really looked at and said it just makes sense. Why not? I mean, as long as it's, you know, professional and appearance and it's neat and well-groomed, why not?  And from the medical perspective that the dermatologists really put right now, soldiers who are forcing hair to go into a bun is really pulling on the hair, causing hair loss, alopecia. And what we want to do, along with diversity and inclusion, but from the medical health and wellness aspect, is how do we make sure we keep our soldiers healthy? How do we go opposite of hair loss? So the best way to do that is to look at an option. And this is our option right here. Now, SMA, we saw a lot on your social media, especially over the Block Leave. This topic is very emotionally charged for a lot of people. So what, you know, what kind of went into, what were some of the things that you were hearing and your thoughts on this topic?  You didn't see it out there, but there were people in here clapping for this. So, you know, in what he's saying to me, how do I go from, if I want, you know, if I want to go from medium to long hair, how do I do that? How do I, and then, you know, why do I have to have my hair in a bun? So, and how do I do that? Sometimes the texture of my hair won't allow me to do that. So why wouldn't we have a, you know, a policy that it is a little bit more creative based off the texture of my hair?  So I think this is really good for the irony. All right. We said short ponytails. How about long ponytails? What do we, what did the panel come back with on, on Long Point? First, what did the panel say originally, and then as we came back to that, we'll go SMA to discuss how that evolved. Roger. So initially, you know, the recommendation was to have long ponytails for female soldiers, not the guys, for female soldiers in all uniforms. And I was strictly a no, like, hey, keep it in Army physical fitness uniform only. But after some talking, you know, some more recommendations were brought up and this is why there was a benefit of having a very diverse, you know, panel from the combat arts perspective as well. And just soldiers in general.  And what we looked at was, you know, making this a yes under certain conditions. And some of those conditions are, you know, conducting physical training in the Army combat uniform, utility uniforms.  And for me, I thought this is where it really, you know, it's part about readiness and everybody that's ever shot their rifle.  So, and it's, you know, it's males and females.  So to me, it may, you know, it would help our readiness to undo that. And then how do you, how would you wear your helmet if you're an aviator when that thing goes all the way over if you had long hair? It's just, it's impossible. If you had it in a bun, it just doesn't work. So we just made our, you know, policy a line with that. We're not going to have, everybody's going to have a long ponytail if you have long enough hair and you're going to put it in a bun. But if you're on the range or somewhere like that and you need to be more effective and more ready as a soldier, let's do it. So that's why we fully supported this one. Great. And I want to stay with hair. So Sergeant Major Clark, let's discuss. One of the regulations was about different hairstyles and only being allowed to have one hairstyle on the head. Can you talk about the discussion that was had and the decision that we made on that topic? Yes. So for under the previous guidance, you were only authorized to wear one hairstyle. But as we, if we probably go back and look at some soldiers that we've all had at some point in time, we probably realized that they probably had multiple hairstyles at once, whether they had locks and then had it pulled into a bun or into a braid or in a case and it still presented a professional look and it didn't interrupt good order and discipline of the soldier. So the panel took a look at this and as you can see some of the imagery that is being broadcast and as you look, these soldiers have multiple hairstyles and it doesn't interfere with their ability to properly wear their headgear. They still have a professional appearance. There was no reason not to go with the recommendations of the panel to allow the multiple hairstyles in uniform. Now, Sergeant Evans, if you could just kind of explain for the group just some of the different things, the options that women now have from your own experience dealing with this issue. Sure. I mean you can have braids and put it in a bun. You can do a braid to the side if you have shorter hair to the front or to the back. So you can wear multiple hairstyles at once and it does make it easier when trying to adhere to the standard and being able to give you more options, especially if you have longer hair. It just gives you more options to adhere to the standard. So I think that was a win for us. So Sergeant Major Clark, what can you tell us about the new changes to makeup and nails? All right. So with fingernail polish, the soldiers will be able to, female soldiers will be able to wear fingernail polish as long as the colors are not extreme or eccentric and presents a professional appearance. And I'll allow Sergeant Major Sanders to kind of add a little bit more to that. Yes. This was a good one too. And this is one of those ones we made in gender neutral in a sense. We authorized male soldiers to wear a clear nail polish. And just to kind of jump a little bit more on what Sergeant Major Clark said it, you just got to make sure when it comes to that professional and we say these extreme colors, that's not your yellows, your blues, your purples. Those are definitely the unprofessional extreme colors that we don't want. And as we come out with the alirac, we'll not necessarily tell you what color you can wear, but we'll put it in the frame of the category of acceptable colors that represent professionalism. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. Next topic we want to get to is on highlights. Who wants to talk about highlights? So I guess I'll take that one. I want to talk about it. My highlights, this is it. I'm just happy I have hair. Roger, that's always a good thing. Always a good thing. So right now in the regulation, hair dyes are already authorized, but we want to take this further. Hey, female soldiers, even male soldiers, they want to have an opportunity to jazz it up a little bit. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's part of your identity. And in some people like myself, you want to hide the grays. I don't hide them. I let you see them. But some want to maybe hide the gray or someone to have the natural appearance. And we really talked a little bit about what is a natural color. And that natural color is not your natural color. It's a natural color that can be worn for your highlights as a uniform blend of color. So this was one we really looked at from the psychological realm of how do we increase productivity. And when you do that, it's really building upon the identity of the soldier. And that's something we really looked at in the recommendation of highlights. You mentioned yourself. So are you implying that this highlight standard is gender-neutral? It is gender-neutral. So men and women both are authorized a uniform blend of a natural color, not their natural color. Roger. When they brought this to me, part of it was I had someone say, well, I've probably been wearing highlights. I just didn't know that was not allowed. So part of this was what's actually already out there that maybe not everybody understood what the standards were in the beginning and then that's why that whole panel and how we brought experts in and go, this is a highlight. And I wasn't in the panel. I wasn't on the panel. But that's what they explained to me. It was like, here's what this is and this is why the panel recommended that. And a lot of times, some of our soldiers were getting highlights and maybe didn't even know that that was part of the regulation and the leaders didn't know that's a different issue. But just kind of match what we're already doing for our soldiers and say this is allowed. All right, gentlemen. A lot of questions coming in. Again, if you have questions here in the room, you're welcome to stand up and come to the microphone. That signals to us that we have a question here in the room. But from Facebook, we've discussed a lot about women's hair and the different options that they have. How about men's hair and specifically when we start looking at things like twists and locks and hard parts, afros, things like that, were there any discussion on options that men have? On the panel, there weren't any at this time. We just really just kind of stuck with the recommendations. The panel didn't delve off into that realm. But they did want to ensure that female soldiers that have a low cut can have it tapered and have the hard part. That current standard is in the regulation as it stands right now. If having a part where your hair would normally part or if your hair doesn't part naturally, being able to put that hard part. But at this time, no conversation was had during the panel. Right. So we know that words matter, right? And that's something that was addressed in the new standard. So women versus female or offensive words like mohawk, foo manchu, dreadlock. What were some of the conversations, SMA, if you wouldn't mind discussing about some of those terms that maybe are antiquated or offensive in today's culture? This goes back to really a larger thing, diversity, inclusion and look at all our rakes and not just 670-1. Is our verbiage right? Are we being offensive and we don't even know that that has a negative connotation over time? And there were some things. Why would we say mohawk? Why would we say foo manchu? Why would we say that? So just take that language out and say, is it in good order and discipline for our soldiers? And I think that's appropriate. And this is part of a bigger where we look at. Are those microaggressions, those things that we were saying that maybe we didn't know were offensive, that we need to be aware of that? So I think this is appropriate. Just stick to, these are the standards, this is what we're doing, and kind of get some of that language appropriate. Roger. And on top of those words, eccentric and fattish are normally used as weaponized wording. There was one comment that psychologists really brought up during the panel, that those words are often used for certain demographic. And what we want to do is we want to utilize our lexicon and our vocabulary. There's many more words in a dictionary that we can use to describe and replace those words. So eccentric and fattish are definitely those two words we're going to try to get rid of as well as, you know, clarify, you know, what do we mean by professional appearance? That is such a, you know, a subjective term. It's just kind of thrown out there, you know, professional appearance. We want to define by, you know, a well-clean grooming appearance. And so that's what we're planning to get after, too, as we remove and replace the appropriate wording. And Sir Major Sanders, the panel did decide on updating imagery for the AR and the DAPM. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how it's going to illustrate the new changes? Roger. So as you all know, in the current regulation, that's just some outdated, I can't even think of the time frame of when that artwork was done. There were artists who did the artwork at that time, but, you know, we're changing. It's not enough to equip leaders. It's not enough to equip us on what right looks like and what wrong looks like. And I think, you know, with the generation we are now, we want more information and we deserve more information. So the intent behind updating the imagery, more examples, and we actually, you know, we're conducting round two of our photo shoot tomorrow to help get after, you know, giving more imagery, more examples. It really just update, bring it up to the times as an evolving thing as revisions keep going. We can keep updating this thing to be more of a current reflection of what we're talking about in regard to guidance and army policy. Great. Sir Major Clark, any other thoughts on the changes? What kind of sticks out to you? What do you see as maybe the biggest shift culturally for our army? So some additional changes that will come out in further guidance that will not be in 670-1, but again will be published in a separate alirac message is diacritical name tags in the Army Service Uniform.   And so to allow those to be worn on the Army Service Uniform with your nameplate I think is a big part of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts with the soldiers. All right. Once again I'll remind you we are trying to take as many questions as we can online. We're pulling those in right now. Again if you have any questions here in the room you're welcome to stand up. SMA, I guess I'll ask you the same question as what we've discussed today. What were some of the things that really stuck out to you? Well I think the biggest one for me is the earrings and the short ponytail and the long ponytail. It's really progressive on how soldiers can identify with who they are and I think that's what I really learned in this last year is and I would say at fault on this. I used to say we're all soldiers I just see green but I learned even throughout myself is that you don't see me as a soldier. So that's some of those things we're trying to understand is not only are you a soldier but there's other pieces of you that are critical that we need to understand as an army and that's what's important about so that's why I'm so excited about these greenery standards is that some of this is I need to do better as a person to see the people around me to identify that they may identify that I don't understand but we're acknowledging that that we're going to look at that and that's why some of those things that the three I just mentioned are really important to us. Okay we have another question in from the Facebook live just a little bit of clarification on the ponytail is it just a free flowing or is a braid going to be allowed Sergeant Major Sanders do you want to? For the long ponytail correct. Roger for the braid of the ponytail so at long single braid it will be authorized when they are wearing the long ponytail. Correct. Okay good deal. Next question it looks like a lot of these recommendations are significantly geared toward women and specifically women of color were there any male standards and I kind of think I know what you're getting at on this one but you know it does seem like a lot of these new changes are geared toward primarily women of color can we just elaborate and explain kind of why this panel specifically focused on those issues? Sergeant Major Clark. So I'll start on a piece of this so again as the SMA kind of laid out earlier these were the topics that were presented to us there is a process that we have where if you have concerns or issues you can send them to the Uniform Policy Office for consideration to be looked at. So as we looked at these specific ones specifically the short ponytails part of the issues as the dermatologist briefed to the panel was it created alopecia and one third of African-American females were impacted by that alopecia but it also impacted Asian soldiers Latino soldiers other demographics as well so it wasn't geared toward just only African-American women it was geared toward just women in general they broke down the hairstyles in a high medium and low risk to the soldier that basically gave them alopecia and what we found was for soldiers who were transitioning as we mentioned earlier from a short hairstyle to a long hairstyle trying to force their short hair into a bun it put them in the high risk so that was one of the reasons why we made that change it wasn't necessary it just happened to impact one third of African-Americans and of course other minority demographics so it just kind of happened to work out that way based on what the the problem said that was presented to the panel but it it wasn't intentionally designed to go look just for specific demographics to try to improve with. Alright SMA so you know what's coming you know it was inevitable every man in the army wants to know are we getting the beard no okay no we're not that's not one of those things we looked at and I am a man in the army so I may disagree that every man in the army wants a beard so no we're not looking at it there's already an exception to policy for those that have issues with shaving there's already a profile that you can get and you can have a beard there's also religious accommodations and I'll let Sergeant Clark or Sergeant Sanders jump in if I miss anything but there is way but we had not reviewed it and it was not on the docket so right now you will not have a beard I think that you know this is a perfect example of what you talk about when we say you can have policy but it needs leadership the policy does have authorizations for beards and yet still we hear stories all the time of soldiers who feel like they still have to shave and they're forced into shaving even though they have those medical or religious exemptions and to the other side of this you know for the leaders if your soldiers have a valid exception to policy there should be that's a valid exception to policy we have to be acceptance again just because it doesn't look like you or act like you doesn't mean it's right or wrong that's the whole point of being inclusive so if there is an exception to policy to have a beard there should be no leader out there telling a soldier to shave we have to do better than that I'm getting a note it looks like about a third of our facebook live audience dropped off they said we're we're done yes and where the famous quote was if I can't have a beard I'm just going to get out of the army so I don't know we have a great transition program please contact your soldier for life representative and I ask everybody to use it I still think we have the greatest army in the world and we have some great policies and we're constantly looking at how we can get better so yeah why now why is this in 2021 we've had gender integrated units for years we've had desegregated units for decades why are we just now looking at some of these policies that are affecting and becoming more inclusive so I will tell you it may appear like just now but the truth is we've been looking at these for quite some time some of you may or may not be aware of the army people strategy which is approaching its one year university which gets after how we acquire develop employ and retain our soldiers and then those four lines of effort we mesh in diversity equity and inclusion so we've been going through all of the regulations to figure out how can we improve the standards and policies that we have that they are fair and equitable for all soldiers and so that we can obviously get the best talent in the army so if you just take a look at other things like things that we just recently did with temporary promotions that gets after disadvantaged individuals so and there's more coming so this is just we're just getting started with all the different changes to make the army better for you the chief, the SMA the secretary are all very adamant about people first and we are trying to show you the action that is being put behind that mantra of putting you as the soldier first through policy and just to caveat