We're at the Pyramids of Meroe, the graves of the kings and of the queens of Meroe in northern Sudan along the River Nile. An empire which stretched from here in Sudan all the way to Jerusalem to the southern Lebanon where the 25th dynasty of the pharaohs was contesting the world with the Syrians. So we're in a very very historic place in a very symbolic place as well for this ancient civilization of Sudan. What's not obvious is the diversity of the people first of all but also the diversity of the landscapes from a basically tropical full of water south to a desert. This is one thing. The other thing is also the depth of history. It's easy to hear that yes there are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt but you really have to ask people and to read up in order to understand if you're not a specialist of this history in order to understand what this actually represents here. And it's not just a place we are here now at. Simply one of the great civilizations of this world which has conquered and defended and conquered again and lost and conquered again big swaths of the antique world and was measured itself against the other big civilizations at the time and somehow there is no way this cannot have an impact until today and I think that's part of what you feel simply as you walk around but you need to dig a little bit or to travel a little bit to places with hardly ever anybody comes to like the one we are here the heart of an ancient super king. In Sudan you can walk in Khartoum night you can sit down anywhere drink coffee or a tea and nobody will bother not because they ignore you or they disrespect you but they don't bother you're just you're just part of being there and that's fine for everybody. It's this incredibly generous open-hearted atmosphere of people who are just incredibly nice. I have not seen that anywhere else and it's something I personally have the impression nobody knows who has not been to Sudan. You really have to be here to understand what it means to encounter people who are so at ease with themselves that they can be so generous with everybody else. It's fascinating it's absolutely fascinating. We have seen over recent decades a brutal civil war in the south which has led to the split up of the country in two then everybody is aware of Darfur with untold suffering and we are still in a situation where you have both in Darfur ongoing remnants of this big conflict it's smaller now but it's still there and where you have in the south of Sudan in two states Blue Nile and South Codafone particularly where you have a combination of displacement refugees and ongoing fighting which continues to affect tens and hundreds of thousands of people in this country. Yes we are assisting with food yes we're assisting with health or education or bringing families back together but in the end it's about the dignity of the people where you see it may be most in the work we're doing here in Sudan most immediately is when somebody who cannot walk anymore because he or she lost the leg is then suddenly able to lead a normal life because this limb has been artificially replaced and it's not artificial dignity it's real dignity but through an artificial means so this giving back some self-respect to people who have gone through the worst in life is something which which makes you get up in the morning and want to do more of that.  Yes we do work for numbers but in the end you you look at the difference you can make to one person and to these many one persons.


Water to me is life. Humans, animals, plants all depend on water. Water to me, well, well, it's everything. It's our food, our energy and even the clothes that we wear. Water to me is a scarce resource. We need to use new technologies for rational use and water conservation. We need to recycle used water to reduce water scarcity. Water is fundamental to grow and produce our food. We need to produce more with less water. Water to me is fun. I like to play and swim in the water. Water to me means sustainability. It keeps life on our planet in balance. We need to keep the water clean to have a healthy life. Water to me is a human right. In my region, people struggle to get water. We need to distribute water evenly and make it accessible to everyone. We need to preserve water for the life of our planet. We have to start now. We will always, always need water.


From Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas. This is Silicon Angles, the CUBE start flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jamie Thomas, General Manager of Strategy and Development for IBM. CUBE alumni, welcome back. Great to see you. It's great to see you guys, as usual. It's fun, fun times. Okay, last time we spoke, we talked about storage. Now you're in general edge of systems and development, which is all across the different systems groups. A lot of exciting stuff happening. We've seen the cloud, the middleware stuff. We've seen all that change and over enabled. But there's still some stuff that's kind of out there that's driving a lot of innovation. Besides the developer community we heard about from Apple, there's Linux, these blockchain being open source. You're starting to see the power of the IBM systems starting to get more open. Okay, is that part of the strategy and how do you guys tie that into the older stuff? Well, absolutely open is a critical part of this systems infrastructure transformation that we've undertaken over the last number of years, but particularly in the last year, if you look at some of the announcements we made and the changes we made, we opened up power to create a vibrant ecosystem around the power architecture, over 200 members now. And we, at the end of the year, we announced a Linux class machines for the power platform. Another announcement we made last year, in addition to the Z13, was just this all Linux mainframe called Linux One. In the area of storage, we announced a new storage family for software defined storage last year, IBM Spectrum. Definitely tied in to the open agenda. So that is definitely a critical part of our strategy as we embark on allowing our clients to succeed on this cognitive journey. So Brian Kroll was on stage from Apple this morning, and he said, it's a pretty interesting thing, so we love Apple, great success, great partnership that IBM has, and I think that's going to be a secret weapon, in my opinion, down the road, as we can kind of most connect the dots, which we will do a little bit later in the interview. But he said something really powerful, which is, obviously it's their agenda. Take advantage of the hardware. Yeah, okay, exactly. That is interesting, because in a way the X86 business, IBM has kind of gotten out of that, that's the Intel side of it, but you got the power, you mentioned power, you still have other systems. What does that new equation mean when they say take advantage of the hardware now? Does that mean kind of conceptually, or can you be specific? What do you guys, do you agree with that statement, and what are you guys doing? Well, absolutely. I think it was an interesting statement from Apple, and also Robert mentioned this in his keynote today, that really it's not about, cloud is not a destination, it's about taking advantage of what you can do on the cloud, but making sure that you've also taken advantage of the investments you've already made. So if we look at the mainframe for an example, more than 80% of the world's transactions still require mainframe. And think about the transactional increase that mobile is driving to these backend systems. We have to make sure that we have the right capabilities there from a security model perspective, from a development experience perspective to allow our clients to take advantage of mobile, take advantage of the cloud, but still take advantage of that transactional system that they've built over years. But so that's a composable, I'll use the word composable, might not be in the messaging this year, but that is a big DevOps trend, composable infrastructure, and end to end. In other words, it's not end to end fixed. Yeah, right. You're essentially suggesting that's a mobile to edge to core, if you will. Exactly. But it has to be composable, it's not a fixed end to end. It has to be composable. And so that's why the announcements we made this week and last week around how we take advantage of IBM's API Connect, how we allow developers more easily construct API services-based applications, but then, once again, allow our mainframe services that allow you to tie into those transaction systems to be discoverable as well, take advantage of this. And the other good example is what we've done around the Power 8 architecture. With the change in that architecture, it really is a cognitive hardware platform, allowing clients to really consume big data and analyze that data to be more effective in their business. And that is really a purpose fit environment for big data and analytics, if you will. So a great example of what we were talking about this morning. Cognition. Yes. If Watson was on the Cube, we asked Nancy Pearson, what would Watson say about John and Dave? Oh, well, he would love you guys, of course. John said, well, John had a rough night last night, I could tell by his tone. So, Jamie, I wonder if we could talk about the business and what's driving the business today and in midterm and longer term. So, we were at the Z announcement a year ago, January. And you remember, John, we talked about product cycle. I mean, we're going to have a massive Q4 with Z. We talked to a lot of customers at that event. It was Jazz at Lincoln Center. Fantastic event that Tian Newman put together. He didn't hang around to take all the credit. He went to IoT in England. But at any rate, great Q4. We talked to some customers who said, I'm going to buy four or five of these things, sight unseen. So, you had huge pent-up demand for that. So, you have a product cycle that hit. So, that drove a lot of business in the systems group. Power, bounce back, showed high single digit growth rates. So, you got some product cycle things going on, some transformations. So, talk about that, but what are the big trends that you see that are powering your business in the future? Well, I mean, we're clearly, as we go into this year, we're still taking advantage of the major sea change we made in these hardware platforms and storage last year, right? There's still, a lot of our clients still have room to upgrade to take advantage of these new capabilities. And we mentioned Linux earlier, right? There's some fundamentally new things that we've done, both on power and the mainframe from Linux perspective that we think our clients have yet to tap into. And so, there's a lot to be seen on that horizon. And I