All right, thank you for joining and welcome to this E4M Tabula Talk series which is a specially curated series touching upon topics that are of great concern to all of us and today we'll be talking about the theme for today is Strong Together. In fact, what COVID has done to all industries is both great challenges and publishers have not been spared even and today we have some of the top publishing executives who will be talking about what COVID has done to them and how they tackled it. So, before proceeding, I want to introduce my esteemed speakers. I have with me Mr. Saleel Kumar who is the CEO of CEO Digital India today group. Welcome Mr. Kumar. Mr. Arijit Chatterjee, Chief Strategy Officer, NDTV. Mr. Rohit Chadda, CEO of Digital Publishing G Digital. Mr. Sanjay Sindhavani, CEO Indian Express Online Media and Mr. Ran Bak, I'm sorry, Chief Revenue Officer Tabula.  Hope we have come to another phase of the narrative has shifted from where it was maybe few months back and now I think there's vaccine around and a lot of new hope is around. So, my first question to all of you is what emotions are you feeling, what keeps you strong during these COVID times?  So, I can maybe start with Mr. Kumar. Well, let me begin with saying that thanks for having us and it's a pleasure to be again with you. I think these are challenging times. These are also places where you look at disruption and how disruption gives you opportunity to look at new avenues, be more innovative, be more flexible and see what is it that you can deliver and obviously making sure that everybody is safe and healthy. I think one of the things that the pandemic gave us was trust everyone and make sure that the teams, the real asset of an organization being their man part is taken care of. That's most important and that's what we did and I'm sure everybody did making them work from home, saying that this can work from home. It's a safer environment. Work was second health and family was given the first place and obviously, we all felt the bump because suddenly the business had stopped. But for the digital side, it had turned around and we saw huge influx of traffic and great opportunities. What I was talking to Roy sometime back before we just joined or went live was how it turned around on OTT, how smart TVs came into play, how mobile consumption has grown. I was reading another article which said mobile consumption time spent is nearly doubled. We saw a lot of people coming in reading news and obviously they wanted news which was accurate and factually correct. Everything was on an overdrive, whether it was the fact checking, whether it was bringing the right news to the audience and trying to garner as much as market share as you could do. Right. Mr Chatterjee, your response to this question, what emotions are you feeling and what keeps you going and what keeps you going in this tough time? Well, I'd like to thank for having me and always a pleasure to be with everyone virtually, hopefully soon in person. I'd like to thank a certain Mr Daniels and a certain Mr Jameson. I'm just kidding for keeping us strong during this time but I think strong is too strong a word really Roy. I think we've all had our moments. It's been a tumultuous time the last nine months that we've never felt or experienced before, staying away from friends, family, parents in some cases. So it's been a tough year but I think what's kept us going is pretty much thankful and grateful for being healthy and friends and family being okay. I know that these two should pass. So I think that's been something that's kept us strong. And also I think the fact that making a subtle mention about taking as an opportunity, we saw real surge in consumption, pretty much a technology and for us it's broadcast and digital and we pretty much saw a tonic shift of consumption patterns etc. Moving towards digital which we had always believed in as a force driver. Just working and keeping, as they say, the gunpowder dry, not doing anything silly, making sure you get the basics right, keep it going and then kind of building blocks to make sure that all this passes, you're still doing the things the right way. And also I think just from a work perspective personally, just working for a brand that people trust, that people believe in credibility, I think keeps me going and wanting me to go to work every day. So I think that's what's really been the takeaway from the nine months. Yeah. Right. Mrs. Sandovali, what has been the story at the Express Group? So first of all, thanks for having me here and thanks to all the panelists. Story at Express basically, like everyone else, this came as a surprise. But what I think is fear is a very strong emotion and when the pandemic struck, everybody was fearful of what's going to happen and everybody feared for the worst. And I think that kind of drives your survival instincts. It's an inbuilt mechanism in everyone to kind of figure out what's inside. And I think that brings out some of the best in people. And initially, our response was, like Saral mentioned, to ensure the safety of all our people, to give them that comfort that the organization is with them. We do whatever it takes to keep them safe, keep them protected and enable them to go through this crisis. Having done, I think what we saw was the teams really kind of bounced back in a way we haven't seen in a long time. And as we were discussing before this started, that it's been one of very good years for us, except for the initial months. After that, we've seen a rapid recovery and rapid growth. And everybody's mentioned consumption has been on top levels. And I think with the help of partners like the Boola and Boola, we also saw that we've been following up on the revenue side. Right, right, right. So it's been mostly similar stories. But Mr. Chadda, if I have to ask you, what is the kind of approach that you took at digital? I know there's a lot of spike in digital, but I mean, what was your approach? Sorry, your audio is muted here. I said this before, I tend to do that. So yeah, like everyone else, thanks for having me. It's great to be in such an esteemed company. I mean, so I echo everyone's views. Sorry, I think there's some issue with the network. Okay, I think let me then wait for... Yeah, so whatever I was saying was like everyone said, you know, so health comes first, family comes first. And hence, that was the first priority. We did not have a culture to work from home before this. So I think that was a huge shift in how we started working. And what we saw was tremendous growth. I think the entire team really showed their grit. And everyone came together to work to do really, really well. We've not been among the top in terms of our positions in terms of ranking, etc., till the past year. But we saw that when the teams came together, started working together, respective, there was no timing, there's no day starting, there's no day end. And I think it also helped the team to focus, because when you have fear in the air, then something I work in really allow you to not think about something that's bad and just change your focus and it helped, that helped. And that showed in the numbers, we've grown really, really well, like most content players. And yeah, although initially the revenue numbers didn't really kick in as the user numbers did, but that started moving in the same direction now. So yeah, it's been a good time at least from a business perspective. Right. Mr. Bhak, I want to come to you. You have been helping publishers deal with crisis many a times. You have done it, but tell me what kept you going? What were the last nine months like at Tabula? So I will start to thank everyone that joined me for this panel.  I think you ask about the motion. I think I'm very excited about the fact that after nine months, we are still strong together. And we're working with a lot of publishers and advertisers to bring the right content to the right user. But I want to start before that, because I think that all the things of uncertainty, and someone even asked me about what is my tips out of the box. And I said, where is the box? So I think that one thing that we learned is that probably in the last nine months, but probably also in the next nine months, we will face a lot of things out of the box. We will need to figure out the box for each one of us. Because what we did until today, not going to happen again. We're not going to be the mode of operation for the nearest future. I don't know what's going on. A lot of people are asking me working from home, working from office. How are you going to manage it? And I think that we need to wait and to see what will happen. You talked optimistically about the COVID-19 vaccine. I still don't see it in the nearest future, even though a lot of people are talking about it. But we need to wait and to see what will happen. I used to come to India probably every three weeks. I didn't come in the last nine months and I'm missing the people I'm working with. I'm missing the environment to do business in. Of course, missing the food, but that's a different story. So I think we need to be optimistic. We need to wait a little bit. There is still uncertainty. But the fact that we are still strong together and making sure that the business will say sustainable, that's the most important thing. Right. This phase has also been a learning, relearning, unlearning, and all of us have had takeaways from it. So my next question is about it.  And I want to start with Sindhavani. Thanks. So I think the key learning is that every day is a new day. You start afresh every day. You get what you are doing. You see the results. If it's working fine, you continue. If it is not, the environment is changing. You re-adapt. You reorganize yourself. So there are rules or a handbook which can guide you through this kind of a moment. And you have to create the, for example, work from home. None of us. I mean, we all thought work from home is a theoretical concept. You can probably have a few people taking off a few days in a year and that's work from home. But for the nine months continuously, 100% of the people working from home, I mean, nobody could have imagined that could have happened. And it's happened. Yes, the team has done very well. They have delivered. But I think there are challenges in that. And as leaders, we need to figure out what are the challenges. And the way I look at it, for example, specifically to this place, the new young people, they do get a lot of learning by sitting together with their peer group and, you know, learning from them. So, you know, the class who's been there, done things, learned it through a social interaction, we may not really fit to work from home is really bad. But at the younger level, fresh people, they need to get that. So we need to figure out what are the alternatives? How do we bring back that same learning experience in a very different kind of environment? So I think the other thing, you have to keep evolving, you have to keep learning, you have to keep looking deeper, keep interacting with your teams.  How do you motivate them? So fear was driving it through a certain length. But as the and the fear settles down, you have to think of other ways to keep the team cohesive, motivated, connected and organized. Right. Mr. Chabab, for you, what have been the key takeaways for your business, some new learnings for you and what have they been? So it's been, it's, so this is a life changing event.  I mean, it's, it's very difficult to change user behavior. But fortunately or unfortunately, just in the past four to five years, we've had two life changing events that at least where India is concerned, the first one was demonetization, which we changed the way we started using digital payments. And the second one is this, that COVID it's actually affecting the entire, the entire world. So at times like this, I think also presents a lot of opportunity.  