and then I just I've been in the army I think sometimes longer than dirt but our army has changed and it's going to continuously change I was on the air panel when I was a division star major I set through the full three days and I had all the experts come in and explain to me about here and we did that in 2015 we didn't have the pony if you went ten years ago there was no ponytails in physical fitness or anywhere and we made that change and now we've got another change so change is just how the army runs and I know some people don't really like that because change is hard and you get set to what we used to do that may not be what we're going to use in the future so these changes I'd say are just part of the normal progression of the military and how we're trying to be more inclusive and why not people say well why now and I'd say well why not so when you see something that you would ask for or just send it to Sergeant Major Clark use his email right there but send it to us and we'll take a look at it I really trust that our leaders now we don't look at everything but we do over time we'll look at it and we're going to review it again it's going to change three years from now or two years from now there's going to be something else we didn't get that right the changes is here we had enough people bringing that forward we looked at it we're going to make those changes but there'll be more changes in the future okay from Facebook Ali Press caught us was there any discussion on 600-9 revisions as part of inclusivity or just any discussion within this panel and maybe any other discussion happening no so this was a grooming standards panel so there was no discussions about 600-9 the only study that we currently have on it's called the female elite warrior they're doing that up at Natick and they have all the equipment to do the test to say and they brought in some of those females that went through rangers school the one female that graduated through special forces and look at their body style and do we have that correctly I've already asked TreyDoc to go out and see when exactly the last time we studied this and is it time to do another study I've had enough people ask me and every time I meet even if it is a grooming standards forum to ask me about it that I've asked TreyDoc to go back and do a review and say when was the last time we actually reviewed the standards do we have that correct so I've got that out it will take us some time to review that but I've asked TreyDoc to help me out with it alright trying to sift through all the facial hair questions I think we have really hit that one home someone is taking the opportunity here this is Chief Huddleston from the 82nd he's washing with his squad they wanted to take this opportunity and ask if there were any updates coming to the ACFT I know it's not the main topic of this but something that's very on a lot of people's minds so while we have the opportunity would you like to talk about that sure yeah ACFT we have one change that we haven't rolled out yet we're just going to make sure that senior leaders have looked at that we're calling it 3.0 3.0 and we'll get I'm not going to talk about the specifics so we make sure that we are moving in the right direction so there is version 3 that we're coming out with and I'm really excited about that proposal and most people would go back and look at the National Defense Authorization Act and say how has that affected the current ACFT and where it says hey we have to do an independent review we've already started the independent review we got the ideas coming I believe they're going to meet March and the beginning of the summer and then the end of the summer and then the final review is going to be in December so right now with the changes of Army Combat Fitness Test 3.0 and the independent review we still believe we're on track for the ACFT I'm sorry the ACFT in March of 22 so we still have some time to go I still say fitness account so and I'd ask you all to stay on track it's a good test we're going to continue to work real hard to get this right and take it take the test yes please keep up with your physical fitness and if you went in and out take the Army Combat Fitness Test and over time I think you'll do better it's really good for your total fitness so the next question is for Sergeant Major Clark and Sergeant Major Sanders what is how can soldiers make recommendations for changes to AR 670-1 and how will those changes be taken into consideration like future changes yes so there's multiple ways DA Form 2028 is the actual official form to submit to my office directly to myself and Master Sergeant Quintana Mitchell we'll definitely take those into consideration I would ask that you make sure this is vetted through your command team because it could be something as simple as a grammatical change inside policy and regulation but there are bigger items that affect the whole Army and for something of that magnitude it has to go up through the G1 Sergeant Major to the Sergeant Major to see how does this positively affect our Army and that's really just to sum up how something can be as minor or something as major as something that affects the Army how we'll go but if you have any questions I'm easy to find bryan.c.sanders on global just shoot me an e-mail and we'll answer it for you I was brave you know me anyway I'd also say I'm not sure you have to completely vet a recommendation throughout your change of command if you've got something and send it to him and then we the Senior Listing Council meets every quarter every quarter we get together and we come in with recommendations whether that 670-1 grooming standards there's a whole bunch of things we get together and we have experts come brief the Senior Enlisted Council and at that point if we think if the council believes that's that's a valid that's actually how you got the panel so these recommendations were brought to the Senior Enlisted Council we looked at them and said okay if this is really important but what we really didn't want to do is have you know us again because we're more seasoned people in that room we want to get the panel so the Senior Enlisted Council got briefed on these recommendations and then we asked for a panel so anytime you could talk to your Senior Sergeant Majors in your installations across the globe or you can send it straight to him and Sergeant Major Sanders has an obligation to bring it to us we look at it and say do we need to look at it and send those things out for those grooming and that's how you actually got to these recommendations given a number of these recommendations or these new standards are gender specific we had a question about the ending of the transgender ban and allowing transgendered people to come and serve as long as they meet the Army standard I think the answer should be pretty obvious but can we just state out there just how these gender specific standards will impact transgendered soldiers so I would tell you I think you're referencing the guidance that was put out by the Secretary of Defense yesterday so what we as the Army are doing now are taking a look at our policy providing recommendations to the Army Senior Leaders so that we can get a decision on how we are going to support the Secretary of Defense's guidance on supporting transgender so there is more to come and more conversations to be held and then once those decisions are made we are definitely going to notify the field on how we are going to do our part just to be clear it started with the President when he said I'm going to sign the Executive Order but it does take us some time to review the policy I mean we had a policy in 2016 that changed there was another Executive Order that was signed by the President at the time and then we made a change this is again I talked about that change it's been every time I've been in the Army for a long time it's just things changed we were looking at that we'll have to adjust or not and see here's the standard did we get that right and then what that means so we get a little bit of work to do the good news is we've changed several times on this and we had a policy to review it and then publish another policy make sure it aligns with what we're doing today and to be clear the gender specific standards that a soldier will follow will be tied to the gender marker inside the Dears program I'm just going to say right now you know yes but let's make sure we go back and review the policy that we have do we have it right if you were in Dears and that was your gender marker or if you changed at that point that was what we were doing that's still there but again we're going to like any change we're going to review it and say that we have that right so whatever policy we have that is still in effect but that doesn't mean we're not going to look at it we just got new guidance from the Secretary of Defense and the President and it's time to go back okay to the force one more time you know because each year people get out of the Army about 60,000 at the active component about 130,000 every year leave active gardeners every year so again we got the guidance let's review what the policy is and then we'll come back out and say let's review it do we have that correct reeducate the force because that's part of that it's just like this with the grooming standards it's about getting this message out to the force then we say here's what we're going to do and then here's the date that you can enforce the standards and move to this instead of here's what we think and we believe we've got the guidance I would just ask for a little bit of time for us to review that and put that out one more time great we'll do one last question and it's a leadership question