From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the remote works Citrix virtual series. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work, of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone, working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So really happy to welcome to the program two of our CUBE alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hawke. He is the executive vice president and chief product officer with Citrix and also joining us Maribel Lopez. She is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. Thanks, Stu. All right, so let's talk. We've been in this pandemic now for a good chunk of time. Many months, some of us are back in the office. Some we are talking a lot about. Maribel, I think you talk about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now what you're hearing from your customers and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say how generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers and that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology but using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions but it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned, Stu, we now have some set of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back, but I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full-time there. Many people will be remote work and in fact, you might even hire some people and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody that might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration and then they'll go back and work from home. So those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work and nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with have been giving their employees the option. It is, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? It's going to be the ripple effect on real estate, on Maribel, as you were saying, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they have before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is customer experience is so important, but of course it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that employee experience look like in today's environment? Well, I think this is a really important area for I think organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience and I would say the digital customer experience and maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year, in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system in this movement of employees from the office to the home is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices and now we somehow came home with a laptop or a Chromebook and the reality was, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix is really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience and you're right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home, maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops so that application delivery was really important the security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So we have to make sure that A that that's accessible and that B that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience and now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. Yeah, a good great point. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors they need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit. What are some of those services? It's not the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? Well, I can certainly tell you for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops. And for many organizations, they still are critical applications. But the application portfolio that employees use today is much broader than that. And includes web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service-based applications, et cetera, as well as their mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications they needed to do their job. But remember in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to fill out an expense report or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security, because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience, no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products, providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. I think one of the things that you brought up, PJ, sorry to speak, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. The workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu, than it does for PJ. And it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that I'm in the contact center and I want a BDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything, I don't do anything, I just open up the device and everything comes down to me and then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on personal, identifiable information on someone's home device. So I think we're really gonna be sophisticated about what a workspace means. Yeah, no Maribel, I was just commenting off, PJ made a comment. There's this thing he talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But Maribel, I'm curious, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm gonna have a couple of months and then we're just gonna go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? What are some of the challenges that you hear out there that people are saying, oh geez, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you might be a developer in which case you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe asynchronously versus somebody that was like, oh, hey, wait, every day I can have a stand-up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural, some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices. While that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the, say, right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam as the webcam in the right place? So the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. We had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely but then we sent everyone home and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio of services and do I have the right portfolio of services? I actually purchased something to deal with COVID but is that the right thing? And now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote light where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs, what style of services, how scalable those services and then culturally I think we have issues like how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for say Europe and Asia for everybody to be on a call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So a lot of interesting challenges ahead. Yeah, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use and think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say at least on Orthodox and maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future, but I know in the meantime we're gonna onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So I think your people processes starting with onboarding but all the way through to training and everything else, especially for managers I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication as you pointed out Stu being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely. And then that last part is of course, what's the technology that we bring to varying these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home. And then how do we reconfigure shared spaces, office spaces so that they make even more sense when we're back in the office. Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done, but I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I previously thought about in the past. PJ, I like what Maribel talked about, setting up remote work right. The promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s, it was going to be, well, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything wherever we are. 5G, come on, we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So help us understand, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility so that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office and are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving as small, what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity, clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure, clearly not perfect. And those of us that are working from home in remote locations, occasionally experienced the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So that's the second one that I think is really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that are built on top, not just the technologies from Citrix, but you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software or collaboration tools, many of them were designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as personal computing devices, they're no shared computing resources, accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud-based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. While all of these will continue to require investment, I once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said is, I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So when we think of employee experience, my experience is a summation of the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really instead of us looking at managing just a few, this floor, the Wi-Fi on this floor, this building, we're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organizations. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are on whatever devices are available. So if you want to go in the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or a hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. Maribel, I want to come back to you. As companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy, which we've touched on a little bit. Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID, the type of discussions we're having with people is, oh, I don't know if I can go to the cloud or only this type of data can go to the cloud and I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we're need and managed three to five year transition plan and I plan on having X% of my apps this year and Y% of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window. If you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So many of the safer cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services makes sense? How do we actually do business process transformation not just technology transformation? So very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty and now they're going back and they're saying, okay, part of that remote light to remote right concept is just in general, did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So they're going full guns. Like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? I think, Marble, one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly, either unimaginable or impossible to build when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who've made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that the cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry, whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet. And now this transition, which I think is really, I think in progress is the transition to cloud, that's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. Yeah, PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies, they were dipping their toe in and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you've both pointed out though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do and hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink the way you think about security in this aspect. I think the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day-to-day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint and then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic and you can secure access to the applications on the backend. In fact, in some ways that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the I think easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is though, that many enterprises have relied on employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device to the workspace itself to the experience really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple end points and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization you have access to everything that employee had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are real technologies that are in the market today that are available to customers to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed and now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that that really minimize the security risk and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. You know, I actually want to pick up on this because I think this is such a critical point for organizations. And this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote rate VPN is not enough if you've given somebody access to the kingdom what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened as PZ said yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Django tower same concept but basically you have to secure at every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you know, you can start as an organization everything from what computing hardware do you buy? You know, does it have a safe heart secure root of trust on it? So that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment and then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies and all of those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, there isn't a silver bullet but we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. The last technology area I want to poke at is we haven't talked about data yet. There's the opportunity for analytics and it's a little bit Mayor Bell maybe start with you there's the opportunity to really understand are people leveraging things or their problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me but you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing and there's concern about that. So what are you seeing out there and any emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance that's great. If it turns out to be, you know every application they've entered and how much time they spent in that application maybe yes, maybe no maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. Maybe it's something that says if this application hasn't been used in period of time because that's an issue around licensing do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending 30 hours a week in Outlook there's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should but what you really should be talking to your vendors about is how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? Is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there's a slowdown in the network I need to know that that's gonna impact users. If there's an outage in a service I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics and balance the privacy and the experience? So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck and so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers the point that Maribel alluded to is have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who were inside the office and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system whether or not they're occurring inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The second area is to do with actually the quality of that experience the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level what their experience is like and we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not they've actually delivered a usable high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course they're relying on remote response from remote employees with networks that they don't manage. So really can you get a handle on what that experience is like? So both of those are actually analytics services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality reliable secure service. The other area where we're exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and share that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics and understanding of user behavior can get used, you could see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employee's own experience inside the workspace. And personally that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. I think this contextual concept is great, right? So understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity, that's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So it learns about me, it predicts things, but it also creates, helps me create new better employee experiences. Yeah, I think my phone keeps asking me if I wanna uninstall the entire folder of travel apps because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they've built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, we did two years worth of transformation in two months. So I wanna just give you both the final word, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. Well, thank you, Stu. I mean, the first thing I'd say is once again, how I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like and to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long-term decisions that they've got to make over the next six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two-year project through two months or two weeks, that's a journey that we've been on with those customers and we're excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things still to figure out ahead of them and we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. So for me, when I talk to customers, I say, this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy, build for the things that are gonna create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots of things for people to think about and looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thank you for watching theCUBE.


One of the most common questions physicians treating patients with inflammatory bowel disease are asked is whether changing one's diet can positively affect the course of their disease. Traditionally, our answer had been, you know, we have no clue. But this may now be changing, given the evidence that hydrogen sulfide may be playing a role in ulcerative colitis. And since the sulfur-containing amino acids concentrated in meat cause an increase in colonic levels of this rotten egg gas, maybe we should take off the meat. See, animal protein isn't just associated with an increased risk of getting inflammatory bowel disease in the first place, but also IBD relapses once you have the disease. This is a recent development, because the concept of IBD as a lifestyle disease mediated mainly by a westernized diet is not widely appreciated. An analysis of diet in the follow-up period after diagnosis in relation to a relapse of inflammatory bowel disease had been ignored, but not any longer. Ulcerative colitis patients in remission and their diets were followed for a year to see which foods were linked to the bloody diarrhea coming raging back and the strongest relationship between a dietary factor and an increased risk of relapse observed in the study was for a high intake of meat. So, what if you have people lower their sulfur-containing amino acid intake by decreasing their consumption of animal products? They tried it on four ulcerative colitis patients, and without any change in meds, they experienced like a four-fold improvement in their loose stools. In fact, they felt so much better they didn't think it ethical to try switching them back. Since sulfur-containing amino acids are the primary source of dietary sulfur, a low-sulfur diet essentially means a shift from a typical diet, high in animal protein and fat, and low in fiber to more of a plant-based diet. Westernized diets are pro-inflammatory, and plant-based diets are anti-inflammatory. Let's see what treatment with a plant-based diet can do after the onset of ulcerative colitis during a low-carbohydrate weight loss diet. A 36-year-old man lost 13 pounds on a low-carb diet, but also lost his health, diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Put him on a diet centered around whole plant foods, though, and poof, symptoms resolved without medication. Okay, but this is just one case. Case reports are like glorified anecdotes. The value of case reports lies in their ability to inspire researchers to put it to the test, and that's exactly what they did. There never been a study published focusing on using plant-based diets for the treatment of ulcerative colitis until now, considering the lack of a suitable diet to be the biggest issue faced in the current treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. Regarding it as a lifestyle disease caused mainly by our omnivorous diet, a group of Japanese gastroenterologists have been providing a plant-based diet to all patients with IBD for over a decade, and publishing extraordinary results far better than have today been reported in the medical literature. I profiled some of the early work in one of my first videos that went up on nutritionfacts.org, found to be effective in the maintenance of remission in Crohn's disease by 100% at one year, 90% at two years. So how about a plant-based diet for relapse prevention in ulcerative colitis? Educational hospitalization meant bringing patients into the hospital to control their diet and educate them about the benefits of plant-based eating so that they'd be more motivated to continue it at home. Most patients, about three-quarters, experienced improvements such as disappearance or decrease in bloody stool during hospitalization. Fantastic. Okay, but here's the really exciting part. Then they followed the patients for five years, and 81% were able to remain in remission the whole time, and 98% were able to keep the disease at bay for at least a year. I mean, that blows other treatments away. Those relapse rates are far lower than those reported with medication under conventional treatment. Other studies found that about half relapse compared to only 2% among those taught to eat healthier. A plant-based diet was previously shown to be effective in both the active and quiescent stages of Crohn's disease. The current study has shown that a plant-based diet is effective in both the active and quiescent stages of ulcerative colitis as well. And so they did another study on even more severely affected cases with active disease and found the same thing, far beating out conventional drug therapy. People felt so much better. They were still eating more plant-based even six years later. The researchers conclude that a plant-based diet is effective for treating ulcerative colitis to prevent a relapse. Why? Well, plant-based diets are rich in fiber, which feeds our good gut bugs that may partly explain why a plant-based diet prevents a variety of chronic diseases. And so that's what we may be seeing with inflammatory bowel disease, suggesting that replacing an omnivorous diet with a plant-based diet is the right approach. It's like using plant-based diets to treat the cause of heart disease, our number one killer, not just safer and cheaper, but works better. No adverse side effects noted for plant-based eating. Let's compare that to the side effects of immunosuppressants used for ulcerative colitis like cyclosporin. Side effects include, and now we have even fancier drugs that cost about $60,000 a year. That's $5,000 a month. And they don't even work very well, with clinical remission of one year of only like 17 to 34%, and instead of no adverse side effects, they can give you a stroke. They can give you heart failure. They can even give you cancer, including a rare type of cancer that often results in death. Well, how about a serious brain disease known as progressive multifocal leukolencephalopathy, which can kill you and for which there is no known treatment or cure? Yeah, yeah, increased risk of death, but did we mention how nice and small the pill was and the easy to open bottle?