Some of the, some of the companies also did capitalize on this, especially in the healthcare space, et cetera. For us, I think what we saw, and what we wanted to do was because we saw that okay, a consumer behavior was changing. So we wanted to capitalize on that, on that fact. We ended up, we ended up launching a couple of platforms on OTT, a couple of apps rather on OTT for our largest broadcast branch. And I think the way, the way that we started working was more like, more like a tech startup, where we started focusing on speed and agility. And what we started doing was breaking down larger projects into very small micro projects. So that instead of investing a lot of resources in one project or in a large project, we actually keep re-iterating and keep, we basically followed an iterative process to actually see, you know, what was the result of the micro project and then whether we want to invest more in that same direction or not. So, so yeah, I think that was a key learning in terms of process or the change that we did in terms of process that has helped us adapt in this difficult environment. Right, right. Mr. Kumar, for discipline also, this has been, I mean, apart from bringing a challenging time and opportunity also. Tell me, what has been your observation and learnings from these nine months? Okay, let me put it like this. I think one of the first things was how connectivity mattered. You know, suddenly the internet became the backbone of all what you were doing. I mean, it was there, but you know, coming into an office with a lease line, you never thought about it. I think the internet, the connectivity, how you work within the family, because trust me, you know, when you work in the home, there is family. And, you know, when you're working from home, morning nine till six, seven, eight, nine, sometimes 10 o'clock, they're just wondering why what are you sitting and doing inside. Then people are coming and going. People think any time is a good time to call out, make a call, expanded number of hours. And then this concept has moved ahead where we look at saying, where from anywhere? I mean, you could actually go to go, I mean, there is some staff of ours, which is sitting down in Goa, there is some staff of ours, which have gone down to some mill stations, and they've managed to secure good connectivity and they're working from anywhere. So what's happened is, as long as you're being able to be productive, and are able to contribute, life becomes that much easier for all of us. Right, right. You know, with that, with that said, I think what was most, what was the most thing was like, obviously, like you said product, I mean, an opportunity perspective. I mean, think about it, everybody's working from home. Suddenly what's happened to the commercial space? I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of square feet of offices that are empty. I'm sure organizations have already started thinking about it, that you know, what percentage of their staff can actually work from home. And right productive, this job can be done comfortably from home. And the employee now may actually get a choice when he's when he's being interviewed, you know, would you like to be permanently working from home? Now, for some, it is, you know, someone like me says no. And the younger audience and the younger gen sets, they turn on and say, yeah, why not? I mean, as long as I'm able to contribute, I'm more than happy to do that. Right. It was that you had to learn to grapple with emotions.  And there are times where your body language or you sign off and say listen, cool off, we'll take this down. You know, because you're talking to a screen here, I think that was one, one thing that you realize that emotions really played. And you really didn't know when the day, you know, working from home also they never let you know, we never got to know whether it's a Friday or a Saturday. And then suddenly somebody said, listen, today's Saturday. And he said, Oh, really? Yeah, okay. Because that concept of getting ready and being completely moving out of the office, that structure was not there. It needed a little bit more planning. I think today, again, working from home has now been able to, you know, you've structured it now. So now, in fact, if you ask someone to come to office, you have to actually switch gears. And we have to go back to work from home. It is again, switching gears and setting up the structures, right, executive forces key. So you plan well, and you try and execute is something that I think that will be very, very important. And team management morale, I think is the key. The other thing what we did was we made sure that we stuck with our partners and continue to build and stay connected in terms of what is happening? How are things? What is the way forward? Are they looking? What are the new signs and signals? Are they catching? How can you be nimble and innovative and also make sure that you could change your strategy instantly and say, okay, this is how we'll function and this is what it is. So it was, I mean, it's still learning. We're still picking up the new habits. And I'm sure as we move along, it'll be a new work culture that's going to emerge out of this. Right. Mr. Chattuji, you have heard speakers before you tell me, have we seen a permanent shift in terms of mindset work culture as many of them pointed out? And what are the learnings from you? What have been the learnings for you if you could elaborate, please? Are you in mute? You're in mute. Sorry. That's for his job. Yeah, I know. Real, I think the whole concept of permanence is over with this pandemic, right? So when you say, is there going to be a permanent mindset? Honest answer, I don't know. I'll come back to doing the same things that we were doing nine months ago and take this as a passing phase. But I think some things that have made us kind of think and go back to the drawing board. Or maybe they were always there and this is almost being a catalyst in kind of expediting that thought process. Like, for example, I think something that's now, it was always a content is king. I think that's more true now than ever. The user has become about good credible content and they know where it is available and where they want to look for it. So that makes us publishers work much harder in getting that content to them along with partners like the Pula, which help us disseminate that content as well. Be the frilities of an ad supported business model has become more evident than ever before.  How do you build more direct to consumer relationships is the holy grail of a subscription model. The answer to all of this, we don't know.  We don't know as much about our users, a lot of our other partners own the data. How do we get back that data as we move towards a cookie towards a subscription model? Those are things I think that this has really got all of us thinking around, right? The overrated importance given to physical proximity. We see a whole building of 300 people and today we've kind of gone into distributed co-working in one of our locations and productivity is at an all-time high. And this would have never happened if not for this unfortunate pandemic. So I think these are changes that will help us. What this has done is make us go back to the drawing board on certain things we took for granted. But whether all this will be impermanence, I think it's too early to say. Right. Mr. Bakar, I want to bring you in at this moment and I want to ask you that what has been your understanding and your perspective on what people have learned and at Tabula, how have you been helping publishers during this time specifically? So first of all, I think that we all learned and I totally agree with what has been said here. We all learned to be very agile. We need to be flexibility, otherwise we need to keep flexibility, otherwise you're not going to be able to stand still with what's going on. So you need to be agile, by the way, not just in business. Even with our families, with our parents, with our kids, they are facing a lot of changes too and we need to help them to take the right decisions. In terms of publishers and advertisers, I think that the agility means for them, want to help them to be creative to find, for publishers to find the right monetization, but to keep the values of your publisher, your organization at the same level as it was before COVID-19. So Arigit, for example, touched the issue of fake news, who is telling the right information, who is showing the right information. It's become very important to a lot of publishers and the way they kept their values meant a lot to them. That's for the publisher side. For the advertisers side, I think that we found out that a lot of advertisers didn't have any way of doing or creating the right content for themselves. So what we did in order to become agile for them, we actually opened a creative shop, creative studio, and we helped them for free to run and to create content that they will be able to advertise and to sell their products. Now, it sounds like I'm not promoting anything because it's for free, but I think this is the agility of what you're expecting from partners that you're working with. You need them to help you, you need them to support you, and they need to do it in a way that they listen to your needs and create solutions for you. And this is the agility, I think that we are looking from all of our partners. And the last thing I think that Salil touched it very, very much, and I strongly believe in it, is to be agile to your employees, to the people that work for you. You need to accommodate their needs, not all of them are the same, not all of them suffering the same concerns or challenges, and you need to listen to them. So for example, he gave the idea of working from home, working from office, what will happen in the future? Do we still need an office? Maybe yes, and maybe not. Maybe to some, maybe for R&D, yes, but for sales people, no. I don't know what's the answer, but I know that I need to be very flexible and to keep myself very, very open with my mindset and to listen to my employees and to the people around me. Right. So picking from what you said, I just want to pose my next question to everyone, start on Mr. Chatterjee. What has also happened is that the way content is consumed has changed. There's a different interaction between the consumer and content. And if you look at it, for example, my question to you, Mr. Chatterjee, is are publishers now looking at a hybrid model with low cost ads and low subscription costs to stay relevant? I would, again, I don't know what you mean by low cost ads, because I think the day you start going low on your advertising, any hope of being premium, which I'm sure all of us on this panel strive to be. So I don't think there will ever be a point where we want to go into low cost ads. I think what will happen is you will start augmenting or rather complimenting your existing ad business. And I mentioned the audio question as well. If anything, this pandemic has completely evidenced the fact of how inconsistent an ad supported model can be. And that's where partners like Tabula, business models around content marketing, business models around subscription, you talk about subscription, absolutely. But I don't think all of us agree that India is not, and at least we think, and I would love to hear what some of the others think, India is not a country where you can peddle a subscription for anything and get people to subscribe for it. So the moments you need to get into a subscription model, it's probably you're looking at a three to five year plan. What's your data strategy around it? What's the value proposition that you're going to build around content and user experience. So it's not a short term game. Nobody can say I'm going to roll out a subscription model because the pandemic's here and the moment the pandemic goes away, I'm going to roll it back out. So I don't think those things will happen, Raheel, you know, content marketing, and that's where Tabula plays such an important role for us as partners, not as just a platform. We work together on creating content and run mentioned every advertiser today wants to tell a story. I think the days are over when a brand would say on digital specifically, let me run some video ads or pre-rolls or just about banner advertising. Nobody wants to buy by advertising anymore. That's just like the bottom of the battle. You're scraping the bottom of the battle pretty much, right? Brands want to tell stories and that's where publishers and platforms like Tabula become so critical because you create content, you create that content, and then you figure out ways of getting that story out.  