so this is from Samantha Webb on Facebook who wants to ask about that phrase what are the standards discretion and really this is kind of a leadership point how do we what guidance do we have for our leaders when we're saying exercise discretion to make sure that they are getting it right more often than not I think specifically for the grooming standards that's I think what Sir Major Clark was trying to say those those graphics maybe I was drawing those I'm not very good now my daughter she's really good so she would have done much better than I am we need to update that that helps us with clarity that does help us with clarity but anytime that you feel that maybe we don't have it right in the commander's discretion there are other levels that's what's great about the Army there's other levels can say hey maybe I disagree with the way I read this so what's great about my Army we're allowed to do that and say hey can we look at this and then you either submit the form or you notify us maybe we don't have that right but I think it's really important on some of the graphics that Sir Major Clark was talking about is to get that out so we can do better with technology that we have today to help us inform so there's not as much commander's discretion when you have a very bland piece of paper and it's blank it's hard because that's where you get well I believe it says this if we can get a better graphic and it'll help us depict that I believe that's where we're going and if you think about it every policy doesn't fit every situation in our Army perfectly otherwise we wouldn't have exceptions to that policy and so there are instances where a commander unit can be in a unique environment where there is a gray area that may come to what the regulation says and so the commander's discretion allows them to be able to make a decision obviously probably consulting legal and things of that nature that is best for that organization and those soldiers in that situation great thank you so much and I want to thank everyone who asked a question would like to thank those of you here in the audience who joined us the slides that you saw today we're going to make sure that we're posting those a lot of material will be coming out through media channels down through the command channels and if I'm not mistaken these will be the AR670-1 will be out for the field to review 1600 today is what we're looking at on Army Publishing Directorate and again keep in mind that these changes don't come into effect until after that grace period is come down so keep an eye out across all the Army social media channels to find more information, more graphics more messages just things to help you as soldiers to know the standard and leaders to set and enforce the standard so Sergeant Major of the Army, Grinston would you like to kind of close this out with any parting thoughts I would just like to say thanks to the Pogue Affairs folks and those that put this together this is really important for Army it's important for us to message this so for those in the audience and those in the the online audience make sure you get this out and say and voice your opinion and say hey what are the things you need to see and then let us know it may not come tomorrow but we will do our best to look at those things that we need to do and I'm really proud of the team for putting this together thank you. Yeah I want to thank Sergeant First Class Evans for co-moderating Thank you for inviting me I appreciate it and thank everyone for watching that concludes our event today we look forward to the comments that are going to come after this the the pitchforks and the torches that are coming to the the Pentagon right now no we'll get through this and so we really appreciate everyone joining us thank you so much thank you have a good day everybody


This study investigated the effect of heat treatment processes on the dry sliding wear resistance of the TC-21T alloy at different levels of normal load and sliding speed. Results showed that specimens subjected to water quenching and aging, WQ-plus aging, under extreme load and speed conditions, 50nm and 3m per second, possessed the poorest wear resistance despite having the highest hardness. Meanwhile, those left in the annealed condition revealed the highest wear resistance despite having much lower hardness than the other conditions. A mathematical polynomial model for wear resistance expressed in wear rate was developed, validated, and used to obtain optimal parameters. This article was authored by Ali Abdelmanin, Ramadan N. Elshar, M. Elshanoui, and others.


We're here at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand and I've got the great pleasure of being in the studio today with Dr. Hamidun Ture, former ITU Secretary-General and now Executive Director of the Smart Africa Alliance. Dr. Ture, thank you very much for being with us today. It's good to be here again. Now, we've put this in here just to give you a little bit of branding here, but I want you to tell us a little bit about the Smart Africa Alliance, what it's all about, and tell us what's its vision. Well, the African continent is decided to move forward using ICT as a tool to meet not only the Millennium Development Goals, but the Sustainable Development Goals as well. And the creation of Smart Africa is a perfect timing because when we're reaching one billion citizens in Africa, we want them not to be just simple consumers, we want them to be producers. If we want them to be connected, we will need millions of handsets of millions of tablets, of smartphones, of computers, and we have to develop handsets of thousands of applications and we want Africa to be part and parcel of the production chain of all of these. The Smart Africa has been created based on the Smart Africa Manifesto that is putting the private sector first. The partnership with the private sector will be key. After putting the right policy in the regulatory environment, the private sector has to come and invest. And we have a number of private companies that are now members of the alliance, in addition to the governments, and therefore we hope to build a much greater alliance to make sure that ICT is on the top of the agenda of every nation. Now every country joining the alliance has a flagship program that it develops, therefore we don't want to leave anybody behind. We want to make sure that everyone is contributing to the best of their capabilities, and then they're sharing back the experience with other countries so that we all go fast together. So the organization is at its beginning, but there is a real momentum. I believe that the timing was simply perfect. In terms of collaboration within Smart Africa, what are the challenges and what are the benefits? Some of the key challenges are first to put the ICT policy framework in place to be able to attract industry, because we know the industry is ready, we know the need is there. There are many countries who believe in it now. And the next challenge after that is to put in place the right capacity building and education programs that will train the people at the right time. What we want to achieve here is job creation. We have a large population of youth, we have over 300 million young people. Most of them are finishing university, and we want to make sure that they're not going to cross the Mediterranean by boats. We want them to stay in Africa and work. Therefore in order to prepare them to be developing applications, services that they can use home and work and produce and really not be attempted by a necessary immigration. We believe that planning gives an opportunity because ICT is a cross cutting industry. It has an impact for agriculture, commerce, transport or smart cities. Whatever part of the industry you take for the development, ICT will have a key role in it. And our young people who believe that they are very innovative is a matter of finding the right opportunity to be given to them so that they can really express themselves, be competitive on the world market as well, and really contribute to the development of the continent. Now, Smart Africa was founded in Rwanda, which has a very active tech, SME and entrepreneur culture. I wanted to ask you what factors do you think have contributed in making it successful and how has government policies supported the SMEs there? Rwanda is probably one of the most forward looking countries in the world, actually, in terms of putting the right policy framework to attract the industry and to attract small and major enterprises. I'll give you an example. When I arrived on January 7 in Kigali, we were creating this company from scratch and it took me less than six hours to be in an office and operational. It takes today three to five hours to create a company in Rwanda. I think that's one of the number one in the world and therefore the credit should be given to the leadership. The President Kagame, who is the chairman of the Board of Smart Africa, is injecting that style in the work of Smart Africa to make sure that we are business oriented. Creating opportunity for young entrepreneurs. There is a small laboratory in Rwanda called KELAB that is an incubator for young entrepreneurs. They say incubator for new applications and new services and it's giving the right opportunity. They are creating a special investment bank to help them. They are finding champions and advocates who would be training them. They are finding companies that will be sponsoring those young people from scratch. I mean, those are types of examples that really need to be encouraged. I'm very pleased that the ITU, the ITU Secretary General Ms. Aho has put the SMEs at the top of his agenda. It's the right approach because more than half of