How to win the post plant with your rule 100% of the time watch this don't swing KJ I'm gonna I'm gonna ult and just tell you all about the spike He's on he's on I'm flashing him. He's off. He's off. He's off. He's off. He's off. He's off Don't pick don't pick don't pick do not pick He's off. He's off.   He's on He's off. He's off. He's off nice


Hello. Okay, welcome back. This is our session where the reports for the KDE-EV-1 teamers will be presented. This used to be part of our general assembly. We were presented the money for KDE-EV-1 members. This year we decided to move those reports for the general program of an academy, since they have comments that may be of interest for the general KDE-EV-1. So, we have six reports being presented today. The reports for our KDE-EV-1 groups, which are the funding rating, community, financial, intelligence, the report, and the CDAN-EV-1 group and also the reports for the KDE-EV-1 foundation. So, every group will present their report in eight minutes, and then we have time for just one more question. So, let's get started. The funding rating is the working group. You can go back to your lines. This year KDE-EV created this working group, and I was one of the volunteers. So, that's their part of last year. What we do is the purpose of our work is to coordinate and create the fundraising campaigns for KDE-EV-1. So, that's it. These are the people that made the working group. So, our team, we can run the summer and summer last year. The first fundraising campaign of the working group was the random meters one. We used the website. The goal was accessibility. We only reached 30% of our goal because we didn't have much time to open the campaign. We lost track of stuff. So, it was also the first time that I worked for KDE-EV-1. All that, it wasn't going to end, but it was already a long, long work. So, we made some stars on each attitude. Before KDE-EV-1 from last year was supporting the fundraising group, which was a media campaign. We created a plan for our KDE-EV website on KDE-EV-1. And we spread the word about KDE-EV-1. So, as I said, our first campaign was not as accessible as we wanted to. It didn't want me because we started working on it too late. But, we learned from our case and I think being in a KDE-EV-1 major actually exceeded its goal. So, we did a lot better in terms of planning. We started planning both on earlier and we posted more often. We'll follow up on that on social media. So, this is something to keep in mind tonight. So, the second campaign, at the end of the year one, we started earlier because we learned from our mistakes. We made our mistakes on the ground and the one here was real huge problem. And it was the face of it. We raised that amount of money a little bit above our goal. We ran the campaign for 30 days to have that number of factors. And it was amazing to see the... I think that's what helped a little bit was the info that we showed them, what we have done during the past year. To boost the timing of the end of the year. And also, we worked from where we have two of those stories, same thing about Brunner and the content of the website. And how we helped them to do the test. So, as the new morning, don't start the fundraising campaign too close to the event or go to be achieved because it was our first time we were working in this fundraising. I was nothing to all the stuff that Kadele finished us. So, it was kind of a challenge to get there. Our result of promo because they know a lot of all the things. And don't wish for a picture without the S movement. It was on the Brunner website. It says, the future year round. So, for example, we made two donations. And we need to refund the whole round because it wasn't going to the end of the year. So, it was something that I was learning wherever I needed help. Something that the Patrician group used more of is some of the resources and opportunities. So, we are currently doing these fundraising, but we have some very useful ways we could get funding. We also could maybe refund our first store or ask Kadele in a new way of transitioning as a contractor. We are doing the financing service. Also, I never think that our new group is actually more active than ours. Because, you know, it seems like today is Super 1 and we are sending everything along. So, if anyone wants to help, those websites could turn on, if, you know, I need to always turn on the new group. For the next year, we have these goals. We are also going to discuss the release with new, we will discuss the fundraising campaigns. And I think that's the strong part of my view. I would like to make bear a modern website for the campaigns because that's the view, the idea that we have more access to websites is maybe generous, more than just the campaign idea. Some of the categories that we can send to people who don't like to take the campaign, we weren't able to do that during because of the timing. And that is for, under the management of your campaign, it starts to work like two, already so we can get more success of the campaign. And you are just on our page, and I think that was our part. Thank you. Thank you. I was live because I just spent, and I was giving you a stop a couple of hours ago. So, we have five cases that I can talk about in public because they took place in public, either on lists, FACTAIR or PubZilla. We had a conflict between the release manager and the promo team, and that is over. So this is from newest oldest. We had problems between the DDG and the Quinn maintainer in public. That had better outcome. There was some soul searching on all sides, and Tomas spoke and listened to some people, and I think things are good. We had a case that was a little odd. A maintainer brought it to us. However, we found that the maintainer was the one who had been rude to the bug reporter, and that is over. We had a death in the community, which is sad. Marco Keating has died, and cis and men disabled the account. I personally think we ought to send apart or something to the family, if that's known. The year began last year with a huge discussion about PD chat solutions. IRC, Matrix, Rocket Chat, other solutions, and there was lots of discussion. It was mostly friendly, and it was ongoing. So I don't believe we've come to any solution there, although I think people are still using telegram and are increasingly using Matrix. So, any questions? There will be more in the meeting with things that we can't talk about in the public. We need power. I think we need more people to talk to us. I was willing to meet in person at Sprints and other meetings. I don't know that we've had something so serious that one of us would have to fly somewhere, but say something, sir. I mean, we'll talk via, I don't know, something free, face-to-face, or non-free, if that's all you need. That's okay. It's sometimes very intimidating for people to talk to, somebody that they see as in power. I don't see myself as in power. I see myself as more of a listening ear and able to take things into consideration. I believe my fellow team members feel the same way. I think the community is, well, from when I first came in, was right after a major fork. Things have definitely gotten better. But that doesn't mean that even people who are friendly with each other also have conflicts. And sometimes, when you're in a community, you don't know