And I think those are the kind of supplementary business models that we see. It's not about just low cost ads or low cost subscription. I think we just have to say how do we move towards monetizing audiences rather than just a page view. I think you'll see that dramatic shift on digital as we move along. Right. Anyone else who wants to address this? Yes. I think that data is the key driver here, especially for publishers, but also today for a lot of advertisers. You need to get insights. You need to know what your audience wants and what they like. And mainly they are reading some articles or content within your site. You need to know what they want to consume. And I think it's really important for each publisher to have insights into their audience and to act accordingly. So there is no question that data is the key driver for a lot of things, pandemic or not pandemic, data is the key right now. Right. Mr. Kumar, I can see you nodding. Would you like to add a bit to it? So your audience is mute. I guess Rohit is infectious. Everybody starts. I was about to say that my presence is infectious. There's no doubt. I think that's the future goal with all the things that are happening around with the cookie. Data and first party data is going to be really key. And that is where partners, especially when you look at Tabula and I recall the first time I was catching up with Ran and we were discussing whether which are the partners you'd like to really select and go for. It was that you had options. I remember I don't want to name other brands here, but there was stiff competition. And when you looked at what mattered the most for an organization came in from the Tabula team. Right from the top, everyone was interested to, I mean, their hunger to capture business is very good. And in a very positive way, we could make out that being a global organization, I've had the pleasure of meeting there, being in their office in Israel, as well as in Bangkok and in the US. And I'm sure they have a couple of more offices. You're talking about China and Salim, you need to explore. Yeah, it depends on the QBR. What happens is that when you looked at trying to look at which are the partners, you looked at this partner, it said, I'm global. I am leading this by technology, data and numbers. So we got all of that ingredient in there. And I think it was a fabulous choice. And today also, when we look at trying to move ahead with data, I remember about a year and a half back, there was a workshop, they had organized in Israel, where quite a few publishers, I think most of us on this panel would have been there. I also got a ping from a friend of mine saying, is this the version he's looking at this live broadcast. And so he said, is this the torn down version of Israel, the get together we had, I said, no, I'm sure that's not going to let it go like that. The moment times are better, we are going to be back in Israel or the headquarters. So we felt that this was where data is required, where technology help is required, where innovation is required, where you need some support from a partner, you saw it all coming. And I must give this to their credit that being whatever times it is, financially, they were very stable and we've never seen an issue on that front. So this is something, and they've been very transparent. And I hear about their competitors very often that they try and pick up a part of the contract and throw that saying, listen, this is not eligible. Hence this deduction, this deduction, we never seen that. And finally to say this, that while the data has collated all the information, it's not sparingly shared. And I must say this, when I say shared is, it's never a very strong regime of a quarterly business review, which we call as QBR. And the best part of the QBR is it's not that some junior person is sitting down, giving the information. It's a two-day long conversation. So you get into the grind, you get to know all your data, they talk about what they're planning to do in the future, how the performance of the partnerships been in the last quarter, what are the issues they're facing, what are the areas they want us to support, and also say where are the areas where they can support us. And they also look at future projections around this time, I think that helped a lot. We put a lot of that stuff together. And in fact, we had more than one or two of those where we had quite a few of back and forth and saying, I think we could do this and this will do better. And that helped to grow in revenue, it helped to grow in the data that was being accumulated, and how to use it more productively was something that both of us saw. And going forward, I think it's going to be very important. I mean, we have to understand that individuals, organizations where you have your data, how secure it is, whether it is following the policies and the guidelines, global guidelines, you're doing that. And all of that is being done very well. And I strongly believe that the data play is going to be important, it's going to get more and more. Right. I want to bring in Mr. Sindharani and Mr. Chedda at this point. The theme is stronger together. I want to start with you, Mr. Chedda, that how has your partnership been with the Bula? And in your view, what else can they do? How can they make it even better? How can they support their partners even better? Well, I would echo most of what Salil has said, that it's been a very strong partnership. I think what the insights, I look forward to the QBR as well, to be very honest, because I do tend to get some of the insights that I may have missed or my team may have missed earlier. And in fact, if I were to be very honest, I'd actually use the template of the QBR for my internal product team as well and told them to track it in a similar format for other things. So thanks to Ran for that. And yeah, I think every QBR, we do tend to see some interesting new concepts and ideas that the team, that the Bula team is working on and that they intend to bring in, which are mostly good innovations. And hence, it's mostly about, hey, Lokia, this is good, we want to do this, and hey, Lokia, this is also good, we want to do this. So yeah, I think it's been a good strong partnership and we hope that this continues for a much, much longer time and explore more ways of working together in a more strategic way and possibly expand that even further. Ran and I have been having talks about it. So we're looking forward to that, looking forward to a very good future. Right. Mr. Sindhavani, same question to you. You have association with the Bula and what can they do to support better? I think we just renewed with the Bula for the next two years. So I think that just goes out to say, believe in the Bula team. Having said that, a very small example, just a couple of hours before this conference, we were discussing a new product idea and the editorial team wanted certain features and they were saying, take and product will take time to build it. And I remember that in one of the QBRs, the Bula team had mentioned that they could help us with that particular aspect. And I told the team, don't worry about this. Reach out to the Bula tomorrow and your problem will be solved. So it's not just about revenues per se. So there's a lot of other things that the Bula does and they bring out those ideas to you in the QBRs. And I just picked up one example from that, which just happened a couple of hours back. I would like to add one thing, Rohil, because I'm a little bit concerned. None of them gave me a good idea of what I need to improve for the next couple of months. But I'm going to give to myself. I think that we need to get better connection to the editorial teams of publishers that are working with the Bula in India in order to empower them to use the right insights because they have all the tools, they have all the knowledge, they have the data in front of them. Sometimes they don't know how to utilize it. And that's our job to show them because we all agree that data is the key right now and we need to empower them to use the data in the right way. So I think that's something I'm taking to myself and my team to make sure that all the editorial teams will be well equipped with the knowledge that they need in order to utilize in a better way than the data that they have. I'll add to that actually. I'll add to what Ran said that another piece that I can actually suggest to Ran and we've been wanting to do that for a while is more around vernacular languages in the country. So we've seen some tremendous growth come in on the vernacular side in the past year and some of the tools that we have from the Bula work super well for international languages and Ran had really appreciated if we can have them in vernacular languages so that vernacular editorial can gain the benefit of data as well as the English editorial team that we're doing. Mr. Bhakar, I want to ask you this question though you touched upon it earlier as well. So these are times of uncertainty that we saw where on digital they were consuming aggressively content but they were low advertising expense at the same time. Tell me how did you deal with those rapid changes that happened in a matter of few weeks, few months? How did you adjust? So first of all today I have the ability to look at the perspective a little bit back or to do kind of a post-mortem. So yes there was a time that the advertiser spend went down but actually it came back and in a much stronger way. So and we heard it from other people here that the business went down but the business actually went up dramatically and significantly for most of the publishers around the world by the way it's not just in India. I can say that we as I said at the beginning we were very agile to understand let's take airlines. So airlines frozen they're opposed there is nothing you can do with them and this is the right time to shift your efforts to a vertical that can work much better insurance, face mask, health, working from home environment, distance learning. This is all stuff that a lot of companies become flourish or start to flourish as soon as pandemic strikes. You need to shift your resources, you need to shift your people and the mindset in order to make success. I'm going to give another example we took our HR people we stopped to recruit you can recruit on the beginning of pandemic. So we took the HR people we gave them a very urgent training to become SDRs and they helped us they helped us with a lot of leads. So you need to again agile, agility and you