the young people who are employed are employed by SMEs and therefore we need to give them the right opportunity to blossom. There are a few challenges. First, you have to have the right policy and the right environment. Second, the risk-taking culture for SMEs is also a really important factor, especially it's a factor that is a problem in many countries in Africa. Some by nature don't want to take risks because they are afraid of failure and we need to change that mindset. I mean, success comes out of multiple failures and some countries understood that and they are really succeeding. Once you break that barrier of taking risks, therefore you need to then find the right financing model to help support them. Most of the time they don't need a very large investment but any investment comes out of some risk and therefore you need to find that and some countries are putting that in the structure in place for that. If you had to identify a single factor, what would that be? Growth of digital economy is all based on partnership, partnership, government and private sector. I mean, the PPP model is very important, especially when governments are at the stage of takeoff, they need to set the right policy in the regulatory framework. Now once that their private sector has to come in, so the two have to work together and you need to overcome some of the myth around Africa, there's a lot of talk about corruption. There is corruption everywhere in the world, of course you cannot take off with corruption but there are many leaders in the continent who are making sure that they do have a clean environment where people can operate and I'm inviting all the investors to come in and see in those countries where it works, then they can work and also countries will follow. Therefore I think that the opportunity is there and I am very confident that Africa is at the perfect time for its new development using ICT. This fourth industrial revolution will not miss that. I can assure you that there is a confidence, not only the time is ripe because we have one billion citizens, one billion consumers. Now if you put the right regulatory and policy environment there, investment will flow and the message has been clear, come and invest in Africa and make profits out of it. There's nothing wrong with making profits, it's not a crime. And I know when private sector is making profits they will invest and they will not take away the profit, they will reinvest it and make more profits, that's the rules of the game. And we know that you cannot be rich with your own money, you can only be rich with other people's money. So we are inviting everyone to come and work with us in a win-win model so that we can really work together. Now I want to make sure that in the process we'll have a conceived in Africa model, we'll have a Made in Africa concept that will enable us to also be part of the manufacturing chain and the conceptual chain so that our young people be innovative. We're going to help them in ensuring that they have also the right intellectual property rights and training in that model and the protection in that so that they can really start sharing information and still benefit from their discoveries or their inventions and their innovations. Why it's important and what is it of value nowadays to be attending ITU Telecom? Well I'm very happy to see ITU Telecom world growing bigger and bigger every year. It shows the importance of ITU, it shows the importance of industry ITU is dealing with bringing the telecommunications sector, the service providers and also even the over the top players who are now joining forces because there was a long battle between the two communities. Now there's a clear understanding that the two communities need to work together and in a win-win mode and that's really very pleasant. I'm pleased to see it's an opportunity also to see the many ministers and policy makers who come here with industry leaders. Therefore it is a perfect environment to share ideas and strategies on how to move forward, how to develop this industry that is now the key tool for all the sectors of the industry. We're talking about sustainable development goals, it will never happen without ICT and everyone understand that and the partnership, the sharing of our information, ITU is a really deep place to come and share information. Well Dr. Hammerdon, sorry, thank you very much for taking the time to come and talk to us in the studio today, we very much appreciate it and we wish you all the very best in South Africa.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services AWS re-invents annual conference. AWS re-invent 2016, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE Media, I'm theCUBE Miniman with Wikibon and our next guest, James Water, Senior Vice President of Product at Pivotal, also involved in driving a lot of the Cloud Foundry, but not part of Cloud Foundry. Pivotal has been a big supporter of it. James has been a friend in Cloud, a collision guru, friends at SiliconANGLE for years, watching it all play out. We are in the biggest Cloud collision. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again.  It's very real, so great to be here. And the vision was kind of there. We were kind of looking at that original Cloud Foundry crew and by the way, it filled up like a small little ballroom of people, first a meetup and then it became group, but back then it was all the same. Community, open source, and then ultimately SOA like services, call them web services, Amazon web services. So what's different now? I mean, you're in the heat of the battle, through this SVP approach at Pivotal, they're obviously IBM, a big customer of yours, they're a big player in the Cloud, but BlueMix, by the way, Watson's been extremely successful with IBM and others. Seeing a new Cloud formation developing, not Amazon, what's the competitive landscape look like? We were just talking before we came on about this article about Andy Jassy, I think universally deserves respect, unbelievable respect for what he's built with AWS, period. But it's interesting that he kind of went on the offensive and said, and it's personal to me, because he said, look, if you just treat Clouds like compute and infrastructure, then you're not really our right partner for us and we're going to kind of steer people elsewhere. And there's a fundamental belief that I have that multi-Cloud is the future, like there will not be one Cloud that defines the entire phenomena. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how this community here accommodates that future, like where do they go from here? Do they understand that there will be multiple Clouds and play into that, or do they kind of build an enclave and go from there? And we've seen just incredible adoption of both Google Cloud as well as Microsoft Azure. So my read on the market right now is that those are very real phenomena that are not going away. James, so Pivotal, you guys partner across all the environments as you're layer underneath, you're mostly agnostic, whether it's on-prem, using your family type of technology with VMware or IBM, you've got partnerships with Google now, with the Home Depot, you've got Azure you're working with, you're doing Amazon. What do you've seen from your customers though?  And maybe if you want to put 10% of it over here or something, that'd be okay. We understand second sources. What do you see from customers? How do they look at Cloud as a suppliers and who they should use? Yeah, I think that almost no enterprise in the Fortune 2000 really wants to go completely all in on one Cloud. But I certainly think that they don't want to have their next 20 years of legacy be wired into one Cloud. And we came to that same moment in Pivotal, so we're not as big as our enterprise that we sell to yet, but we had gotten to a point where we were spending eight figures a year on AWS and we called up our AWS rep and said, hey, we're not always able to plan our reserved instances purchases, but we're spending it volume. Can you take care of us?  And they told us that we had any concerns to talk to the bucket of sand. Physically told us to pound sand. And we said, okay, that's interesting. And so we actually, you know, Google Cloud approach that said, what about half? And the cool thing is within Cloud Foundry, we not only can run on multiple Clouds, but we were a little bit ahead of the game I believe because we have an open source library called the Bosch CPI that actually integrates directly at an API level into all of those Clouds to abstract them down to exactly what Andy said not to do, like exactly opposite of his words, which was compute, network and storage. And so we were able then to move our entire engineering organization of like 400 engineers to Google Cloud in about a month with that abstraction and save half. I mean, if anything I've learned about the enterprise, I mean, I was, when I was commenting on a thread about my days at HP from 1988 to 97, that was a mini computer generation, but similar dynamics around technology selection. But there was never one vendor that won. The IBM was the last known vendor that actually had full account ownership. That's right. Since the post mainframe, it's never been a one vendor world ever. Even Unix, right? There was three vendors in Unix and certainly x86. You could say the Intel and Red Hat have a pretty good, you know, monopolar kind of organization. Let's talk about that. So let's agree that maybe Jassy's a little bit off suggesting that they want to be the one supplier. Because that won't hold well in my opinion. I'll tell Jassy that next time I ask him on theCUBE next tomorrow, on Thursday, I should say. But to your question around competition and