think that plays very well to a lot of the open conversation we've been having here this week at the conference. Of course, there was a great open summit on Sunday where all the various projects came together that are involved in that, working with IBM. I think as we go forward, we believe we've set ourselves on a strong transformational journey. Once again, allowing the new age environments, whether that, we want to talk about that as the mobile front end or the big data front end to take advantage of these systems and what they do very, very well, making sure that our clients can attain a true cognitive computing environment to allow them to be successful and take advantage of those new capabilities. Just a note for the folks, you mentioned the weekend. It was a hashtag IBM OTS, that's open technology. I've got the S stands for, but all the top developers really working on some of the in the weeds, guts of technology, check it out over the weekend. Given that kind of segue to that point, Blockchain open source is huge news. I mean, certainly, people in the industry and the infrastructure say, okay, that's Blockchain, it's really going to change the game on democratization of transactional stuff. What's your thoughts? I'll see it's a systems issue. How does that cut across strategy? Well, I think Blockchain is very important for us that own the next generation of infrastructure. I think that our interest is rooted in where a lot of the transaction and data reside today. And so clearly from that perspective, our systems handle a lot of those transactions and data. And so we need to be a first class participant and we plan to be in terms of the Blockchain evolution. We believe that we have some unique security elements that certainly exist today on the mainframe and we're further enhancing that will allow clients to have peace of mind as they enter into this bold new world of Blockchain. We have some very good demonstrations that are available here at the conference of how these systems can participate in the world of Blockchain. And I think that would be instructive for those clients and partners who have time to go see this week. And you guys were very much involved in the Apache project and the sort of new open source Blockchain. Different than the Blockchain we know at Bitcoin, right? And you're like presumed of the mind that one Blockchain is not going to rule them all. That's an idea in this approach. Clearly, as we discussed earlier this week, there's just all kinds of advantages for this type of open ledger philosophy. The one demonstration that we've been showing is really an import-export demonstration where there's a shipping ecosystem, if you will, that can take advantage of Blockchain. A very fundamentally difficult problem if you're in logistics operations is really how do you share and have the right interchange format across all the different members of the ecosystem to be more effective?  You're seeing all these things exploding. I want to ask you a question. I know you're always candid on theCUBE. We really appreciate that. The color and commentary and sharing of some transparency rather than IBM. But I want to ask a philosophical question to you about what's going on inside IBM because IBM has been a real leader in open source over the years. You go back to the beginning of the web. IBM has been a first class participant in all aspects of open source. So the question is, is there internal conversations where people say, hey, you know, we did great stuff back then, but if we had a mulligan, can we do things a little bit differently or if I had to redo? And looking at today's open source, as you guys are now continuing to invest, do you guys look back at your history of open source and saying, hey, would we tweak it a little bit differently? Is there a conversation where you have some learnings from those years and how you're executing open source today? Oh, absolutely. I think any time you've been involved in an endeavor for this long, you do have things that you understand that you did well and things that you didn't do as well. One thing we definitely have learned is that we need to be involved early on. So you can wait too long to get involved in certain open source efforts, and then at that point, you really have lost a critical ability to impact them or to have input into the early evolution of these open source initiatives. So that's why you see us jumping in fairly early with things like blockchain. We've certainly been very involved in Spark. I know my teams have really embraced Spark and we've gotten some good advantages out of what we've been able to implement today. Docker containers is another good example of a keen focus for us. We also understand that for IBM to be effective in these open source projects, we need to have critical mass around them. So there's been open source efforts we've participated in in the past where we did not have enough critical mass, and that usually means we're just not fundamentally at the table. So you have to decide which projects you want to be at the table at, and then you have to make an investment because we IBM want to have contributors and to be involved. So for your group, what are those, what's the seats for you at the table? So obviously Linux. Can you just go through the systems piece? What are the key projects? Some of the key projects, I talked about already the IBM project around open power. I mean, that's fundamentally important. The other projects that we've been involved for a very long time is Linux. So we have a core Linux team in my organization. That's a way of life for us now. And Linux kernel's changing significantly. We're absolutely very involved with a number of the distribution vendors out there in the industry. Spark is very critical for us going forward as well as Docker containers. A lot of our software takes advantage of virtualized environments or bare metal environments and also now supports container environments. So being able to support this heterogeneous type of capability is really important to us. So talk more about Spark. We were at Spark Summit last week and hanging out with the data scientists and all the geeks. Yeah, I saw that. I saw your geeks. I said I was the only person with a tie on there. So I feel much more at home here. But so another big theme last year, we heard from IBM on the Z side is bringing analytics and transactions together and doing things in near real time to affect business outcomes. Sounds a lot like Spark. So what's the Spark play? I mean, we have Rob Thomas on. He sort of gives it his perspective. What's the play from the systems division? Well, clearly in terms of some of the things we already do today around compute optimization, we have a capability called platform computing, which is able to optimize a number of different workloads to do HPC in-house analytics, but also Spark is a critical element of that. So we announced support for Spark last year and it's been made available so that we can optimize Spark environments. We continue the evolution of intelligent analytics on our platforms in general. Like the mainframe just last week, we announced the fact that we can now apply the data that's available in the mainframe environments more intelligently married with our security organizations capabilities to prevent cyber attacks. So that is just a specialized form of analytics if you will on the platform. So what are you seeing as the big business impacts that these big trends are driving for your customers? Maybe you could add some color around that. Well, I think that I would put them into several different categories. This data explosion that we keep talking about is definitely driving a couple of trends. One is with this much data, you have to have an effective way to get inside out of it. And that then leads us on the journey to cognitive. The other problem that it presents is just sheer economics. How do you economically deal with this much data and effectively manage it? And that leads us, in my view, to understanding hybrid cloud more fully. We have to understand how to really put a hybrid architecture in place to deal with this phenomenon. And those are two of the big things we're talking about. And then the other thing we just talked about, I think quite a bit, is open. None of this is gonna happen by a single vendor by themselves as evidenced by all the partnerships we've talked about here today with the VMware, with Apple, with many others. It really is gonna involve a collaboration across a number of key vendors to make our clients successful and leveraging the communities that are out there. How would you describe your strategy as it pertains to hybrid? Summarize IBM's approach. IBM's approach is that we have a great appreciation, of course, for what clients have invested in on-premise. And so our goal is, while we understand that they definitely want to take advantage of the cloud capabilities, the flexibility of the cloud, we also are fundamentally invested in allowing them to take advantage of the investments they made over decades. And that we enable them to take those investments and move them forward in a way that benefits them because we're here for the long-term and we're not here just for the next decade. And you partner well to the VMware 14-year relationship. That was front and center, solid, keeps the base happy. Nothing's gonna radically happen overnight. Okay, final thoughts. What's your vibe prediction so far? Day one, I know it's day one a little early, but for the folks watching at home, what's the vibe for Interconnect this year? I think the feedback I'm getting from the clients is that they really appreciate the partnerships that we've brought forward today and we demonstrated that we're creating an ecosystem that will help them be successful. That we're also demonstrating that we're a long-term partner and that we're a partner that you can count on as you make a journey that, in some cases, is not easy for some of the existing clients. It may be easy for the startups that were born on the cloud, but for a lot of the clients, it's a journey. And we're here to help them on that journey. Jamie Thomas, General Manager of Strategy and Systems, Technology Development. You're watching theCUBE. We've got some big guests this afternoon. We have the Weather Channel, weather data coming on. We're talking about all that new stuff coming in on the acquisition. We've got a lot of big guests talking cloud. This is theCUBE bringing the cognitive mojo here on theCUBE, cognition. We got it on. Jamie Thomas here inside theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending the time with us. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Live in Las Vegas, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.