need to shift your resources in order to keep the creativity and also to be productive. Right, right, right. Mr. Chatterjee tell me this brush of readers you know online coming online growing digitally has it also forced publishers to introduce some new products when it comes to news and what have been those innovations at NDTV for example do you see what kind of innovation do you see happening as we move on? So I think really I can't stress enough on this and on the earlier question as well the plurry of readers also makes you want to take a much stronger look on the kind of content that you're creating. With new platforms coming on board I think what we've seen is new form factors new platforms becoming more and more prevalent right if someone's at home the when they're creating when they when they consume content what content they consume becomes more important and therefore what we've done as a strategy is always making sure that you can access our content anytime and everywhere. I think under the entire mantra of anytime and everywhere it's really important that the same premium credible content with the same accuracy and the same speed gets published whether it's our own platform whether it's a partner platform or or anywhere else that's what that's the hallmark of what you want to stand for. On the lines of we realized that a lot of people were a lot of our users were reading content late into the night or in the evenings and therefore we actually introduced dark mode on our to kind of their eyesight etc and make it easier for people to read content so the dark mode was one of them. We introduced an EPG product where we saw OTTs and Rohit Sears I'm sure he bet estimated this. People suddenly had so much time to spend on OTT platforms on what they want to watch recommendations etc so that's a platform that we launched where we searched for content and you know ratings and social viewing etc so that's something that we started working on and we see this moving forward as well. So I think those are some of the areas that you know like we just launched on glance the lock screen app and on snapchat we are going to be powering a lot of news content on glance and snapchat that's just another example of us trying to reach an audience that wouldn't really come like the 18 to 25 year old audience which wouldn't be an NDTV audience but we want them to get the content in their format it's a vertical video it's mobile friendly short for mobile these are the kind of changes I think we're all making a vis-a-vis platforms that we're going to be available on and we just see becoming a part of the DNA of business and work moving forward. Right Mr Kumar same question the kind of innovation you have done in terms of new products news products and where would that I mean take you in 2021 would it remain the same would it change our post pandemic I think it's still a new type no okay perfect yeah I guess you know each one of us are working with various innovations right across I mean for example for us we added a few of the tech channels which were in various regional as well as local targeted form of content then there was podcast that got introduced because we realized more and more podcast was going on and we doubled up on podcast in terms of news because audio news is again something that's really big again being streamed at various platforms including devices especially the connected ones like Alexa so you're pushing content there and then obviously there was a leap in terms of trying to see how we could do video commerce I think going forward that video commerce piece is going to be something that's going to grow much bigger as we go along very recently there were some announcements made by some other players talking about how video commerce is going to grow through the roof those have been certain areas where the group has been investing the digital side of business we've always invested and we continue to push as much as possible in fact hiring is on a double drive trying to make sure that you know you get the best talent that's available in the trade today so that goes on right across whether it's in the form of radio or video or text and again we try to work out in new and more innovative ways of our digital magazine which is the India today most trade magazine across Asia and tried to ensure that there were no disruptions of any sort in terms of because physically wasn't available then how do you make it available digitally right across so there has been a good focus there going forward into the next year 21 like I mentioned the focus drivers are going to be audio podcasts how they are growing we're seeing huge growth adaptation there we are also noticing the video piece growing and consumption on the bigger screens grow because like I said you know how smart TV consumption suddenly grown everybody's sitting at home mobile obviously he's been growing because now everybody's at home I'm sure not Indian houses four members have four TVs so what's happened is there are four mobiles which are picking up content and you're trying to make sure that you've been able to personalize content that's one other area where we see tabula helps in with the feed that they bring in they have a good intelligence tool which is always learning and I mean I think these are two words which we all will hear you know artificial intelligence and machine learning keeps improving but that's a fact I mean the recommendation engine helps in fact we've seen more than 100% click-through rates which helps not only increase pages per visit from within the content of our of our entire repertoire of content and reduce the bounce rate effectively and that's one of the unique factors so we see that more and more of that growing and as we move along data is again going to be a key area where we are going to be focusing much more and see how we build that right right this is my final question to all of you I'll start with you is that 2020 has been a year we'll all remember for all the reasons maybe negative reasons but what do you want 2022 look like from a business and a personal perspective 2021 2021 yes I think that's a given that you know everybody wants the business to grow and stabilize I think if I get to the core I think we would like to see our revenues to be more diversified because I don't think the pandemic is going away anywhere as as Rand said you know uh there's talk of vaccine but but everybody getting the vaccine is to the long time away and we will see more waves coming so so I think we have to be prepared and diversification is one way of preparing for it secondly I think like it or not the ad inventory is going to keep on increasing as more and more people digitize as the consumption shifts to more digital platforms the supply side is going to increase and the prices will keep dropping for advertising so the value of advertising will be on what kind of audiences are you able to collect and what knowledge do you have about your audience I think that's where data becomes key so if it has information about my users you know which can be add value to the advertisers uh like you know this is what the bullet does and that's where they create value of the drive so that will help us help you get me minutes and that's what publishing are interested so we are not ad forms which will aggregate billions of people we all operate in missions and we we get a certain percentage of market but I think where all of us excel is attracting a certain pile of audiences but today what happens a large part of these audiences are sold at the same price as any other audience and that premium that you you you are supposed to get for the premiumness of audiences is not really happening so I think ability in data to get that next year and to ensure that use that data to get the premium is one thing uh divisive revenue streams whether it's subscriptions whether it's content commerce whether it's uh content marketing whether it's e-conferences I think that's the other large part that you want to grow and get right and I think ensuring that your teams say stay safe and healthy uh you are able to get the right work environment from them whether they work from home or whether they work in an office environment how do you ensure their well-being uh you know for uh last months have been very high stress for a lot of people right the impact of stress is not immediately visible but it starts showing over prolonged periods so how do you find means to mitigate that stress uh across your teams and people across different levels uh the good thing is the work behind us uh as sir said you know we are back in the hiring cycle we are now planning for the next year we are hiring for the next year we're preparing for it telling those are positives and that will help us solve the issues but I think for me the largest concern is how do you ensure that your team stay in the best of spirits uh going forward and uh the new work environment becomes more conducive to for them whichever way it is right right so same question to you how do you want 2020 to look like from a business perspective from a personal perspective and your thoughts sorry it's on mute yeah third time's a charm I thought but it didn't happen yeah so 2020 wasn't 2020 hasn't been a bad year for us at all uh yes from from a health perspective there have been the concerns that everybody's talked been talking about from but from a business perspective if I speak it's not been a bad year for us and hence and personally personally as well I mean if business does well then I'm happy so it's it's very very intertwined so from business perspective it's been it's been it's been well it's been good we've been able to be been able to show some very good numbers both in terms of user growth as well as revenues I echo the sentiments of my co-panelists about you know the fact that there have to be new areas new areas of monetization I echo the sentiment around the focus on video in fact I didn't mention earlier that we launched news OTT apps during the pandemic in fact and I really appreciate the the effort that the team actually put in working in in the kind of environment naturally building brand new apps and launching them during the lockdown um so it it was great I think what I want 2020 to remind us of is is the grit and strength of the team that we have in fact all of us have because all of the all of the leaders here I think have seen that you know that their teams have have stood the the tough time and and have actually come out on top each each and every one of us so I want 2020 to stand for the fact that um that if then the going gets tough we we were tough enough to actually get going um and 2021 is um the focus there is obviously going to be about new areas of monetization new products we have a lot of things that we had lined up actually for 2020 which unfortunately for the pandemic we we will have to do we have had to push them to 2021 um because like Ran said once the pandemic started some of the pressures on hiring etc happened um and hence we had to put some plans on hold um to keep mindful of the investments that we are making um because nobody knew as to which direction is our things going to go in so so yeah we look back at 2020 in a very positive manner uh because of the way that business has turned out um and we are very excited about going into 2021 hopefully um being able to to execute the plans that we had for for 2020 early on right um and Mr Chatterjee what quick thoughts um firstly I hope in 2021 we can do this in person and we don't have to be doing this virtually I agree and that too in the tabula office in Israel yeah absolutely fine with me I'll settle for anywhere so as long as we are all together in person