multi-vendor, where's the action right now? Because seeing things like, certainly we've talked in the past, containers, Kubernetes is hot. You now have Google taking a technology approach with virtually no sales force. Azure's got a sales force. IBM's got a sales force. Amazon doesn't really have a sales force per se. Startups want to find a partner. Chaotic environment to say the least. Your thoughts on the landscape vis-a-vis competing and providing a multi-vendor opportunity cloud. Yeah, I would say just start for Pivotal, just from where our grounding is, is we've had, you know, kind of great partnership with our clients around innovation and a cloud-native application. So we've got a framework, spring framework that has this way of developing cloud applications called Spring Boot and Spring Cloud that is just 10 million downloads a month, unbelievable, you know, hot. So in the enterprise space, they're starting there with us, and then we're advising them, you know, hey, if you go with Azure, you're actually going to get a compliment of Azure cloud architecture services. You know, they're going to help you really get going. I mean, Azure's investing 3,500 specialists already to do nothing but, you know, give architecture advice and help people get to cloud. If you go with Google, you've got some of the best machine learning and at-scale compute experts in the world. And I like to say it's kind of a gift to the world that Google took the world's largest infrastructure and let you use it now. Yeah, I'm sure Facebook's going to follow, too. It's going to be a matter of time, in my opinion, Facebook will follow. This is the real tension in the market, which is that, you know, Microsoft really rightfully owns enterprises in a big way. A lot of their architecture has for two decades, more. And Google really was the number one at-scale cloud provider always. They just chose to never offer it to others. So that's what makes this a really dynamic market and why I can't imagine a world where those two players aren't serious, serious concerns, despite the incredible momentum that we have here. Yeah. I got slammed dunked on Twitter by someone who said, you really mentioned Oracle as a cloud player on theCUBE. And Stu and I were talking before we came on camera that they have a database and they own that market. Now they put a cloud, their stuff together. But question, guys, is Oracle, in your opinion, a cloud player or is it just a database that happens to run on the cloud? I would honestly say not yet. I say there's no sign of there being an Oracle cloud yet. I think there's pretty big commitment. I heard they built about a 250-person team up in Seattle, hired the best cloud people they could to get going on that. And I think, you know, when you hear about- So they're late to the game. When you hear Larry talk about, we have innovation now, it's like they're doing bare metal provisioning. But the overhead of containers or VMs is really not a material 40% advantage, like you normally want in product differentiation. It's like two or three percent. So, John, we talked in the opening segment, follow the data, follow the applications.  So that being said, they're moving it to a cloud, but I think it's premature to mention them in the same sentence with the mega cloud guys like Amazon, like Google, like Microsoft. Well, I think to Amazon's credit though, let's talk about what they've done that's really nice. You have services like Elastic Cache, I went to that today, they've done some innovation of how do you make Redis do failover and clustering. The thing they did around SQS and messaging to make sure that, you know, you had scalable messaging. These are cloud patterns for applications that they've invested in. The problem with Oracle is they're kind of like the classic monolith, like which like put everything in one Oracle database and then if you want to do even basic ETL, do that as a stored procedure. So the problem is that their asset is the ultimate and non-cloud patterns. So James, I want to get your thought on something because we look at Amazon and they're like, we're going to build all the services. You're going to use all of our services. That being said, they're really attractive for developers. I mean, I see more hoodies at this show and I'd probably see anywhere other than like DockerCon. You know, so, you know, the serverless group is people are super excited.  The momentum in that space seems phenomenal. So, you know, are they a lock-in or are they great for developers? Can they be both, you know? I think it's to Amazon's credit that they've innovated in kind of more event-driven programming models like Lambda. I think it's great. I think, I don't see a world we want to rewrite every application of that. If you have applications that are programmable and friendly to those kind of event sources, that can be really cool. You know, and we're working in our world to bring function as a service to our platform for the programmers in general. So I think that kind of event-driven programming is part of large distributed systems. So it's to Amazon's credit. I think maybe to their discredit, you know, and I really, I'd love to ask Jassy this, Mr. Jassy. This work they've did with Redis to make it more cluster-friendly and cloud-friendly. Did they open source any of that? I don't think they did, and that's an open source product. And so the question is like, how is Amazon going to behave as part of the community? And you know, if you're betting all in on Amazon, you're kind of betting almost against the open source community over time because the open source community is going to want to run on every cloud. Well, James, and I tell you, it's an area we've actually poked and we've been critical of Amazon for a few years on this. They just hired Adrian Cockroft. He's relatively new here, but you know, we all know him in the open source community. You know, he's got a presentation on Thursday. So, you know, I'm willing to give them a little bit of opportunity to come and say it. He brings up a good point though. He brings up a good point that if you're taking from open source and not giving back. That's it, that Redis, do they do it? There is going to be a backlash at some point because at Amazon scale right now they could just take any successful project that they did not invent and reinvent it or innovate on it and bring it in and basically it puts open source out of business potentially. So a revolt will happen if that happens. Some of the same criticisms have been made of Google over the years. I think Google's been much better the last couple of years because it was always like, oh well what ends up in open source is what Google was using five or 10 years ago. So, you know, now that they seem to be engaging more, they're partnering more. We always knew, I mean, Google was like the number one company built off of open source components and now, you know, they were on it. Yeah, but they were search engines too. When you go into the enterprise it's a little bit different, Dinana. That's like saying Facebook. They have an application called social network. Google had searched.  But no one's going to look at a player and give them crap for taking open source and building a big business.  So the point is, that's the dynamic that is on the table. I mean, a revolt will happen. You know, I think the good news is- What's your vision on that? The good news is that we've had unbelievable success. We'll have, say more, you know, I have next year about it at Tivital right now and we're the fastest growing open source product company, you know, in terms of percentages or maybe raw dollars off our base right now in the world. And, you know, we're kind of the opposite of that vision. We are steadfastly open source. We're steadfastly multi-cloud. So we've really set ourselves up to be, you know, kind of the dark horse against the Amazon thesis of the market. So James, how are things under the new, you know, kind of parent ownership of Dell there? Do you all have Dell laptops now? Michael Dell's stopping by the office a lot. Yeah, well, you know, Michael's been on theCUBE several times and I'll just say that, you know, thank you for watching it. He's been incredibly supportive. And so what's happened now is that his incredible network of people that he knows and that trust him, he's literally gone to them like, you know, Pivotal is like my bet right now. That's the big, that's the big bet we're making. So it's been like a whole second wave of normalization within the market coming where the list of enterprise clients we're working with right now is really incredible. So I think Michael's been, and Dell technology in general has been an incredible boost for us because he sees how well we're positioned in the market with the trends that are going on. What's the roadmap look like for Pivotal?  