And here the Better World 2018, who are you? Hi, I am Ajay and I take care of the business development for Western Europe, Path Partner. Path Partner has been a partner for ST from a good number of times and we have been working with ST on various products. So you have something like this for example? Yeah. What is this? So this is basically a DecaWave product and it is powered by STM low power microcontroller and it is used for indoor positioning within the buildings, within the hospitals where you can track people using this how been in the centimeter range. So is using a GPS GLONASS and everything or? Yeah, it's not using GNS but it's based upon a DecaWave technology using the UWB sensor type. All right. Do you also have this kind of project? What is this? Yeah. So this is one interesting product developed by Path Partner with a collaboration and support from Master Microelectronics. So this is a very unique product used in the hip surgery navigation and you know in hip surgery one of the important aspect is the leg length measurement. So we need an accuracy of 2 mm for the leg length measurement and a degree of you know plus or minus 2 degrees for the hip angle measurement part again. So we are using? Yeah in the hip side. So basically in the surgery part where you know it is powered by ST's laser TOS based sensor and a six axis accelerometer and a gyroscope. Different boards in there? Yeah. Different boards but you know connected by so one is the laser sensor and then at the back from the ST Microelectronics low power microcontroller. So is your company like a PCB designer house or? So Path Partner is a design services company so what's common between an air purifier in California, between basically an astro sight, hip measurement, modules. Leg length for example right now it's tracking my face here it knows exactly where my eyes are. It is used for the level trend level for automation where it's going to track the face of the driver whether it is drowsy, whether it is distracted and you know going to you know measure his activity and going to track it. And what is this one doing? So this is the traffic sign recognition and the pedestrian detection from Path Partner and this is used for the EDA systems for the level one and level two. So your company is going to be inside the self-driving car solutions? Yeah we are going to be at the perception part of the self-driving car. And this is working on the advanced driver assistance system right here. What is this? So this is a radar solution from Path Partner again for the target for the autonomous driving perception part. It's going to track the objects, pedestrians, bicycles and etc etc. And it's going to give details back to the autonomous driving stack. So where are you based? The company? So the company is based out of Bangalore, India and we also have an R&D center in Fremont California but Path Partner is a global company with presence in India, USA and Europe and Japan. And you are an ST partner so what does that mean? We are a ST partner, we got access to STs, microcontroller, steering sensors, accelerometer, humidity sensors, pressure sensors, we got access to a lot of technologies which is helping us building a lot of products for futuristic markets.


Good morning. It's great to be here. This really does seem like a fun crowd, a fun topic. Gabriel did a great job of giving some of the highlights of this research that these three experts all helped guide, I would say, and were a part of. They surveyed people who work in financial services, and I think some tech companies that work with banks as well, they got more than 250 responses. So the research paints a really good picture of the state of open source and finance, as you can see. So we're going to talk about some of the points that came out of the research and what these experts think. So these are all people who work with banks and are very, very knowledgeable about how these projects are going. So I just want to ask each of you, if you could talk about like one project or one type of project that you've either been personally involved in, or that you know of, that you think is kind of a game changer in the way that open source is being used in financial services, and the way it's kind of, I don't know, making a difference. Hillary, maybe we could start with you. I'm super excited about FDC3, the project we just heard Rob speaking about. I've had the opportunity to work in the financial services sector for 10 years and be on the front lines of some of those pain points around the lack of interoperability across applications. And what is extremely exciting is the problem that FDC is solving for FDC3. And what I love is the opportunity for open source solutions to be born within a given industry, but have applicability beyond the industry, and that's what I see for FDC3 is transportability to other industries. And of course, I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities. I think we're just getting started to see opportunities for digital wallets, a digital asset custody, and central bank digital currency, and digital identity. Like we are just getting started, so I think I'm excited for the future. So what's like a key benefit for, so if I'm running, if I'm a CFO at a bank, why do I care about FDC3? Well, there is latency in the lack of interoperability in data, and time is money. And financial services, their objective is to turn a profit for shareholders to create shareholder value, to define themselves by better trading systems, better investment management, and creating value for clients and shareholders alike. That comes through better technologies and more reliable and more timely access to accurate information. So it's directly linked to ROI. Scott, can you give a project or a type of project that you think is sort of game changing? Sure. Yeah, it's Colin. I get that all the time. I was afraid I was going to do that. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, rather than focus on a project, I'll focus on something slightly different. So we've been involved in a lot of different finance projects, Vue, Perspective, KDB. We wrote the FDC3 conformance framework, so I know which three pass, buy me a drink and I'll let you know. Although that kind of implies I drink during the day, which is probably not a good thing to say. One of the things I've been doing recently with Finos is putting together the technical steering committee. And from my perspective, that's a real sort of milestone in terms of the maturing of Finos as an organisation. At early stages, one of the key metrics of Finos was just the sheer number of projects that sit within the organisation. Now it's got to a point where it's attracting a considerable number of potential contributions and projects, and there's a genuine need to have a bit more curation to make sure things are more cohesive, to make sure they genuinely deliver value. So I think from my perspective, that's one of the most interesting things I've been involved in this year. Alright, how about you, Cara? I would say the most unique piece to Finos is our open source readiness SIG. And in open source, there are many times of how do you get involved, especially if you're not necessarily a technical contributor. So the open source readiness SIG is a great opportunity to be able to come, understand open source, learn from other OSPOs, learn from other open source leaders. In addition, it helps with the creating of your strategies and even getting started on your strategy. It's a nice entry point, especially into Finos and into open source, especially if you're a financial services firm. Okay, so the research found that 87% of respondents feel that open source is valuable to the future of the financial services industry, and you've all given examples of some of the value that you're currently seeing. Is there anything open source will be able to do to kind of help banks continue to modernize and maybe compete going into the future? Do any of you want to...? Hilary? I can take a stab, sure. I think the value proposition for open source in financial services is unquestionable from a lowering the total cost of ownership of your technology stack, reducing vendor lock-in. But one of the unheralded benefits of open source for this sector relates to talent retention. Our people are our competitive advantage. And when we empower our staff to create through open source project communities and to build value, we help attract talent, we help retain that talent. And so I think the talent equation is incredibly important as to why open source is so significant a factor for success in the industry. I guess I'm going to come at the question from a slightly different direction. I guess what you're looking at is the value proposition for open source. And I think you're going to hear that over and over again in the talks today that the value proposition is something that people here deeply care about. And that's kind of the carrot. That's the positive motivator. There's also the stick as well. Round about 80 to 90% of all software is now open source. So pretty much everything that banks are doing has a significant amount of that code is now open source code. It's ubiquitous. For that reason alone, you should be paying attention and you should be investing. So that's the stick. That's the come on, you know, get motivated. Yeah, and just adding on to that, I think open source is everywhere in financial services and that being able to grab the attention of the leaders within the organization are going to be able to help with security issues that we're talking about with log4j. Financial institutions were able to be able to answer the needs from a security perspective so quickly because they were modern enough to be able to have open source policies and governance around their activities and contribution and consumption. Let me follow up on that because I've always looked at security and open source and granted I'm not an expert in this area, but I've always looked at it as a double-edged sword because you have the ability for a large community of people to all look through code for vulnerabilities and fix those vulnerabilities, but you also have code that is out in the open that hackers can look at and figure out how to exploit. It gives them a lot of opportunity to do their dastardly work. How do you guys look? Am I wrong? How do you look at that? I agree it's a double-edged sword that some people have heard of a thing called Linus Law from Linus Torvalds, very famous, one of the people that you could arguably say invented open source and he has a law that's given enough eyeballs or bugs a shallow. Now there are some people that agree with that law and some people that disagree and I don't think it's been scientifically proven. I'm kind of on the fence about it but one of the things that I find is that ahead of open sourcing some code you pay particular attention, typically you pay quite a lot more attention ahead of putting it into the public domain as you would putting it deployed into production. It encourages people to have a lot more attention on security issues and cosmetics as well. So I think there are significant benefits to open sourcing. I agree it is a double-edged sword, it doesn't necessarily mean it would be more secure just by open sourcing it. But again getting back to my earlier argument, considering 80% of your code base is open source and you wrote 20% of it, balanced the probabilities, the