and socializing and we can get run to India I think we settle for India as well so that's the first thing that you know that comes to mind um from a business standpoint we just want to keep building on the fundamentals getting those right um it's been a tough year I mean I know numbers are great uh while revenue um the last quarter we recorded the highest ever revenue in the digital business growth of 31% year on year so business is good but make no mistake it's been a tough year um mentally challenging uh more than numbers uh numbers are just one part of the business the entire framework of you know health uh people um getting through uh you know friends and families and colleagues who have been affected by the pandemic it's been a tough year so hopefully it you know we are all in a better space mentally next year is what I would want to hope for everyone and once we do that I think business will follow suit so I think we'll be covered there right right right uh so there are some questions from the audiences I'll just try to get into them uh yes there's a question from Mr. Sumit Rana content takes a long time to kind of yield results is displacing important for keeping the gas on Mr. Kumar I want to ask I want to pose this question to you okay yep yeah yes yes can you hear me yeah yes can I can I get the question again please so Mr. Rana is asking uh content takes a long time to yield results is display still most important for keeping the gas on well I know I mean listen display is um is a is a is a is a key a part to the mix but uh you know would it keep would it help you keep burning no uh advertisers today look look at telling a story they want to do it in the most innovative ways one of the reasons I if you recall I mean during this session I mentioned about uh video commerce uh that's again a part of the storytelling it's um also trying to get contextualized and make sure that you know what you're talking about how you're going to narrate the story what is it going to be it could be in form of a text content piece it could be in a form of a of a video story anything like that how do you integrate the advertisement with your content is going to be more important display advertisement is not I mean today not everybody is really interested in it's not um a key component I mean it's not the biggest component anymore right right Mr. Buck I want to pose this question to you it is from Surabhi Nagpal the question is how do you see content marketing taking shape in the times to come basically the trends that we can expect so I think that first of all content marketing is for a long time um stand uh and I think that we're going to see a shape of video as as Salil mentioned I do believe that video will become a very key component within the content marketing um I also think that in some country they call it native um and that will be embedded into discovery platform like tabula that native will be part of the offering uh as of today it's it's part of the offering so it's it's about native and about discovery I think by the way the most important thing the most important thing about content marketing or about discovery platforms will be the place you will discover content in the future so until today we thought only about desktop and maybe mobile right probably probably in the next couple of years you will find it in autonomous cars on your refrigerator in some other places maybe on your tv uh so content marketing or discovery platform will become much more wide use for a lot of users right right miss and Rani and there's a question do you see subscription as the primary source of revenue for digital publishers in the future so I think it will become an important part of this revenue mix uh becoming a primary mix I think it's a long journey uh I think Alijit mentioned that you know it it's it's three to five years uh at the minimum scale if you look at samples in the west for instance you look at the most successful nyte or wsj or financial times you know they've been in the game for almost 20 years before they hit you know a million mark on subscribers so subscribers are short term play it is a very important play uh it is going to be a indeed integral strategy I think for most publishers but you will have advertising subscriptions and other forms of of revenue as a as a part of your mix different people will have different proportions but I think people will like to have a diversified revenue stream right uh there's a question from antarik shgol this is for Mr chedda what can be the impact of any new censorship laws on advertising and subscription revenue streams well till now I mean digital has been a free bird from where the otta is concerned um and I mean they've been I mean we've been taking liberties in terms of content because and we've been showing the the two two reality good good content I mean um it it is going to impact to um to an extent um that so while it may not so two parts yeah one is uh the quality of content or the kind of content that that you're going to end up seeing um and second is the impact that it's going to have on revenues now um I I don't see that it is it is going to have too much of impact on revenues um while I mean good content is good content if you chop off a few scenes or you add a few beeps here and there um I mean while it's obviously not going to be appreciated by the by the end user but then if it's happening every I mean if it's happening across platforms you you don't really end up having a choice from from a user perspective but I don't think that it's going to affect revenues um revenues at all right I think there will be some kind of discontent among users because of these this censorship because they're used to watching um you know all kinds of content on digital um and once the censorship laws come in uh that's going to be I mean some sort of customer dissatisfaction great we have still a lot of questions but unfortunately we're out of time and I want to thank all of you for joining us especially Tabula for partnering and supporting the E4M and bringing us E4M and Tabula talk series and we look forward to many more and many more such conversations with all of you thank you once again for joining us thank you very much and uh wish you a healthy year for everyone thank you thank you thank you bye bye thank you bye bye


All right. Thanks everybody for joining. My name is Jason Hunt. I'm a software architect with IBM Focused on things cloud and NFV My name is Thomas Spatzi. I work in the IBM Netcool team especially looking at things like service assurance. I will cover this today And I'm Toby Ford. I work at AT&T and responsible for the the architecture of our domain 2 platform All right, so what we're going to do today if you've been to a number of the other sessions to talk about NFV A lot of them have probably talked about you know core aspects You know things that need to be done with service chaining or neutron or you know hypervisor enhancements That's not what we're going to cover today We're going to kind of step up a level and go to end-to-end You know across the service life cycle if you will so not even just the VM life cycle not You know instantiate VM scale it tear it down But you know what does it take to deliver service sort of end-to-end from the first thought about what that service should be to assembling it together It is assuring it Etc. So kind of our flow here is we're going to have Toby kind of tee this up for us Tell us what the business challenge is tell us what some of the Approaches might be to solve that and then Thomas and I are going to tag team on that life cycle Talk about service fulfillment service design and creation and service assurance and techniques that we can take from both the cloud And in the telco world and bring those together to help deliver on NFV Perfect. Thank you. All right So this is our challenge for today the telcos Starting with AT&T. We've decided to take on the mission of what we call NFV. This is our transformation from bespoke vertically integrated hardware to a world that is Disaggregated disaggregated hardware and software disaggregated control plane data plane Running on commodity hardware a drive toward virtualization For us, this is all about Helping us to move faster build new function more quickly to get the competitive cost structure both in terms of our capital spends and our Operational expense spends so this is this is what we're trying to to make happen and make happen faster But at the same time we have to live within a set of expectations so this dynamic of Wanting to move quickly and then meeting customer needs with regard to resiliency or availability Efficiency performance their expectations of cost And then also wrapped around that is also all the rules that we have to live within so that's our basic challenge Is dealing with this these two vectors often going against each other? This this concept essentially is a universal problem right and is When we go back and rewind 25 years to when I first started Coding and how agile development came up. This is really how you characterize agile development is how do I? iteratively evolve quickly and then at the same time over time how do I refactor code to make it stable and more simple This as we've seen Is a very effective way of moving quickly and meeting people's expectations and creating very large Very capable like e-commerce sites and very capable Video content management or distribution sites and these these types of things so this is a proven Mechanism to solve for this is using agile forces to do this and it very much is a part of OpenStack as well And you see this with our work lately in the foundation with promoting the big tent We want to make it possible for people to innovate and innovate quickly and then have their ideas Front and center as they start to try things and make things happen, but then at the same time we have to find a way to make it more Manageable and resilient and upgradeable and these types of things so like how do I make OpenStack into something that is? has five to six nines of resiliency 16 nines of durability, how do I make it so I have less than a microsecond of jitter and latency? How can I transfer you know 10 20 30 mega? Million packets per second through an x86 box. How do I actually upgrade sites? Get out of the conundrum that we're in today of having for AT&T We have sites already continue to exist that are on Essex How do we bring them all up to a current version and even go beyond that to see ICD? And then how do we get to something that that actually is secure? So that's that's the problem that we have to solve both for telcos and for OpenStack And wait, I think that this is very much about three things How do we solve this we solve it with with in my view? Agile as I described already and then also this new concept that's come to the forefront Making things cloud native If you've heard me talk before I've talked about the pets and midget cattle Kind of dynamic trying to convince Applications that were built in the legacy world to be Something that's less scale up and vertically scaled to something that's more scale out So these are two two concepts and then there's a third one that somehow got missed on this slide We're where did my home policy go? So there's a third thing that is very much a telco concept is called policy policy driven is a way of thinking that the telcos have used for many many years of taking expectations people have and then formally Identifying what that represents in this and then making manifest in a system and trying to drive to those those expectations So these are the three general ways. I think it's going to take to solve our problem now Diving into each one a little bit more deeply on the