You got a lot of moving parts. You got some open source in there. You guys have enterprise attraction. The adoption curve is moving fast from on the progress side. Not, I won't even say close to maturity, but accelerating. What's going on with the product? Give us a quick update. It's been a minute to give a Pivotal update. I mean, I think one of the cool things we're doing just to stay on topic on the product is that we've got that open source library, the CPIs, and Google's got six engineers working full time right now making Cloud Foundry best on Google. So they're saying, okay, here's the core of Cloud Foundry and how do we add value? Okay, we make the CPIs the best. So now you get VM provisioning times in 30 seconds. That's unbelievably efficient. Then you say, oh, we're going to write brokers that are open source to get all of the advanced Google data services into your Cloud Foundry application. And so then Microsoft is also stepping up doing similar. So we really have a lot of multi-cloud but with best of cloud kind of product features that are coming right now, which is interesting that I think is great. The other thing that's going on is that Adrian Kockroff, who joined here at Amazon now, he had built a whole set of technologies with Netflix, Netflix OSS. We really are the company that has productized those in the enterprise. So a lot of big banks right now are building their apps on Netflix OSS stacks, things like Eureka, Spring Boot, et cetera. So we're taking banking right now to where Netflix was four years ago, which is actually an incredible fast pace. We're productizing all that on the platform. It's great to see you doing so well. Pivotal, former SiliconANGLE contributor in our early days when we founded. But you're in the action with a lot of customers. I see you flying around the world on Facebook. You're doing a lot of frontline work with customers. I do. When customers ask you, what's your answer when they ask you, James, help me make sense of my cloud decisions. What should I do? I think that they're, thanks, that's a great setup. And yeah, I was on this crazy five-week bender. This is nonstop. So when I have these opinions, I tend to field them very seriously because they kind of earned one flight at a time.  Should I take my legacy as it exists today, put it in some VMs and just stick it in Amazon? Or should I actually look at both the social and technological constructs of those applications as they exist and start to piece that apart into a more transformational view of where I go next? We call all that the cliffed and shift versus the lift and shift versus cloud ready. And what we're seeing is there's incredible benefits to cloud ready. And that's where we're advising people to go because you get to get to a modern CI CD style of practice. I mean, I think the one thing you could lose in a show like this is continuous delivery dev ops. These are really big concerns that are really driving this more than anything. And so just getting to an Amazon data center doesn't make you faster. Like it might make you provision a VM faster, but clients we have found say, oh, I can provision a VM but it still takes me three months to get my application deployed with all the complexity after that. The workload provisioning is still a big issue. It is. It's hard. And what we're really doing well with right now is partnering and how do you build or migrate to cloud ready applications? So that's the hot topic for us and what we're seeing is that people sometimes try, lift and shift and kind of bomb out on it. Whereas there are, you know, clients like Comcast who've gone public with us and said, hey, we had a 85% better developer experience using a platform and cloud apps and a 95% better operating cost. Like those are boardroom level metrics that are really changing our clients. That's awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you again. Any events that people can find you at are pivotal, any events coming up for you guys? Yeah, we got the cloud foundry summit coming up in spring and then we're gonna do our spring one platform in the winter next year. So those are our two big events next year. It'd be great to have you guys there. All right, James Waters, senior vice president of products at Pivotal, really creating the choice, play for the cloud, position, not all in an Amazon is good hedge. James, thanks for sharing. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break.


What I wanted to talk about today is a more practical approach to digital twins, from the perspective of the land surveyor. So again, I take NAC, and we're a little bit about TopoDot. We are an application as a software that is dedicated to realizing the value of point clouds. That's what we do, the extraction from data collection. We're the bridge between data collection to the deliverable, the topography, the digital twin, what that might be. Extract features, extract assets, extract anything from basically mobile LiDAR data, point cloud data, any point clouds that any data that is collected. We're located in Florida, Orlando, Florida. We have offices in Europe, the UAE in China. And we have about 6,500 users now, 750 companies. And we do most of the mobile LiDAR processing, basically transportation processing is done with TopoDot in North America and much more in Europe now. So it's a little bit about us. So we're talking about digital twins.  They know they want a digital twin. I need a digital twin. What digital twin do I need? Nobody knows. So I went back to the beginning, and I talked about this. I said, OK, let's look at the definition because it becomes clear. A digital twin from the Digital Twin Consortium, it's the best definition I could find was it's a virtual representation of real world entities and processes. Synchronized as specified frequency and fidelity. OK. So it can be anything. It's a representation. I like there's a saying from an old British statistician, all models are wrong. Some are useful. If you have that in your mind, you can understand digital twins a little better. So the question is, and this is for the, again, from the perspective of the geospatial technician, the geospatial expert, the geospatial professional, how do you organize your operations to meet this demand? That's a key. That's a question. So basically the question is this. The real digital twin challenge is, how do I synchronize digital twin production frequency with extremely dynamic processes? We typically, our customers work in construction environments in planning and things. And it changes all the time. Anything along a transportation corridor changes. What digital twin do you need? When do you need it? How do you optimize digital twin fidelity? And fidelity is actually, how much do you model? How accurately do you model it? What do you model? You can't just ask for a digital twin, no one knows. And no one digital twin will meet everyone's requirements. And the gentleman here was speaking about digital twins that are nothing like the digital twins we talk about, which are topographies and things. Yet they're both called digital twins. So how do you do this? How do you assure quality control of digital twin production? So how do you know that the digital twin is coming out that someone's going to make extremely, especially in this environment, extremely expensive decisions that digital twin has met requirements? The idea of a single source of truth, who's heard of that? The single source of truth, you go and everyone, every engineer can go to the digital twin. No, I can give a point cloud, I can give a point cloud to five engineers, the same point cloud, they'll measure in it and get five different measurements. And if we're within a meter, I'll be astounded. You have to have another process. How do you optimize a schedule and cost? Digital twin production is not inexpensive. There are people extracting the model, there are people processing the data, there are people doing this. You can't just say I want to model everything into the best fidelity possible so everyone can use it. No one wants to pay for it and it'll never be ready. And it keeps changing. That's the real problems with digital twins. So in TopoDOT, we have a solution. And this solution to meet the digital twin challenge is called TopoShare. Now, let's go back to the TopoDOT model. Now we, again, our fundamental process is how you extract value, how you basically extract digital twin, whatever that might be, from point cloud data, from mobile data, from airborne data, from whatever data you have. So in TopoDOT, we start in the orange is outside of our world. That's where you acquire data. We deal with point clouds. We don't care where it comes from, points or points. Inside of TopoDOT is the green. That's the process. How do you manage the data? How do you assess its quality? How do you extract what you need? And then how do you assess the model that you've extracted, the digital twin that you've extracted? And how do you make sure it meets your requirements and that you can then deliver it? So at this point, we have a tool, TopoShare Basic, inside of TopoDOT that will let you organize your data in the cloud and access it very quickly. And you integrate our quality control process with geospatial operations. And basically, you support whatever the operations may be. So you have a deliverable request. The deliverable request goes to an administrator, the geospatial operations. They say, you need this. This is typically what happens today, in 90%, 80%, 90% of the projects. You access data. In the TopoDOT users, we'll access data like this. They'll find their data, and this will be their interface to their data. They'll click on a particular project. They'll have that at their desktop. They'll select, I need this tile. They'll bring it in. And with this environment, they can share it with 10, 20 processors. They all go to the same place. They all pull it. It's very simple, very straightforward, and it's a file-based transfer and storage, which makes it very inexpensive. Keep in mind, once you leave file-based storage, file-based transfer, it becomes expensive because you use processors and RAM in the cloud. So everything you'll see is file-based. There's a reason for that. And then you extract and deliver your project. And that's what happens all the time. We do all that. Our customers do that every day. However, there's something missing. This is a pointer? No. OK. The supported operations now have no way they don't know anything about the data that's up here. It sits there. Gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes. No one knows. And