what to do. You don't know what to do. People who are friendly with each other also have conflicts. And sometimes they may not have the tools to come to an agreement. And sometimes they're so invested in the issue that they don't see that their own conduct is a problem. That actually is really common. Because humans are humans. I think I'm out of time. Talk to me privately. I have one last one. So you pointed out the choice of communication and departments on several, especially at the beginning of the year. And this is not a problem in any place or any company, there's several methods. I think the only solution right now, the hard solution, is we need someone that's wanting to include or that doesn't. I don't believe wanting to start in everyone's eyes. It wasn't that. Can you have at least some amount of point at this one solution? Are you talking about the chat solution? Yes. Well, I'm not going to choose it. I don't know who could be the person to choose that. But I'm out of time, so thanks very much. Thanks very much. The next report is for the financial working group that uses a whole group. Who is your make-up? Yeah. Working group. So we are talking about money here. And the financial working group is a particular one. We can start from who is in there. David, we have you on the slide. Because this group is special, the financial working group are dealing with delicate things, not as delicate as the community working group. But still. And they require special confidence from the membership. So they have voted in for two years, we have elections coming this year for renewing membership of new mothers. And then, those are the official goals and missions of the financial working group. To say it the same thing, it's to support the Treasury with the level of KDE and the finances. That's somewhere under that. The working group is advisory, is not forcing anything on the Treasury or on the Board. It's helping, advising. It was at this time. And then, I will pass it to David. So I want to talk a little bit about how financial planning for the EEB actually works. And the commonstone of that is the budget plan that we made in the early year. So actually, I'm going to go to this slide. The process for all budget planning tends to start in the last quarter of every year. It starts when the KDE Board meets for their fall meeting and there's a discussion about what we expect to actually include it in the budget plan and what it should go by and it goes through the different positions of the budget plan as it will be viewed at home. And the changes we expect, the trends that we sort of speculate and the goals we want to set. And after that discussion, the Treasury is responsible for the warm-up of the first job, which then subsequently gets reviewed by both the Board and the Financial Board here and gets integrated over a number of weeks based on input from various people and then eventually released to the KDEB membership, which may have additional input and sometimes some of the affinities are based on that. So what is in the budget plan? The budget lists our income and also our expenses and has line items for the different income sources that we have. For example, various management pieces that generate those individuals or corporate support members on expenses. By the way, this year, we are very lucky to have a report number of sponsors for the KDEB and thank you very much for that. And of course, individuals who drive by donations through the various forms of donations that we set. The numbers in the budget plan we draw a lot based on the performance of the previous year and how things evolve. And we try to predict the income we see in the next year. In some of the income line items, versus the different way, where instead of predicting the income, we set a goal for what kind of income we want to achieve, specifically with our fundraising activities. And based on that goal, we are not deciding whether to run certain campaigns or what form they should take. This sort of has an element of public relations management to it. And I will get into that a little bit more with the complete example of the 2018 bad man. Now, the budget plan also includes our plan expenses. The plan's expenses map very sort of neatly to KDEB's support activities to the community. It includes the events we have organized and fund those paid organizations to some extent and the materials we did for that. But the line shares have their travel support for community members to attend those events. We have a number of employees. It's an organization. They also expect to get paid. So that shows up there. Infrastructure, like our service and office materials. And finally, administration. For example, pay hall taxes and our phone bill. Now, let's take a look at the 2018 budget plan which at this point is a good half year old. So one thing that we saw in the previous year is that we see sort of a trend shift in our income where our supporting memberships both from individuals, we are a series here but also corporate sponsors. It's exceeding the income that we have from regular donations and fundraising. So both the income from individuals supporting membership and a corporate sponsor membership is up. Since that is the case we decided to be a little less aggressive on running fundraising campaigns. We don't want the PDE to appear to be too needy and we don't want to go to the level too often. And since we are in a comfortable position where our supporting membership income is on the way up we decided to set our fundraising goal via campaigns a bit lower. Then another income source is Google Summer Growth. It's quite interesting to mention that the other plan also has a section on risks and uncertainties. Google Summer Growth was among those as Google has decided to occasionally rotate some long-standing, long-participating organizations out of Summer Growth so there was a certain risk that we might actually not be in Summer Growth this year. It would be very hard to be able to do it again but this was a risk that we had to plan for and be able to mitigate. All right, that was our class. Expenses, again, our spread expenses which were to be up this year we had one more plan was for this and the second one was for the PDE Go program. The PDE is a little more expensive this year than the previous year which is by no means a bad thing since we expect high attendance. The location is a bit more expensive but the location may be the reason for high attendance so again, that's certainly the bad thing because it's something that the PDE is practicing now. However, the details of how that number has constructed have changed a bit but it's mostly what we're seeing. The PDE moved to New York which costs a lot of money. Our tax account service was very expensive and unfortunately it also showed a very large remaining one-time tax code for PDE Go. Now, I'm not sure how to respond to PDE Go because it's very expensive in the other expectations so the more expensive location the more there is a good time to invest in. Supporting memberships as PDE Go is more reliable and it's a reasonable problem that PDE Go is exploitative but as much as they should because we still have problems with the CDCR and it fits. Rounder did not happen. It was coming from another family that made it funded Kevin is holding up a sign.  