the cloud native part of it more than just making something scale out making something that is simpler more modular and More easy to manage and you see this with containers. It's not more. It's more than just making something more efficient than virtual machines Using less overhead. It also represents a move towards simplicity Where you're using less it's it's using less packages less overhead of in the operating system You're using something that's far more transparent and easy to to see what's going on I think that's an essential move as we add complexity that the components be more easy to understand easy to grok Then also Nothing that we do in any of these contexts can be done manually. There's no time for manual It has to be dynamic and autonomous So going beyond just the simple automations that we've done in the past with scripting and maybe in the more recent time With configuration management tools we have to then get to the next level, which is closing the loop in our parlance is making the System autonomous so that it can be left to its own device to solve and resolve problems And the last but not least is is really a commitment toward API driven interop integration and modularity so that I can allow for innovation to happen and that for What I call eat our own baby so make something that's solid and and Works well and such but then realize that maybe somebody could come up with a more efficient and optimal way of doing something And even though I've spent my life's work making this thing that I'm able to let it go and let it be replaced by something more capable So I think cloud native as a number of different aspects and you see this with our cloud native compute foundation group we're trying to promote this and for me, I'm trying to promote these concepts with the VNF vendors who have just Basically gotten over the hurdle of trying to be virtualized now. We're trying to get them over to another hurdle to even go the next step The last piece is the policy-driven part for me is And this is one I've been struggling with because it represents bringing a lot of the Cruft of the old OSS BSS systems of telcos Bringing it forward into the modern world. How do we bring policy which in my past experience has been very Overwrought and complicated. How do I make it simple and incorporate it into a more cloud native microservices way of thinking? And so hopefully Jason and Thomas can solve that problem for us here so essentially policy is about Writing down all of our expectations Making it very clear and logical This is I want to maintain this level of availability. I want to have this person can only access this resource This company can only do these things This I have to maintain this level of Latency and jitter in the system. How do I specify that in rules and then put it into the system into the autonomous system and let it maintain those rules and Manage any conflicts. So yeah, this is the third part of what I think is essential to make to solve our problem So you know as Toby mentioned we got this conflict here with his two arrows coming together It's same thing service agility on the one side We got to roll these services out faster if you remember at the keynote yesterday talked about taking service Design time from 18 months to six months, you know, so you've got that on the one side on the other side You have the operational trust so you remember that big picture of the network operation center I mean that's serious stuff, right? I mean those guys are very serious about making sure their services are up and running because if they're not People can die or if you're in the United States your American Idol votes might not go through which is a very bad thing So, you know, how do you bring those two together? This is the same problem in the sort of software world that you know You've had with dev ops right dev on the left side ops on the right side you bring them together This is sort of the same thing, you know on steroids a little bit Because particularly on the operation side So if we overlay on top of this this will sort of set up the rest of the presentation you've got you know This sort of life cycle that I talked about starting with the service design and creation How do you come up with that service? How do you take the functions that you get from the various vendors and whatever form they might be put them together into a service? The fulfillment piece which is how we make that realized in the cloud when a customer orders a service And then assuring that it's going to perform as expected within all those constraints So I'm actually going to start with service fulfillment because I think that's the one that relates most to you know What folks might be familiar with on the open stack side? and first thing to sort of bring up here is that We're going to be in what we call a hybrid world for a while, right? Physical network functions aren't going anywhere You know the business case has to be there to go to virtual So what you'll see initially is new services on virtual network functions You'll see services that are growing, you know cap sort of their physical piece and grow the new things in virtual But you know for quite a while you have both physical and virtual in a hybrid environment So what that means is you know if your order systems and your bss os s they're going to have to talk to both sides They're going to have to talk to those existing provisioning and activation systems, and then on the right side They'll have to talk to you know your your virtual aspects of it now in this stack here We used sort of the NFV terminology of NFV orchestrators VNF managers the VIMS Which of those of you have been on the Etsy side are familiar with I do want to make the point though that these network Services are going to not just be network functions. They're going to have it Characteristics or applications with them. There'll be mobile apps. There'll be portals There'll be apis that they have to call out to so this stack You know if you're more of a cloud software type person don't get scared off by this terminology You know you need application management. You need orchestration on top of that now off to the side Here are some of the artifacts that you need to make that Thing become real right so at the very base level you're going to need images you're going to need containers if that's the route to go down You're going to need the software components of it You're going to have to assemble that together in templates or patterns as the next layer up So that you can take those different network functions piece them together And then you know you've got to chain those together They've got of one has to be able to talk to the other to the other So you've got that as the next layer up and then when you bring that into a network service There's sort of an end-to-end flow or workflow that might be needed to make that fulfillment happen Now the other challenge around Service fulfillment is you know not just sort of getting through that stack, but placing those network functions in the right place You know whether it's within a region or across regions, and I know Toby's Particularly passionate about this topic. So I'll let him kind of lay out the challenges yeah, so so placement is One of the things that I think the open stack has been pretty good at setting up a scheduler that looked at Some of the resources that you put where do you put it? The challenge for us has been okay taking open stack and making it something that works across a distributed setup So that's one dimension of what we want to see Evolve, but then the other dimension of it is that placement isn't just one time. It's not the first time It's something even though we're trying to get to disposable Microservices architecture where I could spin up new things and use the spinning up of new things to solve for placement I do want to actually optimize things that are running, and I don't want to Maybe end your call so that I can do bin packing. So in the end I want to be able to to also over its lifecycle change the placement and Move things around behind the scenes without people knowing about it All right, so that's sort of the service fulfillment side now Let's stop step back and say what does it take to to make this whole thing real And to create it in the first place now, you know when I've talked to somebody In in a telco in the early days of NFV He joked that when a network vendor would come in pitch their latest product to him He'd say well does it come on a USB key all right? I mean this was the whole challenge right because you're moving from hardware to software So if your network function doesn't come on a USB key, I don't want to talk to you And I thought well, what's on the USB key right? You know you expect okay. I'm going to get their core software Maybe I'll get some scripts that help automate the installation configuration of it You know if you're lucky, maybe you'll get something like this This is a heat template I've got a couple of slideshots here out of a demonstration that we do around an end-to-end service life cycle So this is a virtual evolved packet core and the heat template for that So maybe they'll provide a heat template that says these are all the VMs and the types of networks that have to come together to make my to make my network function But you know as I mentioned before you'll kind of need a workflow layer above that both to talk to the physical things and the virtual sides As well as within the telco Area there's always a number of other systems that you have to talk to beyond just getting your infrastructure spun up So it's great, you know now we've got IP address management, you know in neutron So that might take one of these steps out of this flow, but you've still got inventory systems or security systems to talk to or you know the subscriber management systems whatever and you know having some sort of workflow capability on top of all of this Is going to be necessary and in this example We had things like virtual probes that also got spun up and virtual testers along with it And all this ends up being something that an end user can can order along the way So you might need some assets for that in the end, you know What I kind of was covering that the core capabilities here these core assets from the image up to the pattern up to the workflow But in order to deliver on a lot of those requirements that Toby was talking about you know the five nines and The policy driven pieces and and the low latency you're going to need a lot of other kind of assets around the edges And that's what we show around the edges here. I want to highlight a couple of them on the testing side you know telcos are very Diligent about you know testing their functions before they go out In the market and so for for those of us from the software or cloud side This is a little challenging because these aren't just rest API calls, right? You've got very specialized protocols You've got specialized testing components and you have to treat those testers and the simulators on the back end Just the same way that you treat the network function. They need to be virtualized as well They need to be spun up dynamically in your test environments Even when you roll them out into production you might spin up a tester and test that thing in production at the same time And when you're testing them you need to capture the metrics as to how that thing performs So you need to know, you know, maybe initially how does how does this function perform on a VM by itself? What happens if I put other network functions on those VMs we start getting contention or whatever You want to capture that set of metrics so that when we get to service assurance that Thomas is