security vulnerabilities are going to be in the code that you didn't write in the first place so it's a somewhat moot point. You know to that point is there a bright line that you're seeing these days between what banks are willing to use, the types of tools that banks are willing to use that are open source versus what people want to keep proprietary. They want to keep their own IP, their own special sauce, etc. Is there a divide and where do you see the divide? Yeah I think the gravitation toward open source for the financial services sector is around common pain points and challenges that all organizations face. Particularly with respect to regulatory compliance, liquidity, know-your-client, anti-money laundering those types of commonplace operational requirements that all organizations share, that's foundational. Where there may be a tendency to not participate is in differentiation type products that you know an organization is putting forward a customer facing application that is designed to be better than the competitors application. And tagging on to that I would say too when it is that space where it is proprietary and it's something that you want to keep within in-house that's where inner source and inner source model where it's open source principles within your organization are leveraged. And we actually saw within the report that 61% of respondents said that there was more success in their inner source programs when there was an open source program office or an Ospo, or an identified Ospo leader. The way I look at it is financial services invests a significant amount in technology. They invent their own programming languages, they go that far. Ahead of public cloud there were investment banks that effectively created public cloud style deployment environments for themselves. But with open source having become pretty much the ubiquitous model the value that you derive from inventing your own programming languages, inventing your own cloud style deployment mechanisms, the value you derive from that has diminished significantly which is why financial services should be leaning a lot more heavily on open source. There's a lot of things in the past that have been created which are not differentiators. They were potentially necessary at the time, but these days there are many things that you wouldn't consider a differentiator. A great quote from the report was that one of range viewers said we're not going to go and design a container orchestration system. That already exists, we could just go to the repo and get it there. That's not value add. Ten years ago they would have done that. So it's probably things like trading strategies, product modules, things that are very individual to the particular bank. So one of the points that Gabrielle noted was that GitHub repositories with commits from financial services institutions are up 43% over last year. That seems significant, that's a huge, and Hillary was educating me that this means that the financial institution contributors are highly valued in these projects. So what happened over the past year to make the financial services contributors so much more effective and valued? I think it goes back to the policies and the governance. They're able to understand how they can contribute, how they can bring that back into their organization. Gab was talking about how there's 20 new OSPO leaders within financial services. So I would say definitely the governance and knowing, really knowing how you can contribute and not just the policies piece but it's also the technology piece. In many times we find that developers don't have access to GitHub or Slack or open source tools and so it's being able to remove those barriers to entry to be able to have more commits. So the talent was there and they just didn't have the access and now they do and the leadership as you said. Yeah, previously, well I think it's still happening today in a lot of organizations. Generally speaking the conversation would go, oh I found a bug in this open source project, can I fix it? No, not on our network, go home and fix it yourself. And that sounds ridiculous but that happens quite often in a number of organizations that have thankfully moved beyond that. What I do want to point out is whilst the delta that we're looking at is positive, the absolute number is still pretty poor. Compare financial services to most other industry sectors and it's a laggard and if we weren't operating within a technology sector and I consider financial services to be a very much a technology sector that would be excusable but we're not. So technology is of critical importance to all financial services organizations so it's a positive step. We need another two or three years of the same increase to get to where we should be. Yeah, because I think 75% of companies surveyed let employees contribute to open source but only 35% openly encourage open source. So why is that, what's going on there? What's that divide? Is it what you're saying? You can do it at home but you can't do it at the office? Well a lot of it is value proposition. When I think about open source there's the two sides of it, there's the consumption and there's the contribution. The consumption value proposition is really easy to explain. It's free, okay, we're done. Whereas the contribution value proposition, that's a little bit more complicated. Why should we spend time fixing bugs or contributing features to this project that doesn't give us an immediate return on investment? So the value proposition is something that is subtle and nuanced. Part of it is a long term investment in the ecosystem that you fundamentally depend upon and the other angle is security. If 80% of your code is open source you probably had better get familiar with that code base. That's your insurance policy. It's not a contract with IBM or some other large supplier.  And the flip side to that is if we prohibit our team members from contributing to open source we then are waiting for someone else to fix a problem that immediately affects us and that is going to come. And so you can be proactive in getting involved in contributing to a fix quickly or you wait for someone else to fix it. You mentioned the talent thing as well. They're a growing number of developers who will be asking an employer what's your position on open source because it matters to them. So you were talking about the value of this in recruiting people. Are college students really coming out like saying I want to work on open source? And I think it ties in with the finding that fun and enjoyment are still top reasons that people want to get involved in open source. Is it really fun? And are people, is it really drawing young people to companies, the fact that they can work on open source? Is it fun, Colin? All eyeballs to the person who is still a developer. Yeah, it is. Developers, engineers, people involved in creating software like to be in a position where their software creates the maximum value possible. Keeping their code locked up in closed source, just being used for a single application. There's some value to that, but taking your code, open sourcing it and seeing a significant number of other organizations, people benefiting from your hard work, that is fun, that is rewarding. Also, contrary to popular belief, developers and engineers are quite sociable. More often than not, they like to be sociable online. They may not like to meet in person, but there is a social element to working in open source that works for the kinds of introverts that like software. Right, and that's why it's open source community. It's about the people, it's about the contributions, and what you're taking in, but there is a gamification element to it. It's your rank, it's your brand cache. Oh, I got to fix this before somebody else did. So, fun is not just for developers, it is for everyone, but it is really bringing in that community element. This is something that research shows outside of financial services across many research projects that we have done at the Linux Foundation. Time and time again, we get this data that validates, that open source is a highly rewarding, very stimulating environment for people to participate in. I think it's important from a corporate culture point of view to embrace that and explore how we can make our policies around upstream contribution more accommodating. All right, that seems to be the takeaway that it's important, it's valuable, lower these barriers, fix, you know, get rid of these pockets of resistance and move forward for all the advantages we've been talking to. Well, Colin, Hillary Cara, thank you so much. It was a great panel. Thank you. Thank you.


Welcome to DrupalCon. The session is JavaScript and Accessibility. Don't blink and sever it, do felt. Did to be presented here again as well. Presentation, I'm blind. I'm gonna have this earbud in my ear during the presentation, just so that I can listen to my notes. One of my colleagues, Lee, in the front row, here is driving the slides and she'll try to keep up with me as I'm going. So thanks once again, everybody, for coming. Before we jump into the session, I wanna really just start by saying really this session revolves around a clear thesis and like any thesis, I'm certain, any good thesis, I'm certain that there are people in this community and perhaps even in the room that might disagree or disagree strongly with the thesis and that's important because it's only through sharing ideas and agreeing and disagreeing and combating back and forth around those points that we learn and that we grow as a community. So before I dig into the details, I'll kinda do the spoiler alert, here's the thesis that I'm here to share. JavaScript is not to blame for accessibility. There might be good reasons not to use JavaScript in your application. There might be good reasons to use JavaScript and to build using progressive enhancement. Accessibility for persons with disabilities who use modern technologies is not one of those good reasons. So if in your mind today, if you've come to this session and you're asking, am I allowed to use JavaScript? Doesn't JavaScript create problems for accessibility? My thesis is the answer is no. So who am I? My name's Everett Zufelp. I'm the director of technology at MyPlanet. I've been working at MyPlanet for just about six years now. I started speaking at DrupalCon in San Francisco in 2010. I gave a quick five minute lightning talk on accessibility during the core track, which I think at that time was one day in advance to DrupalCon. It wasn't a track like it is now running through the entire conference. I was the accessibility maintainer for Drupal7. I've participated in the HTML working group at the W3C. And right now what I'm doing at MyPlanet is I'm supporting a growing team of technologists who use Drupal and React and other open source technologies in order to build cool solutions for our customers. Some of the things we're gonna cover today, I wanna go over this in advance so that you can decide if you're in the right session. Imagine if I'm gonna give a little bit of a background on myself and explain some of the barriers that I personally have run into with accessibility on the web. We're gonna talk about a few myths about accessibility. We're gonna talk about the truth about accessibility. We're gonna talk about affordances. And for any designers in the room, that term probably resonates. But for people who are maybe less familiar