Also stay warm and good. Yes. This would have talked a little bit about how we got to find information but I guess we've chance to talk about this during the waterfront already so you may skip it and mark that if you want to respond to the next. Do you have questions? We'll take one for Robin. So, I have one question and a short one because you weren't on time. One question? Alright. The next report is what we are and what we do. So, the advisory board is basically a formalization of KDE's alliances both in the commercial and the non-commercial open source ecosystem and the advisory board working group consists of contact persons for each member of this advisory board. We did this so that the advisory board members would be able to that the advisory board members wouldn't always have to come to the whole advisory board with every question that they had or every input that they wanted to give but that every organization had their own specific contact and that each member of the group is responsible for one advisory board members where they are open for input and questions and also getting them in touch with parts of the community for example if someone has a specific question about a specific project application then their contact can get them in touch directly. Current members are Alex, David, Eike, Helio, Kai, Uwe, Lydia, Sebastian, Cornelius, Thomas and me. Yeah. What have we done over the past year? We have five advisory board calls which is always on the advisory board members and the contacts. It's usually not everyone can make it to the same time because some of the advisory board members do what they're doing within their work time, others do it within their free time so we are alternating times between afternoon and evenings so that everyone has a chance to come at least to every second meeting so we have two new members to the advisory board Private Internet Access and Debian and currently one of the things that we've done was coordinating a letter calling on politicians to accept all free software repositories from requirements to scanning filters so this is maybe you've heard about this the new EU copyright directive and one of the articles in it is a team as everyone who hosts anything where users can upload things, has to filter them for any potential copyright infringement and this would be pretty hurtful for open source communities because we don't have the staff or the technology to do this kind of filtering and we also don't want to do that so we have partnered with several of our partner organizations within the advisory board to draft and sign a letter together to politicians to make an exception for all of open source and free software some lessons learned so we have tried to figure out a good schedule for the advisory board calls we tried to do them every two months and we realized that we didn't really have enough interesting topics to make every call worthwhile and realized that people seemed less and less motivated to attend every call so we went back to a four month schedule and hoping that we will now have enough topics to really make those interesting and one positive thing that we've learned was that we were actually surprised by the impact that the news of Debian joining the advisory board actually had in the free software ecosystem with users with people on forums on Reddit with news outlets about Linux and open source so for us Debian joining the advisory board was more or less yeah we like each other we have different missions and it was just coming natural to us that Debian should be on our advisory board but for the world outside of us it was really big news was what is happening, what will this mean will Debian now switch to Plasma as default desktop that was pretty interesting it showed that just being on the advisory board actually means something not only for us but also for the outside world where we need help we're currently trying to find more closely what the advisory board should do and also what the advisory board working groups should do if anybody has any input on what could make the advisory board really useful then we're happy for it our key goals and plans as I said we want to define more closely the duties of an advisory board contact so that people really know what's expected from them we also want to do more of these joint initiatives and actions like with the letter to the politicians but that was the only big thing that we did and we think that there's still a lot more potential and of course you want to grow the advisory board further so also if anybody has ideas for organizations that should join the advisory board then we're also happy for that you can reach us under this email address one question one of the discussions that we had was that Sousa came to us saying that our their schedules of updates don't really match with our schedules and also that we didn't have any long-time support long-term support but I think long-time support long-term support version for Plasma so Sousa always had to decide what Plasma version they should include in their releases and then what to do because we wouldn't Plasma only had 6 month support schedule so they had the problem that they always had to backport fixes from later Plasma versions so we tried to find a solution at the Plasma LTS and that's definitely what came out of this now we have two additional last so the last report from our working group and you can try it we've basically all the infrastructure on the roadside do you think we would like to the community infrastructure in the future of this our systems delivered 9 terabytes of data of the month of July some of that was due to our partners Cd and Cd7 but the massive metric I think in the standard here is that about 1 terabyte of data was just normal really low clip-side content images, HTML when I saw that figure I actually had to read it because that didn't let me we hosted over 125 gigabytes of get-insert version repositories accumulated since the beginning of ADE and that continues to grow and that's not going to start from HTML and that HTML service delivers over half a million emails every single week and on some days it can top over 100,000 so that actually required working with email providers in some instances can't just start delivering that much email because you will get blocked in terms of in the good moment there's myself Nick from the channel here and Jeff Mitchell-Souls after some other things and of course there are other people who look after various services throughout our systems who are kind of also part of Cd7 so we are going to talk about the accomplishes here the kind of big hallmark the binary factory which the system pumps out the windows doors the macOS DMGs and Android APIs for small handcraft applications that have Android to boot that's not a simple of a challenge you have to get a lot of tools and make that work in the case of windows if you don't sign the binaries the many instances windows will throw at you so we can get a sign so we have a lot of work done there and it looks like there are a lot of various improvements to the CIS system we got rid of our floor images we retired a bunch of because it's now actually Jupyter and learned support as a result is now a lot of our services because of the that was really fantastic with helping us maintain those images to get new software as it's needed and that's being handled in