going to talk about You know the service assurance systems know what sort of expected or not expected for that particular function So you've got all these artifacts. These are all the things that have to come together to make a network service How do you manage, you know the creation of those? So you've got all these people that are maybe using different tools to create these sort of things And I'm not going to go through this whole slide But the general gist is if you have a software development life cycle today and you do sort of Continuous delivery of your software components. You can use that to do NFV as well a couple things, you know, that would be unique I talked about different test tools so your test management is going to be able to Need to call out to different test tools You're going to have a few more artifacts along the way and you're going to have a degree of rigor around the certification environments and the pre you know the pre-production labs and all of that to get that done and then at the end when When all of this goes out to production, you know, you've got a couple challenges because we're dealing with services, right? It's not just like an application that you just go and you know I'll continuously update it you might have a number of instances of that service for different tenants or different customers So you might need to do sort of blue green, you know, zero downtime deployments for that you know if it's Design in a cloud native fashion as Toby talked about and for you know new customers that come in you've got to take all of the Things that you've learned if you will in this design and test process and put it out into your system So your service assurance systems have the right, you know thresholds set your orchestration systems have all of these assets ready To be provisioned or fulfilled when the orders come in All right, so you've heard enough from me. Let's hear from Thomas a little bit around how we're gonna make these things perform in in the real world Yeah, last but not least service assurance and in my opinion. This is an aspect. It is sometimes a little bit neglected so everyone thinks about how I Stand up those virtual network functions and how I scale them But in order to decide when you have to scale or to to see when something's wrong You have to have source assurance in place When when we come to this new world of virtual network functions or cloud in general We talk about the problem of two-speed IT. So we have The classical world so the hardware that you that you put in place and this is a pretty Well, it's a static environment. So this is what's called it the heavy goods lane here and we have Little changes in that layer on the volume is not that big in terms of variety we see events we see SNMP Traps EMS bulk imports and in terms of velocity We typically do periodic batch discovery which can run sometimes for a couple of hours So it's it's pretty heavy and but pretty static and the higher we get in this deck We we call it on that picture. We call it a fast lane that system is much more dynamic So we have high change rates and things that work in the old world don't work in the new world So for example, we can't do long-running discoveries because at the time the discovery ends The system might look completely different. So what we do instead of discovery is just capturing all all kinds of observations From from this dynamic environment that out of those observations We construct our view of the world so that we know how how the system looked like At any point in time and in terms of volume We are talking but about much higher volumes of gigabytes of terabytes over time because this is a constantly running process and Here we have to apply big data technologies Talking about service assurance architecture. So what we had so far I tried to summarize in this picture. So both from a from a tools perspective a data perspective and and also an organizational perspective We had we had those silos silos. So we had a team managing the network. We had a team managing the servers We had a team managing applications. We had event management in different tools and And and Not only did we have a separation between the disciplines But also layers. So I talked about the lower level network layer than your infrastructure the applications and Another thing was that they the the old service assurance architectures were built for mostly static systems So we we haven't things in place to cope with the high change rates in in virtual network functions or cloud what we are working on now is So in my opinion the the main component of this is bringing the data together So instead of having separated data Stores for network IT applications or for events or metrics We are applying big data technologies to basically get an end-to-end view Across all components of the system. So we we have application formation the underlying Virtual infrastructure and also the hardware because I I think when you when you want to drill down into a problem that you have at the Virtual layer you have to understand where this thing is running because Just provisioning a new VM or new container might not be the solution to your problem if you have a Problem really low down in your in your in your hardware infrastructure and hardware will be around for quite some time I think probably forever and What we are also doing we we convert from the silos to a more much more integrated stack where all the The disciplines have access to the very same data and they can also Pull new put new information in in this shared data in terms of getting data from the environment We still have traditional discovery. So for your pretty static environment, you can still do discovery You don't have anyone running into your data center and plugging in or removing servers Every hour. So discovery is still good here But what's what's more important for the higher layers is those those observations Observation can be anything it can be data from agents. It can be flow data and that flow as flow adapters that we're using here or it can be the the virtual probes and virtual tester information that Jason talked about and All this information is just posted to a to a rest API and then In real time basically correlated with the data that you have already and then all the components have access to that To the overall data wire wire data program Another thing is we have those managers So we have the women the VNF manager the NFV orchestrators and they also provide useful information When we know what we are deploying so we have we do deployment based on templates So we don't have to discover everything because we basically know what what we deployed and we have a good seat at least for doing For correlating data and finding out what belongs to a virtual network function or what belongs to the end-to-end service So what we do is either using plugins for for knowing for example when heat has deployed a stack So it has a plug-in a plug point where you can basically get information on life cycle events of the stack or we can also apply adapters that use the rest API's of the of the managers to pull out instance information or information about changes and Finally now that we have this new architecture and we have the service fulfillment piece with the managers We have to close the loop for having what we call closed loop control And I think an important point is that you you need this end-to-end service orchestration that talks to all the disciplines so as part of Deploying your network functions. You're not only pushing down instructions for well for deploying a heat stack or for creating virtual resources, but you also push down hooks of your service assurance system so that agents for example can can Post information to that system for each instance In the same way for each instance that you deploy you you push down assurance rules and policies for correlating events of of that specific instance and And at the end you also put policies in the middle to basically tie back Insights that you gain in service assurance to the service fulfillment piece to make to to reach this this autonomic behavior that Toby was talking about and I think If you look at opens that you have auto scaling capabilities you and he there's a new project called Sandlin that allows auto scaling but What do you get out of the box is scaling based on infrastructure metrics, but Is it a really a problem when you have high CPU load? Is it really a problem when you have high memory consumptions in many cases? Yes, but what you also have to do is Pull in the information from your virtual probes to see well is this video streaming really bad or do I have? bad response times on my web applications and So the decision cannot be made by by the by the virtual infrastructure managers or the VNF managers in some cases So what you can do is you you gain this insight on the right hand side And then you basically do not use the out-of-the-box auto scaling Metrics, but you you basically invoke a webhooks based on the information you have from your assurance system and So from my side think we're just about ready for questions They did ask the line up at the microphone if you have any questions, but just for food for thought Well, people are thinking about any questions. They have I want to go back to to this diagram Because you know as I've been here this week trying to understand, you know, which projects which open-stack projects How could open-stack help with some of these components that are necessary there and I'll pause it You know something and you guys can agree or disagree is that you know in the core projects You know, we're sort of agreed on you know, what what should do what and you're seeing a lot of the NFE requirements starting to be addressed in there You know a lot of the enhancements in neutron for example and probably heat, you know You know as Thomas said there's some things that need to be adapted to it But you know probably everybody agrees that's a good start for the patterns and templates But if you look at all these other things That's where you start to get into projects that maybe have less adoption at this point and some overlap So for example workflow mist rolls the workflow engine, right? Manasco has some workflow in it as well, and then there's a Tacker, which is going to be an NFE orchestrator.  