with interface design, we'll do a bit of a refresher around what an affordance is and why affordances are important. We'll talk about JavaScript and its role on the web. We'll talk about how browsers take information from HTML and the DOM and map that into something that assistive technologies can make use of. We're gonna talk about the div problem and how we fix it. We're gonna talk about some complexities, outside of maybe some more, I'll use the word monolithic, but outside of applications that we might be familiar with where each page of content is a single request and response from the server. We'll talk about things that are more application-like or single-page apps and where some additional complexities around accessibility emerge. We'll talk about some complex user interface components, things that don't exist in the HTML5 specifications so that we need to go out of our way to write even more JavaScript in order to make those items accessible. And we'll talk about what we can all be doing next in order to progress accessibility on the web. So a little bit of a background on me. I was born with a degenerative eye disease. I was born with glaucoma, but it's called congenital glaucoma. Most people, the vast majority of people who have glaucoma get glaucoma later on in life, either as complication from heart disease or diabetes. I was born with glaucoma. It's a progressive eye disease. There's not really, you can slow it down, but there's not a lot you can do about it. So from a young age, I knew that it was highly likely that at some point during my adult life I would lose my sight. I learned web development in the late 90s, so let's talk like 96, 97, 98, where you were writing one page for Netscape, one page for Internet Explorer, and then sometimes two different pages for two different versions of Netscape, two different pages for two different versions of Internet Explorer. It's around 2004 that I completely lost my remaining vision. And I'd say it's probably been, I was trying to answer this question for myself earlier today. It's probably been about 15 years that I've been working with assistive technology to create situations that have happened to me. You referred to a popular social media platform and it was impossible to register. Just something about that registration form you weren't able to register. Imagine a popular online shopping site, you're 30, 40 minutes in, it's completely impossible to check out of the store.  Imagine if you're trying to book a hotel room or a flight and you just, no matter what you do, cannot enter the check-in date or the departure date that you're trying to use. Imagine if you're working with a software delivery team like I assume many of us do and you want to contribute to planning with the team but the task management tool your team uses makes it impossible for you to move items around the board, group them into sprints or prioritize them with your group. So these are all experiences that I've had whether in my personal life or my working life, barriers that I've run into because of my disability and because of the assistive technology I use but moreover because what I will assume to be very well-intentioned web developers didn't have enough understanding of how accessibility works on the web to be able to make those interfaces accessible. Abilities don't use my web application. Years ago I was doing a bit of an introduction to accessibility at Ryerson College in Toronto and they asked one of the students said, well I'm building an online store that sells art. So clearly that doesn't need to be accessibility accessible to people who are blind. Screen reader users, script. So the screen readers obviously they can't use JavaScript. Accessibility, that's only a half myth. I'll let you figure out for yourself which part's the myth. I'll make a bold statement here that if the goal of being a goddess possible audience of users then it's absolutely an important, we've never tested it. The second to last one is daily in the United States. Nobody in my industry has been taken to court and over the last couple of years there's been a VA against retailers and other businesses across America. Universities, retail business, grocery stores, athletics companies, absolutely. Unless you're in a very niche industry somebody in your business has been taken to court. The last myth, JavaScript is not accessible and quite clearly it is. Got a bit of a quote up there and if you, I'm not sure if you can see but if you take a look there, this quote's from WCAG 1.0, we're on 2.1 now. And 20 years ago the recommendation was make sure that the pages work when scripts, applets, everybody remember applets and other programmatic objects are turned off because those poor folks with disabilities can't use those types of tools. And they couldn't, this wasn't wrong. This wasn't a wrong recommendation and it wasn't a wrong approach. But this was 20 years ago. I could still see when this was a recommendation. I was just barely learning how CSS and HTML all work together back in the late 90s to build website. This is not, confusion has come from because many, many years that, and we all did this for the purposes of accessibility. Some truth is about accessibility. Accessibility is a human right under the United Nations Charter for the Rights of Persons to the end of the world. They're slightly skewed toward ability. You're not going to interfere with your work. You're not going to make your easy thing to start. That's absolutely specific domain knowledge. That's why I'm here sharing with you today. Doing is better is going to make your application easier. I pulled from about a year ago less than sevens about JavaScript accessibility. So you're in good company with 75% of your peers. So why did I want to talk about affordances here when we're talking about JavaScript? So, although JavaScript can be used server side using solutions like Node, the aspect or the usage of JavaScript that has done accessibility by five groups used in the browser, the user experience, and to add interactivity where interactivity doesn't exist natively in HTML. And when we're talking about interactivity and we're talking about user interface design, we just, by necessity, we're talking with the term. The ability for us, typically on the web, it's a purpose of an object when we don't have access to that object. I can't touch it, I can't feel it, I can't visual language we use and patterns so that you can believe drop-down menu. As it has to do with listed affordances, these are easy that that's interactive and that if you click it, something will happen. You don't know what's going to happen, but you know something's going to happen when you click on that link. Pattern is on a website with an arrow pointing downward or perhaps an arrow, see that, and if that arrow is close enough to the word or the phrase, you infer that there's some amount of interactivity that when you click on that word or phrase, it's going to expand. Hidden affordances, these ones become a little bit more tricky. Hidden affordances aren't revealed until somebody has done something. This might be the little question mark beside a form field element and you've learned over the years of interacting on the web that if you hover over top of or click on that little question mark, some more information's going to appear. Negative afford to submit button and there's a level of opacity applied to it. It looks like it's been disabled. Well, that's an affordance as well. And most of these affordances and most of the behaviors that we're talking here, perhaps with the exception of that last one, but even with the last one, most of these affordances, the behavior behind them is JavaScript. So we're using CSS, yes, to visually represent the affordance, but we're using interactivity. Quite simply, it allows you to create dynamic content on the web, it allows us to do more than present a document that allows us to engage our users through a level of interpreter than clicking on a link and loading the next page of content. Into basic for some of browsers and the DOM is not HTML. Even with HTML and DOM, very, very different things. How's the markup language? It was able to embed images. What it is is a text file. It takes people and can be rendered in a browser. It generates. Once, more importantly nowadays, use DOM is almost underlying or a very minimally underlying source document that loads JavaScript. The JavaScript creates all of the DOM elements, whether you're using React or Ember or Angular or just using jQuery straight up on its own. All of the items, all the elements in the DOM are created by JavaScript and some of that content is embedded in the JavaScript. Sometimes that content is retrieved through a callback to a web server in the last couple of years with Drupal, but there might actually be in your application very minimal HTML. There might be only enough HTML to load the JavaScript on the page that works as the basis of that single page application. It is a source document that was HTML into a document object model. The object model and turns it into or exposes it as an accessibility API. And it's that API that, and it's different on every API that is to both to interact with that of active elements are really a sea of divs and spans. So, obviously, when I, I'm not hearing divs and spans, but I'm really getting no and perhaps a common complex from scratch rather than just using a plug-in.  It's just this sea of numbers on the page. Now, you learn a bit about it, but it doesn't tell us that it's a link or I've learned that that's probably a button. That's probably, to wrap to the word, save in a diverse span. And they added a click hand to that diverse span. S and D, if I simulate it with my virtuous, it will save when it is I'm working on. Buttons, I'm gonna go be bold here and say you have excuse for buttons. They're into each other's calendars. For things, we've been using in popular culture as the most common components to build an exception. You don't really have miners, you don't really have a lot of items on how to do it properly. And then a div and you put a click hand button element. But a calendar, they ask you to build and if you need it. And so that's why a few of the specifications. And I think that the three C got together and said that maybe gritty being used on the way, but that don't age TML together and they define the twidge around roll with roll give that you can now add dom will troll equally to a in the excessive with a few understatement of having these area documents. Areas now part of the age. Ters didn't make the age with age five, which is not document anymore web applications were used with the API is being created by style things and to add behavior applications to the work around this one, I type in all the search results page because my screen readers. What was I hear on? So now as it's on that page is there here for my screen textual afforded in the same view other customers using a visual. The next departure result sorted by this lowest. It's an indicator to me that the concept sometimes they're able to in action on Thursday when I get on to that indicates to you something's face is traveled or otherwise kind of leave the assistive technology you spend alert you don't really know what's happening. Do I have to go literally I have no idea. The next thing I hear on the expedia site after I for nonstop reads filtering and a moment later it says filtered. The Expedia has