the new hallmark in terms of new build posts thanks to the board for proving those changes they replaced the existing ones and sped up build build timers and some of their services you're looking at build and timers proven by the fixing them on and we're going to rework how our windows build posts are set up so that kind of makes things more flexible it means that we needed to we needed to use 32 bit or 64 bit build specifically with huge I mean we need to consider some hardware and so on and so forth we also got rid of some services that were thrown way out being used in the local service was one of the reasons why the editor has shut down quite a bit is because it still lasts for plenty of time which is really good so it comes at the end of the time and it's like this has to go sorry we also discontinued our model our computers and we set the mirror at the end to shut down and then we decided to put in the distance on the key because no one really used the distance on distance on it and it was also a couple of all that we decided to put it on the key so we shut it down as well but after I set the key we don't even need to do the funding but you can't change the map we also closed with the default because in my opinion it's in terms of email services that was a problem so I'm not really able to change the menu here we closed with the default because we used in the sari rule set so we got rid of that so we reviewed all it's a much larger balance and we took out a lot of old scoring and the rest of it we get a few minutes of years and as a result I don't want to fix the maintenance as I'm all right we've been in this garden for weeks and now it's all so that's basically a reason for don't even want to say this is what I want you to do when the email wasn't signed by me and it's not that it doesn't come from a server that I see as I see the new email that's quite important for the payback of asking emails to those so that's really good on email services we want to pay by journey they don't just try to do that in the sari rule and in terms of all that we switch to the wall backup actually the wall backup use the wall backup compressors and drip zips and de-drip vets so that's what we want to base we as part of the on-board setup people wear a mouthful of Zara and we set it up in relation to the binary vector as well as we have the inputs they can ask the wall to the generation see what's they're doing what's they're doing suddenly and we move the in-house colors to the dps system which is not right on the same system so there's four other factors we also help with the energy rough or the cross quality as part of the call introduction of dps in terms of our home products we do have a facility all of it has come to the end of its lifetime there's just some of 55,000 accounts in there and there's a consequence it's not on the scale if you're trying to create an accounting amount it's a fairly easy one and we test it's capability and it's in time and it's in high quality but it's not how it's made we also help with the introduction of the wall backup and the format can be able to use ci so we know how to attach to ci this builds, this doesn't maybe it's just a and we also we do a review of the normal energy at the moment you know it's a new treasure of all three we can say two minutes is short or one short and if you delete your call to three it will just get one around but it won't just get in the other one but we might be able to get it to the category so you can just push and we'll create a review or update it I'm going to put a video about all that in order to see how it works how can we communicate with this how can we create a door that's part of the job it's not too scary but just in terms of the time it can be useful when I create a group of people sometimes working on that it can be both a lot of other entities it's a perfect idea we'll be able to send it here to the UK in the next couple of weeks it will be also important that's actually solved it's being moved from sending it off to the UK it's sending it to the UK it's sending it to the UK it's sending it to the UK it's sending it to the UK I don't know why that's being done we can take this to the UK I'm curious how has the system the team of Royal and Toronto and I used to see you helping out do you feel like that you're making a lot of of the community work on with the system it's becoming a digital product it requires a lot of trust dealing with the canons the inter-distribution between the big computers the system can say that we're on this stage it's hard to hear do you need to go on with something that's not too easy in some cases the problems with those aren't easy ones so you actually need to be pretty prepared to start solving one of the problem solving this hard problem whether it's solving or not just like someone might actually need to do a business how can we see that there's a problem but I think that Royal has a problem with that it's not very normal do you have a last few more for the KD3 creation just a second KD3 creation is something that is a foundation that has the creative to secure the availability of the Q2 for the development of free software in particular for the development of KD3 software so it's a giant foundation two people from the KD side two from the QCompany side and we have a little contract that ensures that Qt stays free software the cover platforms are desktop limits and Android Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows Phone Apple MacOS and Apple Apple IOS and it includes all parts of Q everything there the free software more specifically mostly the LGPL KD3 and also under the GPL version 2.0 later it ensures that it's comfortable with a wider range of free software and for some other modules it's at least the GPL version 3 for example some new modules have a dependency to have a patchy license which is just not countable with GPL version 2 for us we're preparing the part and we're all being re-licensed by now so we have a clean situation not covered by other platforms like in battle 2.0 X those are anyway the main Q licenses and on top of that QCompany has the right of additional product that are developed and not included in the contracts but also based on whether it's a new 3D design a UI design tool that has been released under the GPL version 3 was called originally comes with an MDM so QCompany involved a lot of other plans for QN6 with the two long term support releases before that in order QCompany 18 QCompany Q2.5.12 and then spring QN2.20 QCompany Q5.14 with that QCompany Q6.0 in order QN2.20 as a clean algorithm removing code that's the case in QCompany Q2.15 now removing code doesn't mean just drawing things that are already new the QCompany in the form of the foundation form has said that currently we have no plans for functionality in QCompany 6 of course APIs can be changed or replaced but functionality will be there a proper yeah, so I don't know if those are advancements or refactoring to different or whatever conditions as before as shown in our contracts now if the developer community of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany of QCompany QCompany We had a lot of meeting on Tuesday night, and we had a group of 90 people came. Also, there were many other projects in the back of the evening, for what was visible from your interview going forward.