if someone has a question here, they don't know where this geospatial guy is. He did this six months ago, a year ago. It's needed now in design, engineering, operations, construction, maintenance. So everyone wants to make that data valuable, but no one uses it. And then we see many times this in the supported operations, they just go survey again. They send somebody out and go measure something. It happens all the time. And there's a reason for that, too, because this geospatial operation doesn't necessarily want to hear, hey, can you give me a clearance from a bridge that you did two years ago? It's a lot of work. It's not a happy call. So how do you do this? Well, we created Toposhare Enterprise. Now, Toposhare Enterprise is a web portal. And what that does is just a website that ties this access. So basically, all your supported operations can now see into the data warehouse. They don't have access. They can't change anything, but they can see. We give them the portal. And project data and metadata can flow to them as controlled by the administrator. When they find this data, they can actually go and say, can you give me deliverable requests? I need something from you. I need this product. I need this answer. I need this digital twin of volumes. I need clearances. I need a level one survey topography from this point to this point. So they have access. And you create this ongoing usage of the data with that access. So the question is, so this is digital twins delivered on demand. That's our concept. It's impossible to do a one-truth model. It has to be what you need, when you need, where you need it, at the lowest price and the quickest possible. That's what we're looking for. That's what we're achieving. That's what our customers are doing in the US now. And it's working. In this particular case, there's unlimited access because this sharing is through a URL. You're in just Google Map. You see everything. Everything you see, you look into this. It's a browser interface, any browser. So there's no cost. Give it a URL to 1,000 individuals. Doesn't matter. It's not costing you anything. Now, what does it look like? This is what you look like. You put TopoShare into this access. You might want to see the city of Perry, Foth, where this was laser scanned the entire city. This is what an engineer might have. An engineer can have access to hundreds of projects that you give him access to, all controlled by the administrator. So what we see is, we see here is that we might be able to download the point cloud, but we create rasters in Topo.earlyon and upload them as metadata. So now this comes in in seconds. It's not 500 gig of data that costs maybe five, six euros to take in and wait 20 minutes. It's a raster. An engineer sees what you have. OK, that's a good first step. An engineer sees all the line work. This is road condition on the main road. They wanted that in this city. He can look at all this. This was done in Topo.ar. The process, the quality control process to extract it. The line work is there. There's some interesting. We're not S3, but we can put some text in there and tell you some things. But then there's also images. All the mobile lighter systems have images now. Well, we use those very effectively. You can click here and say, I'd like to see what's there. OK, I see what's out there. And I can also measure because Topo.ar allows you, in the pre-processing stage, to take data and attach it to the image. And then the image you can measure in the image. It's a layer of point cloud data. Now, the interesting thing here, I'm going to say again, well, first, and then right now, this is the work order request. So what our customers are doing now is you click. You can email the project manager in the geospatial department and say, I'm Mr. Engineer. You don't know me. You did this six months. I see you have this data. Can you give me this? And then the geospatial administrator can say, yes, I'll give you what you need, but what requirements do you have? Which is missing in the whole, everyone goes to the truth model. What requirements do you have? Will this data meet those requirements? What do you need? How do you need it extracted? So this is a quality control process. That's what we meant. So the bottom line, again, we just see it as not practical that all data will go to some truth model because it's very difficult to. We spend a lot of time training people how to do this in point clouds. And if it's that easy that you can just give a point cloud, everybody can do it, we're wasting our time. Although we don't. We keep training people, hundreds and thousands of people. So that's our process. Now, the other question might ask, well, and this is typical. This is one of our customers who we let you look at, create your own page. And this was about five, six months ago. So they had about 500 projects now. They have 700 projects. They can access any one of their projects. They can find an intersection, a point cloud, in their environment within a minute from over 600, I don't think, now it's maybe 750 projects, they said. They said even the interaction with engineers and their clients is excellent because their clients can see this also. But they said just the fact they can find this data so quickly is worth every penny because it's sitting on before, it's sitting on SharePoint drives, it's sitting on things. And if I have to find one bridge, it can take three hours. Now it takes a minute. And it's there on their desktop. This is all available. Now, someone might ask, everyone knows they've seen the immersive viewers. We like the immersive viewers. We think they're cool. The immersive viewers are, let me say some names, Point Terra, what else, UGrid. Well, even RGIS is not immersive viewers. Actually, it's a GIS database. But the bottom line is, how did this all fit in? Are we trying to displace this? No, we're different. We're organizing your data inexpensively. We basically support all of these. Because the reason is, and the main reason is, we meet these requirements. We don't compete with them, but this is what TopoShare, the TopoDot process, accomplishes. Comprehensive data governance, what that data looks like, what its features are. Supporting digital twin production, yes. You can't do that with an immersive viewer. You don't know where that data came from. It's laid on top of each other. You don't know anything about it. We always go back to the original provenance of the project data. Where did it come? What was its accuracy? What I extract from this? What can I sign off? Because the geospatial expert has to sign off and say, this is what I'm saying. This is the volume. I will sign this off and say, this is the volume. So the engineer can say, OK, here's the contract to move this much material. This has to be done. This is necessary if you're going to have a quality control process. Fast and efficient access to the original product data. OK, I talked about that. And then all of this digital twin production is now under geospatial operations from the extent that you use the point cloud, raw point cloud image data that's acquired with mobile lighter. You're in control. You organize that. Someone else may make a simulation. You might help work with someone else to make another type of digital twin. But the geospatial excerpt will be the start of all digital twins because we have the spatial data, and it starts with us. OK, implement execute at low cost. Yes, point cloud apps, not so much. They're expensive if anybody's priced them out. And then the most immersive viewing experience? No, it's not immersive. It doesn't panoramas and everything you want to see. And yes, and that's useful. But again, when you look at the price, what we're proposing in the way we do it is that it's 150 times less expensive than immersive viewing solution. In this particular application, we're showing you just one mile, so about 1 and 1.5 kilometers of data is 10 gig. In an immersive viewer tickable price, I looked around. I don't want to concede it's just a different technology, but all this streaming and storage and accessing a live interaction, it's $500 to upload that. In our solution, it's zero. You upload to your account in your Amazon Resort cloud. You upload that project. Storage price is $3 per year for that. I'm not sure how it works there. There's a locate data 2000, measure 2000. I don't understand it quite. It's a little complicated. But the TopaShare site visit, when you go into TopaShare, it's about $0.05 to look at raster data, look at things. And you can give them access to the data. So if you want to give them access data, you want to download it. That entire project can be downloaded on a desktop for $0.80. This is scalable. You can put, as I showed you, our customer 700 projects. It's not costing any money. But how does this fit in with the immersive viewers? Well, it fits in very well. You have this process, and you say, just feed it. If someone, you organize your data like this, the administrator, if the supporting operations say, I want to look at 10 kilometers of data along this transmission, and I want an immersive viewer to measure, you say, OK, where do you want it? Here's how much it costs, probably $4,000 or $5,000 a year, viewers a year. OK, good. If you need it, great. And when you're done, you stop. You feed it with the original data, and you make sure they get the data they need, where they need it, in this immersive viewer. We think this will work. We're seeing it work now. It's taking a while for the market to grow. But we're seeing now it's expanding. In the US, because they're starting to understand the usage of just this approach. And it's comprehensive. So you get the digital twin, where and when you need it.