done an excellent job at what is actually a fair one level to communicate visual of filtering on data and the readiness of and by just simple statements about what's happening people can see happening in the browser frustrating or experience for me and turn that is actually quite do these things on Expedia on your own. I have I'm doing live demos of the conferences. The reality types of rooms are not really amenable to having somebody who has never heard who is only seldom listened to hear it. Hear it talking echoey room. You just you just don't. But if you were to go and check that filter those results and then if you open the bottom of the DOM you message that would be sitting there is text at the bottom of the DOM and how that works is using something regions. So we talked about Aria is accessible. We talked about the fact that there's different so for a lot of these more components that we want to be adding to our web page that Aria create a broad. Own in Aria it's not really a component. This concept of a live region region is really simple that you mark out using using the Aria states and when new DOM nodes are at assistive technology know to read that they they monitor it in the DOM and they announce. Now there's some politeness that typically they range from kind of if this is very very important. If you happen you can set it on the more if it's less ticker that's scrolling though I would encourage ticker automatically on a web page if it's something less important on the more polite end of the spectrum and that all whether or not the screen being read in order to components. I've talked about a little bit here again. I'm not over the speaker system because I don't get anything out of it but I'd be happy people who want to learn more afterward a private demo later on during one of the things that I will have demoed here. I've said and I know it's probably hard to for the 15 to 20 years on the web we still don't really have a great website and this is where I get to create a little bit of conflict cause on Nashville website at site before it and I would guess that or that has a fairly down menu and so my colleague who's driving demonstrate this menu is not terrible at least tab through menu items and access them with a key who couldn't use a pointing device only able to navigate through web page. You can at least navigate through those top level on one of them and go to the page but what you'll see there and if you do it on your own and your should be able to see is that new items receives focus new items beneath it do expand. But it's impossible to get. So if you want well which is underneath program the way to get to the schedule go down there's no sub menu items there's no way to get there and almost every website variation of this sort of drop down menu or complex with multiple columns of advertising content on the right-hand side. It actually isn't a type of thing to make access tomorrow afternoon my colleague Laura and I are gonna accessibility testing and we'll talk this pattern actually is so complex not readily tested by four but suffice it to say even on the Drupalcon website and the other the website but it's in reader how would I use that menu I would I did yesterday because I was looking up this guy I'd find the link for program use a keyboard command on my keyboard the mouse to where my I've actually moved the mouse over which expands the drop down continue pressing the down arrow and my keyboard and I want screen reader user knows how to do complex set of interaction of menu item we won't demo this one but mass.gov I think the mass.gov team full of research into what make and on their site you are able so if you were to again try this afterward able to move across the top level items and you can choose whether or not you want to sub menus or whether or not moving across the top of the top level pattern for making this successful complex user interface component last accessibility enhancements we in many years ago is autocompleted haven't in Drupal eight the autocomplete field is if you start typing in a destination like Nash H user so there's going to be a visual afford some indication that there's a number of look search between user you have no idea that the pop a lot I use hotels.com a lot few letters of a city name and then I'll probably they'll probably be an autocomplete on the other it does once again I said I said with that using those live read the data and I think Expedia does a terrific as well so with it start to type in NASH for now but I hear read in my screen reader 10 suggestions use the error so really the exact same information perhaps he's looking at the screen I'm being told I'm being told how to interact I'm even being told that there's one you'd have to count the list to find out that there's more information than somebody who can see so I think that Expedia has done the last one that I'd like this calendar talked about hard to do it's hard to do they can type in a date though Frank and using a lot of American websites I feel I I just do it both ways and hope for that one of them on arrow plan is loyalty program for the time being up until a couple of months ago impossible and I that's I've been working with the web a long time I can even open up the Dev to make the page more accessible to my to remediate my own accessibility still a couple of months ago it was to type a date into the flight the date field so if you were to try to type the date man you could search top to bottom of the calendar it was impossible that slightly but what I'd like to call an example so whether it's Hilton or these sweets or any of the Hilton brands if you there when with the as with a screen reader when you eight field not only can you yourself if you know the right format and I think that much information but I mean let's arrow the down arrow will move you into the cat where you can use the arrow keys to select enter key to make your selection escape to leave the date picker want to enter the date manually not using a screener not only does it eight through the calendar field but it gives that there is me how to move around the house me how to select a date dismiss the calendar don't like using the an excellent example of an excess I normally ask say afternoon if you'd like to come that we can chat and I can give you a want me to take a look at one of the act I can take ages and like things look really big take home is that Java not to blame sample from Hilton possible without Java when I click on the box to filter my connections at it's applying the filter then a few moment the filters been applied that's not a script take those down menus and mass.gov keyboard only and so you can navigate through the service the government can't properly without Jack is not to blame so working together this is a so if we think about everything you think oh I've got this blog filters when the Phil this date component on that's not a I just grabbed the I found you're doing is better than easy and you accessible than it was yesterday using the live region but with it does sound like a lot when the spec frameworks community and accessibility accessibility I know that my colleague that is a group of people sometimes some great around how to build there's lots of there who've gone before a possible out before


This fall is a wonderful time to get out and enjoy Wyoming's natural resources. Today I'm standing in Kirk Gowdy State Park, just 24 miles west of Cheyenne. Kirk Gowdy State Park has a richly varied landscape where flora and fauna decorate the foothills of the Laramie Mountains. There are three reservoirs, Granite, Crystal and North Crow, all of which provide water to nearby towns. Boaters, canoes and anglers use both granite and crystal and the larger granite reservoir is also open to water skiers. The reservoirs are stocked and the fishing for coconut salmon, perch and trout is excellent. North Crow is an unimproved reservoir and shore fishing opportunities are available. The park was established in 1971 and later named in March 1972 for the famous ABC Sports Caster and Wyoming native, Kirk Gowdy. It is a popular wildlife watching spot with mule and whitetail deer commonly seen while elk, bears and mountain lions are more elusive. There is also a wide diversity of birds. Hikers and mountain bikers are commonly seen on the park's extensive trail system. If you're ever in Cheyenne, take a day to spend some time in the crisp autumn air at Kirk Gowdy State Park. From the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Ashley Garles, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.


Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference 2014. Brought to you by HP with your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back and we're here live in Boston, Massachusetts. This is theCUBE, our flagship program throughout the event. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Dave Vellante here, Jeff Vist, the VP of Solutions Marketing at HP Autonomy. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Give us the update on big data, meeting business convergence. We were talking on the keynote earlier, it's really on theCUBE. IT deployment of big data and then putting it to reality. A little bit of disconnect. Business managers want results faster. IT thinks they're checking the boxes. You guys are playing on both sides. You straddle that with autonomy. You're up and down the stack. What's the update? Well, there's a couple irons in the fire, per se, to use a metaphor. A big, big push that I think is worth talking about today is idle on demand. That is gonna take this genre into a whole new area. But in addition to that, we're seeing the emergence, and I think you start to see this one marked, start to mature and grab hold of purpose-built applications. One big bet, and we're showcasing it here, is a healthcare analytics big data platform, specifically for looking at clinical data. Not as a turnkey full solution, but as a platform that others can innovate around. And that shows you the spectrum from something that is far more accessible, that developers that would never touch a technology such as idle in the past can access, and then something that you can take directly to line of business managers, in this case, in healthcare, and have them be productive in delivering results in weeks. So on the analytics side, I got to ask, because this is something that we've been talking about.  