Inside Hawaii Real Estate, a show dedicated to providing up-to-date information and used to Hawaii home buyers, sellers, and investors. I'm Will Tanaka with my co-host, business partner, and wife, Leone Lab, a realtor with over 20 years experience in various leadership roles in the Hawaii real estate industry. Thanks Will. Will is a full-time realtor with a real estate litigation attorney background and he also was the head of a Hawaii title NESTRO company. And now we're full-time in real estate working together as a team to bring you the latest in Hawaii real estate. And today we have a very special guest. We have Rick Osborne Jr, the general manager of Everon Security, formerly known as ADT Commercial. They specialize in security and fire monitoring for commercial properties. Rick has been in the commercial and home security industry for over 30 years. And before that, he was a lifeguard saving lives. We're lucky because Rick is a true expert in his field, having worked with companies like Alert, Alarm, Simplex, to ADT, which is now Everon Security. So welcome, Rick. How are you guys doing? How are you doing? We're here. Excellent. All right, Rick. Yeah, we really appreciate you. And today, of course, we're going to talk all about security systems. And growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, no one had home security cameras. Now when you scroll through social media, I see some very interesting behaviors caught in security cameras, whether it's at home, condo buildings, shopping centers, grocery stores, you name it. And when we go to Best Fire or Amazon, there seems to be an unlimited supplies of home security choices. So Rick, the fact that you've been in the security industry for over three decades, what do you feel is most important in the security industry? I mean, what's changed in your industry over the years? What fulfills you and what's kept you in it for most of your career? I would say probably change. Change is probably one of the most intriguing things that have been happening. Like you said, in the beginning, back when I started, cameras weren't a thing for residential at all. And even if they were in the commercial industry, they were only in banks. And they were in boxes like this big. And it was actual film inside the camera that actually clicked off pictures. And you'd have to go pull the cartridge and take it to like long drugs and have them develop the cartridge. There wasn't even video.  So the innovation and the technology change, I think, has been the funnest. I've moved away from residential. I mostly do commercial, which even has more and more innovation. But then it's always changing. It keeps it interesting. We talk about these emergency of technology, smart home devices and all these options. And of course, you have employees, a good amount of market share. And what are some of the advantages like everyone for utilizing a professional service like your company? Well, like I said, I always go back to you get what you pay for. But there is a certain amount of expense and needs when you have overhead. For example, we have 35 employees, 25 trucks, offices, the whole line yards. I think the difference with us is when you pick up the phone, we actually show up, what a concept. Some of the smaller companies, if they take on too big a project, they could fold. I've been in the industry almost 30 years and kind of stayed with the same companies along whether it was through acquisition or other things. Again, having a company, everybody's got product, everybody's got a camera, everybody's got a recording device, a card reader, an alarm system. But I truly believe it's the company and the service that stands behind it that makes the difference. You talk about service. Can you talk about how everyone stands out from other companies? I think we have a very, very high expectation for our staff and our people, for our customers. For example, we've got some pretty steep metrics. For example, we have what's called an FDR, a first day resolution. So 85% of our tickets that are entered by our customers must have a first day resolution. Because nothing is worse than you call for service, we show up, oh, we're going to need a part for that. And then we leave and it doesn't get rescheduled or we come back for the part again and we bill you again for the second time we came for the part. When if we had just done our homework and realized what part we needed, we would have made one call and it would have been less expensive. And it's less costly to me if I don't roll a truck two times or something I can only charge months for. So first day resolution within 24 hours, 85% of our tickets must be responded to within 24 hours. And we're currently running about 92 and 94% on both metrics. So it's, you know, we're all about customer service and returning calls and making sure things get done right. That's impressive. That is, and I like that first day resolution. Is there any examples that you can share about security systems that you've seen over the years maybe that actually have saved someone's life?    So that's, that's a good thing. I would say the life saving is more along the lines of fire alarm systems and sprinkler systems. That's why it's generally called covered under the gambit of fire life safety. That's when you're really saving lives. You know, for example, Marco Polo had had sprinkler systems and a better fire alarm system. We might not have had the incidences that we did. So yeah, I would say the saving of lives is more on the fire life safety side. I remember this was years ago at another home, but you know, we had a break in and we didn't have security systems, you know, like 15 years ago. But when we got it, there were a couple of false alarms. So, you know, when I looked at the statistics, there are over 18,000 false alarms just on the island of Oahu, which takes up a lot of police and fire department resources. After a certain amount of time, then you get a fine by the police department. So in terms of trying to prevent false alarms and, you know, when an alarm goes off, can you just kind of walk me through the process? Right. So again, on the commercial side, I can speak to more definitely, but on the residential side, it kind of works the same way. We try, first of all, we're going to sit down with a customer and do a proper onboarding call. Who do you want us to call? When do you want us to call? You know, on the residential side, most people always go, well, just call the police. Hang on. We're going to try to manage the situation properly. So we call the police when we actually need them. So one of the things that we do is do what's called video verification. So we try to connect the alarm system and install a camera system at the same time. So when the alarm comes to our central station, we can look at the cameras and realize, oh, that's