I think we need to work out Any questions? Yes Between heat in the orchestrator. Do you want to as the heat reviewer, New York? So we have different levels of orchestration I think for for the VNF manager for example heat is a perfect fit because in this on this layer You can apply a lot of a pattern based orchestration and I mean Jason showed this screenshot of a heat template for virtually EPC So so that is the place where he plays a role But there's also a layer on top of heat so for for chaining several network functions or For talking to you or to your service assurance system at this layer you can apply Workflow technology and in our solution we we currently use our business process management system for doing this Yeah, if you want to talk task because I know Thomas is involved in task as well, so yeah I mean we I'm also involved in the Tosca standardization And we have a working group that deals especially with virtual network function With a VNF profile for Tosca and Tosca includes more than what what heat understands So what what you do or what you can do is use the well a complete Tosca package and then Extract things that can be understood and processed by heat push it on to heat, but you push other elements like policies to another component in OpenStack That that is a possible way to go And I think the other thing about Tosca too is you know you got to be able to bundle all these things up together and deliver them So Tosca has this concept of a cloud service archive file cloud service network service You know maybe this is a you know a good way to bundle these artifacts up But to be honest, I think there are multiple alternatives So I mean as you correctly said heat does does some Level of orchestration, but do you need something on top? You can I mean you can also use heat template composition have a have a high level template that invokes lower level templates That is a way to do it You can use workflow orchestration or you can do this this kind of translation of some higher-level construct into pieces That you put into different All right, thank you for coming up to the microphone Sure So my question is a lot of this stuff is still being standardized in places like Etsy, you know ATF etc Separation of responsibilities has not been well defined So trying to implement this in OpenStack right separating into different projects deciding which project is responsible for what? especially in the orchestration area right Orchestration versus SDN controller versus VNF manager who does what and talks to where we don't know yet So is it too early for OpenStack to start addressing it or? Should we just create de facto standard just because it's already implemented That's never too early for OpenStack to take on the new project. So It's my big tentative joke for this week You know, I think you're bring up a very a valid point is this this issue of For me that I'll take it a little different direction. I mean authorization keeping things bounded for who does what? This is the question the policy question that I have is can that be done as an overlay? With the heats and the attackers of the world or are we gonna have to go back and actually relook at some of the integral assumptions within a Nova and a Keystone or a glance and and maybe rethink how that happens So I think that is I think in general you're gonna see projects like tack or tactically deal with the problem You're talking about or Congress But then and we want to see that happen But then eventually we're gonna have to again as I've mentioned earlier go back and refat Maybe have to refactor something and to make it actually work Yeah, I also think it's not too early to start something in OpenStack. I mean we have project tackle It's they start implementing something. It won't probably be the best solution at the beginnings But it has to change but I I think waiting for a standard to finalize is not the right thing I think you just have to try out things So that's an experience that I made since I joined the OpenStack activities about two and a half years ago and and learn and feedback to the standards world and and It already done it. So I think It's it's not the final solution that we will get today on the next cycle But we just have to get started and implement something Thank you Hey guys, I'm kind of to elaborate on that right now The tools are picked do this every vendors kind of doing it themselves Like before we kind of standardized on heat people were using different things like chef and puppets and then we all move to heat But there's like a list of recommended tools that you're saying, you know If we were to look at it right now These are the tools that you should go for but let us know why these won't work So we don't have one vendor off trying to figure that one way and another vendor trying to figure it off another way And ultimately one of them, you know, many of them will succeed This is this is the the balance that we have to find and this also goes back to Big 10 is okay Do we have do we open up the aperture have a VNF manager per VNF? That's probably not the ideal setup. You want to have some commonality eventually get to one thing So that's one part of it But at the same time you want to have you open open the field up for more innovation And I think in many ways allowing for the chefs the puppet stansables to evolve, you know Let the best tool win in the end, you know, and then also it goes back to us saying about Eat your own babies like realize that there may be somebody that shows up that That threads the needle and solves this problem in a better way And then you need to be ready to replace whatever it was that you you spent your last five years working I mean, I kind of worry that many people are going to solve it in a fairly decent way But it's going to be different and then you're going to align on one that The other guys don't like or something so that maybe having Maybe it's opnv pushing to say, you know, these are the things that we would recommend But if you find something better, let us know and we'll put it into the Well, I think in the opnv thing, this is we've struggled with this in this in opnv to find this Balance between picking and then letting it open. And I think the end answer is back to the to the relying on that gel methods is if we set up the right testing framework in the same with tempest set up the right Testing framework around your the thing you're trying to solve for then you can rely on that To provide Does it work or not? And then you can have a lot of variation inside, you know, and within opnv We're allowing for multiple deployment tools multiple SDNs multiple combinations because we realize it's too hard to pick What is way more important is that the requirements and the specs are clear and that the tests are complete And that somebody rigorously Makes things keep flowing Thank you so much for the panel to the panel for this really insightful conversation My question is about the vision that you guys are driving about like a hundred gigabits per second on a commodity hardware Say doing by stock neutron or like basically custom neutron or something like that If you were to take a playbook page from a playbook from high frequency trading They shaved off a lot of the customized a kernel lot. They made it really lean and achieve that performance But do you expect open-stack community to work on? Making the neutrons so lean that we can achieve this goal while still it remaining relevant for the mainstream open-stack community I hear anchor is he's laughing at me on the subject Yes, I mean this is a big challenge for us right now because the expectation from The people inside telcos and in that VNF vendors is that An x86 is going to infinitely scale to be able to do hundreds of thousand hundreds of millions of packets per second and such This is really the integral problem. We have to solve for we just have to live with the fact that Right now. It's going to be pretty hard to make an x86 box A Linux kernel go from 10 gigs to 25 gigs to 100 gigs the there's a limit and so How have we solved this before? We've solved it with scaling methods scale out methods, right? I mean that that's that's what I always lean back on and it also I think it goes somewhat to what Thomas is talking about to bring it back is about Visibility and having end-to-end visibility into how performance is achieved in the environments that we work on if you look at Just a KVM environment where you have vert IO and you have the host net or you have all the components of neutron Working to orchestrate it. You it's getting more and more complicated The people that we're managing networks. They're like I never touched a Linux box before. What is this? What is this mess so but giving people visibility into how what is going on and where there's Blockages or bottlenecks in a nice easy way is the challenge I have for the for the community is making something that allows us to see it And then then it's easier to solve Thank you. I think we're up on time. 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This study found that 26% of live births in Bangladesh occur within short birth intervals, SBIs, which is significantly associated with young age, low education level, rural residents, and death of the second most recent child. Additionally, the prevalence of SBIs increases with distance from healthcare facilities and lack of access to modern contraceptives. These findings suggest that targeted interventions should be implemented to raise awareness about SBI and its associated adverse health outcomes, such as infant mortality, and improve access to modern contraceptives in order to reduce SBI rates in Bangladesh. This article was authored by Muhammad Zahidal Islam, M. Mahfazal Islam, M. D. Mastafizer Rahman, and others.


This paper discusses the use of next-generation sequencing technology to generate a large amount of data from Lodgepole pine, pineus contorta. The authors used a combination of reference-based and ANOVO assemblies to create a data set of 63,657 contigs, representing over 17,000 unique genes. Additionally, the authors identified thousands of simple sequence repeats and single nucleotide polymorphisms which can be used as potential molecular markers. This article was authored by Benkman Craig W, Granin Johane, Geist Catherine S, and others.


In this video we'll look at some examples of naming amines and alcohols. Amines and alcohols are structurally similar. In alcohols there is an oxygen-hydrogen OH group attached somewhere to the molecule. When that happens the suffix of the name becomes O-L-O-L. In amines there is a nitrogen-hydrogen, usually NH2 group, attached, and then the suffix is amine. Let's try these examples. First we've got a simple amine. First identify the main chain. There are five carbons, so it's based on pentane. But the end carbon has an amine group attached. So the name is changed from pentane to pentanamine. Note that we keep the an from pentane to indicate that there are no double bonds in the molecule. But we also have to indicate where the amine group is attached. So in this case being on the end and numbering the carbons, the name will become pentan-1-amine. So the second one. Here the main chain is a ring made of five carbons, so it's based on cyclopentane. Now if we pretend for a second that there's only one alcohol group attached, then the name would be cyclopentanol. But there are two of them, so we indicate this by calling it a diol, two alcohols. And the name becomes cyclopentane diol. For some reason tradition dictates that we keep the E on the end of the pentane because it's a diol. So with just one alcohol group it would be cyclopentanol, but with two it becomes cyclopentane diol. Except if you're writing in German, they leave the E off. Ich weiß nicht warum. So anyway, there are two alcohol groups and we need to say where they are. So we will start numbering at one of them and continue around until we get to the other. Now we'll go the shortest way so as to keep the numbers low. So that will make it cyclopentane-1-3-diol. Note that like with alkenes we insert the numbers into the middle of the name just before the suffix to show that the numbers refer to the two alcohol groups. Lastly, this wacky looking thing. Still it can be broken down and solved using what we know already. First the longest chain. Six carbons and all single bonds so it's based on hexane. Next the functional group here is amine but there are three of them. Now we'll number the chain from the right which will give us amines on carbons number one, two and six. Notice that if you did it the other way round the numbers would be one, five and six so they'd be higher overall. So that gives us hexane one, two, six triamine. Again note that we're keeping the E on the end of hexane because there's more than one of these functional groups. Okay now the substituents. We have three chloro and two four methyls. So we need to put all that together and we need to list the substituents alphabetically. So that gives us three chloro, four, four dimethyl hexane one, two, six triamine. Done! Do you feel the adrenaline?