And years ago, Mike Olson was the CEO out of Clutter at the time, was like, oh, the application economy's coming. We just never saw that happen coming. There was never a tsunami of big data apps. It simply was the killer app of analytics. Certainly visualization and analytics seemed to be the primary game in town, in terms of value. What do you see coming down the pike? Obviously, you see that as well, or not, share your opinion on that. And then when are the apps coming in, or is just big data gonna be native in all this? Well, yes, and yes, I guess, okay? So a good political answer. I've been in analytics a long time, and there's a lot of inertia, and inertia doesn't go away quickly, by any means. So there are IT organizations that have made substantial investments, data warehouses in the tool sets, and I've seen again and again where you bring in an app, maybe a proof of concept, you show it to that line of business manager, their eyes pop out, the value is immediate, and you think, this is gonna be smooth sailing. We can just mail it in at this point. And then what happens is you show it to IT, to the practitioners, and the first question isn't what value do we get it, how quickly can we scale it, it's what technology do you use, and how can I build it? And that in a nutshell captures I think the roots of where we come from. Now what is gonna change that from doing it kind of grow your own? Well you need IT because you need the data, and the data comes from those resources within ID. That's what big data is about, in fact going to more diverse resources. So it's not about even if you move to the cloud cutting out IT, it's really about embracing it. But for me the change that we're seeing is taking solutions that are far, far easier to weave into your apps, and making it intrinsic to the apps themselves. And that's where it was a yes, yes answer, is that things like search, nobody's running around saying number one priority is enterprise search, but if you can't find the right data and the right relevant information, what's the point of doing any of these big data apps? It's now though that those kind of capabilities, not just search, but other functionalities need to be intrinsic and accessible. I mean search is a great example, we were talking earlier with Etsy and also with Wayfair and e-commerce companies, they're seeing the search, they analyze the search like it's nobody's business, because that's key and important part of that thing. But it's not coming from Google anymore, it's coming from apps and all these different omnidirectional points out on the web and the internet. So that's certainly a big shift, right? So whether it's enterprise search, there's a new vectors of discovery, that's a huge thing.  This is the weird thing, it's like what is big data? Is it a category or is it just native and everything? Well search is going to be fundamental to every enterprise app and we all know that most search stinks, right? And you're being kind and it's early in the morning. Right, most searches is absolutely horrendous, it's useless essentially. And what a lot of people don't see is, and especially consumers in line of business people is they go to Google, they search on the web, they use Siri and they get a great result. How many times do you go past the first page of a Google result? But when you're dealing with enterprise data, where you didn't have five million people searching before you and searching for one thing, a link, a hyperlink that is being refined again and again. When you're going to enterprise data, you have to look at the payload, you're usually not looking for a link, and you're right, you go to that proverbial white box and you're usually wasting your time and that is why we're doing Idol on Demand because this is about contextual search. You see a lot of terms thrown around, but it comes down to the simple idea that I have to interrogate the data, I have to understand relevancy, there's a distance between ideas of unstructured information, and I have to have the right technologies that's going to find that. Very different than running a popularity contest, which Google does very well, but that's all they do. And you suggest, and I'm inferring from what you said, Jeff, that the Idol on Demand gives you scale and gives you data and insights that you can then apply to improve people's enterprise search capabilities, is that right? Well, I think it's a game changer and I'll tell you why. We've had Idol for over 10 years and it powers some of the most robust applications, e-discovery, compliance archiving, heavy duty stuff, but it's a heavy duty app. You need a lot of hardware, you need to do what we call build the index. You have to analyze the data, usually in batch mode. Once you have that index and we manage in place, so we're not shifting the data around, which is another key part. I think a number of the actors, John, are they're moving the data to analyze it. So they're saying as long as you put your data in our little piggy bank, our data repository, all's good. That's a deal breaker, because you're going to move the data, forget it. For big data, the size of the data. Why not move the compute to the data or move something else around? Or how about if you can link and point to where the data is so that the data can be diverse? But, and we've managed in place for a long time, so that's not an issue for us, but I tell you what was the issue. The computational intensity of building these engines into your app, that, unless you have a really, really thorny problem, wasn't doable until now. Now, Idol on demand is where we took those functions in Idol and created APIs. Cloud-based APIs, a simple call, today it's stateless, we'll move to stateful. There's 26 APIs ranging everything from a basic search to face detection, to finding similar documents based on context and not keyword. You could not get those until this year unless you put that engine into your application. Now you can make a call to a private or cloud-based application with Idol on demand. And now that means I can take what I could, would have had to put literally thousands of man-hours into developing, now it can be an API call through a web app. We were just having a very inspiring conversation prior to get here. Jeff with Alan Nance from Philips, huge company, obviously they spend a lot of dough on services. And of course, you guys are a big supporter of those guys, but the issue he has is, clearly I asked him all this transformation stuff, I said, what's the outcome of all this? All the stars line up, and he pulled the string and everything happens. What's the objective? What's the outcome? He said, I just want to get close to the business. And that's the big data challenge with the analytics, right? It's really, is that, do you, well, and it's not obviously cliche to say that, everyone wants to get close to their business, but how do you make that happen? What's your experience? Well, you don't, there's two sides of it I think. One, and you see a lot of focus on this is doing what you already understand faster. To be able to do it in near real time or real time in context of your business. And that may mean one of your online users clicks and I determine in a millisecond period of time what kind of adder information to put up. In other cases, it's not gonna be milliseconds. It's gonna be many seconds or maybe even minutes may be suitable for giving that information. So time has context there. But the other side, and I'm not trying to wax philosophical here, is you don't know what you don't know. And the trick here is to let the data tell you and reveal to you the insight. To allow you to see breaking trends. Often we refer to this as looking for patterns of information through weak signals. Now that is a very, very powerful concept. And if you want to get closer to your business, I would argue, yes, sometimes it can be reporting in the general sense. Sometimes it can be clicking through your supply chain and trying to understand and have transparency all the way through and understanding in minutes what may have taken several weeks before. That's part of it. But I would argue that is balanced out or maybe even overwhelmed by the ability to look at weak signals in your data to understand your customers, understand how you're operating and act on that before your competition does. That to me is the game changer. That's what big data is really all about. And that's something you can only do if you have the right technology and you have the data sets to be able to bring that image together. Almost always it does not come from one siloed index. One data set. It's usually diverse data spread around that you cannot connect the dots any other way through big data. And then you can create a virtual index essentially, right, is what you're doing. Is that correct? Well, yeah, you can, the whole idea is to look for relevant and irrelevant information that comes in different structures, different formats and then be able to contextually understand what that information is discussing and talking about and then make the join between them. Not that you're merging it together in one big MDM, but you're starting to connect together something as simple as a Twitter feed and your customer support emails, right? I can't tell you the number of companies I talk to, they have social media analytics. There's lots of great tools out there, we make some. And then they have usually some sort of response, multi-channel where their customers are screaming at them, praising them, reviewing them. It is a very, very small minority today. I would say less than 5% that can join those two data sets together about how you're being discussed on social media, which is not in your data center, right? And then the information that's coming in. It may sound incredibly obvious, but today that big data problem is sitting right in front of virtually every company and a far majority capitalize on it. And that is a great example of what we need to do. How do you tell people to jump on that opportunity? Because let's drill down on that. That opportunity is sitting there. What's your advice to your friends and your customers about that opportunity? What do they got to do right now? Like seize the opportunity, critical, top three things. Well, number one, I think they have to break their organizational silos because I can guarantee you, not guarantee you, but I would say in most cases, those data sets reflect the organizational design they have. They probably have one group of social media analytics, probably the average age there is 16 because they understand that technology and then there's probably another more ERP classic traditional data set behind those glass walls, running the financials, the heavy duty mission critical systems. You got to mix it up.  And then I would say number two, you have to start finding that right platform. It may not be one technology, but you have to find where the joins are. I think the breakthroughs in innovation are usually at the edge. So you have to look to where the edges are and then start to think about how can I unleash the data. When I start to see big data initiatives that are consolidation, land grabs if you will, let's put all that data in one place, make it big and count the terabytes. Usually you see organizations are going to be less successful. And the whole concept is antithetical to big data, which is like John said, ship the function, not the data. So how does they do things like mobile affect the ability to find patterns through weak signals? Well, that mobile is the great kind of equalizer that allows people not to be sloppy. Because number one, you do not have a 28 inch or 45 inch screen that is sitting there that allows you to kind of tool around that data. All of a sudden you have to be able to do something in a really elegant, intelligent way. So you have to push the intelligence upstream so that you can work through your device. I'll give you an example. With Idle on Demand, well two quick examples if I can. One incredibly fun, probably has no real value in the world, but I gotta share it. And the other one probably useful. The useful one is one of our hackathons, one of the developers created a Superman search and how it worked is they held up their mobile phone, made an S at an article. They typed nothing, nothing. We could do a contextual search in that article and then find similar information that we could bring back. No keywords, no metadata, and all you needed was a finger, a digit, a stick, and you could do a contextual search, okay? That shows the power and the necessity of mobile where maybe if I had a big screen, I could be clicking around, I could be bouncing around, I could be lazier, I could be sloppier. So that's the good example. The one that's fun and probably doesn't have any real value in the world, but blew us away at the potential of bringing this into mobile footprints is one of the hackathon teams had a Nerf gun. The infamous Nerf gun that shoots foam darts, this one was electronically operated. They slept a Raspberry Pi board on it with a camera. The Raspberry Pi had a Wi-Fi interface so they could make an API call to face detection. They pointed the camera at several people and triggered them or tagged them rather as good or bad people. And then they walked around the room after doing this with this Nerf gun. It would look at you and then automatically determine whether to shoot you or not. And it would, it scared the heck out of people. They did this in one day. They did it in what you could argue a mobile footprint, not a phone, but in this case, a piece of weaponry that was obviously a toy, to show you how they could bring face detection, image analysis into a footprint that, while in one sense was funny and in another sense gave you a sense of what you could bring to a footprint that you couldn't do before. So I think we're at any one out one of a long game that's about to come where we're gonna see applications enhanced and powered by big data capabilities but in ways that we generally didn't think about. This is far, far different than running your ERP report to see your supply chain optimization in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes. That has value, but what I'm truly excited about is this next genre of capabilities. And that's what Idle On Demands all about. That's our big bet on big data. I don't, I think it's more than lots of data faster. I think it's really about a new generation of apps. So I got to ask the cultural question because you've been in the business for a while and David and I were riffing on this in stages when we introduced this concept of born in big data. Really kind of just pivoting on the mobile first. Microsoft's got this thing called cloud first, not that they invented that, but that's their drum beat right now. So we have the notion of data first. So this born in the cloud, born in big data mindset, the kids, the young guns or the new folks who are coming in without the baggage of IT, clean sheet of paper, they're looking at no barriers. They're born in big data. Is that the future? Is that the requirement? You're seeing, I mean you can see this, born in big data and not born in big data. And if every tool for the job is, there's a tool for every job, well if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. So you don't go in with this, right? So what's your take on this? So how do you balance that new generation of users? Well the new generation just comes to a hackathon, okay? We need to get a lot more kind of silver-haired people at hackathons. What is the born in big data? Describe it in your opinion. What is the culture like? Well, they think differently. They think differently and they are far more risk taking in terms of looking at data sets and not feeling like they can screw it up. And they're far more judgmental about the value of the data in ways that I think the previous generation view different data differently. I think the previous generation thought, the closer you are to the data center, the more valuable, the more trusted. I think this generation thinks opposite. I think when they look at the cloud, when they look at social media, when they look at the interactions that are there, that are unmanaged, they actually put more credence in that. And the closer you get to the data center, and this is a little extreme, I'm painting a black and white, I think the less credible, the less timely they think that data is. So it is a reverse mentality of outside in versus inside out. And that means where they start with big data starts at a different viewpoint and they are polar opposite. And if I had to capture a metaphor or- So app down to infrastructure, so maybe that's app view. Well, that's the second thing is they don't really think data app, okay? I think the previous generation thought, I build the app, it maybe consumes some data and then if it's a good day and the sun's shining, I'll do some analytics, I'll deliver some insight. And usually it's the form of reporting to just validate what you already knew. They don't think in those kind of parsed like terms, I think they think about them in the moment, what experience can I deliver and then they build out from that standpoint. Now, naturally that plays in the consumer. I think the big question is as Siri invades the enterprise as these tools move in, and I'm not just talking about nice user interfaces, but I'm talking about allowing anybody in that organization, obviously with access rights, which is key, to be able to get the insight, to be able to find the truth. That is very threatening, not just to IT, but probably to every CEO down. There's knowledge, there's power. And I think that is the way that's coming with the new upstarts. Yeah, let me see that result before you send it out kind of thing. Where are we, Jeff, with idle on demand? You mentioned 26 APIs. Where are we with customer uptake? What kind of metrics can you give us? Well, if I can say so, this is HP being not HP, okay? If you go to idleondemand.com and what I mean by that is we are full open transparent about this. We put it in early access. It is available with no monetary commitment. You just log in and join the community. We have over 3,000 developers in the community growing at about 30% per month. So huge growth and huge interest. And it's not that we have the only APIs in town. I don't wanna claim that, but I would say we have the most robust, diverse API set that you can find. You'll find one guy that does enterprise search, one guy that does face detection, one guy does this. You go and see these 26 APIs which are gonna grow to over 50 by year end. And introducing pipelining, introduce advanced capabilities so it's more than just an API call. The feedback we're getting from the developers is we haven't seen this treasure chest of capabilities in one place ever. And so what you're gonna see to answer your question is top coder challenges. We're pumping a lot of money. If you're gonna buy stock, buy stock and top coder because that place is just a mecca.  So there's top coder initiatives going on. There's hackathoners going on. We have the idle innovators contest going on. We've opened up the kimono to engage not with practitioners that are obviously critical to HP's success and HP's business as an infrastructure company, but in this case we're talking directly to hardcore developers.  And we are doing innovation really from the outside end. I've never seen it in HP. Every analyst I talked to said they have not seen this kind of approach in HP. It's always been grow it in HP labs, have a lot of PhDs and then show it to the world. This is the other way around. You know Robert Young-Johns we've interviewed a bunch of times. We love having him on theCUBE. He's one great guy. He's very talented, great content. But one thing we notice with what he's doing, what autonomy is doing in the Vertica is you guys are aggressive. I mean you're like doing the HP thing, saluting the HP flag, I get that. Things going on there, but you're in on the ground making things happen. You got Chris Sellen saying, hey don't ask us, ask your peers. And this is the new way to do business. I mean and this is, you're not only eating your own dog food in the sense of, you know, these expression with the product, you're actually walking the talk on the culture. So, you know, I think you guys are doing a great job. I think you got to get the word out on the visualization side and the interfaces are everything. I agree with you. This API notification world is going crazy. So, you know, the interface is everything. You see B from Etsy said that on theCUBE and user experiences are changing at the developer level, at the IT level and the whole new analytics. So, with that in mind, I'll give you the final word. What is the goal for the next 12 to 24 months from a product, market perspective? Not so much performance, but like just objective, on board more developers or what else are you guys working on? Well, number one is to push the envelope, okay. We have incredible technologies. We have very little to lose by taking this technology, expanding it. And if you want to have a platform and HP at the end of the day is a platform company. And I say that proudly, proudly. But the way we deliver a platform so it can be consumed and innovative, that has to change. And that's what Idle on demand about. That's what this Vertica conference is about. This is about engineers talking to engineers. And that is HP kind of coming full circle.  It was like, bring in the computer and don't take out a PowerPoint, open the cover. It was an engineering company. I worked there for nine years and you got the manual, here's the parts list. You know. And that was, you know. Hey, which part never you want to look at? You're using those resistors? No, they were geeking out. They would geek out. Sales process. Yeah. And that, you know, whether it's Meg talking about reinvesting and innovation or us breaking maybe the traditional rules of a nice, safe HP where we're mixing it up and mashing it up. That I think reflects not just what we want to do, what we need to do as a company. And- Which is known for reliability, trust. They had that engineering geek culture before it was cool to be geek with Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett. Great to see them mentioning the keynote. But, you know, also they were humble. HP was kind of a humble company. Well, you know, when you're humble you can be humble for a couple reasons, right? When you're not humble, it's either because you have the best mousetrap in the world and just everybody else is going to find that out. And if you can pull that off all the credit to you but there's a lot of people that are not humble if I can be polite, that don't have the goods, okay? They have- That's why theCUBE exists. We want to highlight that. That's what we do. Well, there you go. Well, the customer's highlighted. We had the Phillips here basically called out, laid out, who had what? And, you know. There's nowhere to hide. There's nowhere to hide anymore. So when I talk about HP being aggressive it's also we want to have the goods. HP has always been a company that pride itself that we deliver real stuff and we take care of our customers. And if you can do those two things, okay? And I don't know if that's a bumper sticker, you know, real stuff and customer success. But if you deliver on those two things and you're straightforward about it then I think a lot of people can get a lot of value out of you. And that's what we're trying to do. It's just now we've turned on the turbo boosters, opened up the doors, and you're seeing an HP that is just beginning and we're having a lot of fun doing it. And that's the big focus right now. Jeff, thanks for joining us on theCUBE. We appreciate it. We got to go. We're getting hooked on time, getting the hook. We are here live in Boston, Massachusetts. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.