a floating mylar balloon through the room. I'm not calling the police. Things of that nature. Or there's construction outside rattling the windows. So there's not somebody trying to break in or somebody didn't break in. So we can actually verify before we call the police. But again, like you said, 18,000 alarms is going to move false alarms and move the priority of alarm response way down the list. Right? So based on that, you'll always want to try and make sure you're testing your system often, getting it serviced often, try to, you know, budget for the video verification piece of it. Monthly wise, it's not much, depends on what you want to do. Most of our banking customers, most of our retail locations, we are looking at doing video verification so that we can minimize the false alarms. And then your company, everyone has partnered with Google for home security systems. A former company ADT did. Yes. So when we were part of ADT, so ADT on the residential side, which again, we're not a part of, but I can speak to it a little bit. But on the residential side, everything is going to do it yourself, right? So that's a big market. And so for ADT to be viable in that market, they needed to do something. And at the same time, Google was getting steep competition from Ring at Amazon, right? So the problem with Ring or simply say for those eyes, you can buy it yourself, you can install it. But if at some point it's beyond your technical capability, there's nobody to call to come to your house and look at it. They may walk you through it over the phone. Even ADT does this, they have a FaceTime service. They'll actually FaceTime with you on your phone to walk you through the keypad issues where the technician gives quicker response. But we still have field personnel if something goes wrong. So Google actually partnered and bought into ADT so that what they're doing now is to merge all the Nest product that Google has, the cameras, the doorbells, the hubs, those type of things, merging those and making them compatible with the ADT alarm system. So that allows you to control things through your Google Home and things of that nature. It also allows Google to have a field presence because of the direct partnership with ADT. If something goes wrong, you can call ADT A for monitoring or B for service in the field. And Rick, in the commercial space, in terms of having access to your cameras on the phone, on your laptop, is it pretty similar? Oh, absolutely. The difference on the commercial side is there's a lot more IT involved. There's a lot more IT restrictions involved. Every time you go to somebody in your IT department, go, hey, I got this cool mobile app. I want to look at stuff. Can I put it on the network?  And we found that to be the case. And usually it's not because they're trying to be difficult. It's A for security reasons for IT cybersecurity. B, it's also for bandwidth. And I don't mean network bandwidth. I mean personnel bandwidth from your IT department. They've already got enough on their plate. They don't want to have to try and figure out and deal with the security of camera systems being put on the network, them having to manage it, having to put out the IP addresses, port forwarding, all these other fancy words. So we at Everon actually have what's called managed services. So we'll actually bring in the internet circuit, put in a Meraki switch and move all of the security equipment to a dedicated network so that their IT people don't even have to deal with it. So we're actually finding success with that with our banking partners because they just don't have to bandwidth personnel-wise to manage all that stuff. So are there recordings like somewhere in the cloud, I guess? So that's an interesting question because that is one of the, as you would call it, emerging technologies in the cloud. But when you talk about storing video on a massive level, for example, one of my clients who's one of the largest health systems or hospitals on the island or the state, at one location we're talking over 400 cameras. And then you're talking about terabytes, not gigabytes, but terabytes, which is 1,000 gigabytes. And I'm talking five to 600 terabytes of information. If you get up to 1,000 terabytes, we're talking about petabytes. So we're talking about rooms of servers and hard drives. So people are like, yeah, let's just send it to the cloud. Well, if you remember, cloud is all subscription-based. So the monthly cost versus buying a server. So you have to play, you have to look at each and every application differently. Cloud is becoming more and more popular. But again, when some cloud instances, you're then a prisoner of who that proprietary information might be.  We try to do what's more of a hybrid or cloud managed. So we're still storing on premise, the video, but we're sending a link out to manage in the cloud. Again, less taxing on the IT departments. Yeah. All these technology, and I never heard the term going up above terabytes. So you said petabytes? Yeah, I never heard that either. Petabytes. Las Vegas is in the petabyte range. I could imagine that with all the gambling and privacy and cybersecurity issues. I understand one of your companies focus, of course, commercial and condo buildings. So you have cameras at the lobbies, elevators, pool areas, barbecues. And for those condo buildings, are there usually people just proactively doing those cameras live? Or is it more reactive when something happens that you would just go to the recordings? Is it your company doing it? Or is it their own security people? So there's a couple of different applications. But the first two, you use the proper words, actually. One is a proactive approach, which is they're sitting there watching the cameras. But you have to understand that there's been studies done and no human being can watch more than 16 to 20 cameras for more than 20 minutes before they start to glaze over. Right? And so unless you have alerts in what they call analytics, tripping certain things and moving screens and making beeping noises to bring their attention to it, you're generally going to start to kind of glaze over and not really catch stuff. You always want to be recording, and that's what we call a reactive. So again, it depends on the property, the budget of that property, the mindset of that property. We can make all the requests in the world to say, hey, you need to do this, this or this, especially in a condo. It's all going to come down to that year's board. So whoever thinks that they're the SME or subject matter expert that week. From our home security, if a homeowner sells their property, how easy would it be for them to transfer the system over to a new buyer or to the new homeowner? It's actually very simple because whether this law has changed or not, but way back when, when I was turning around chalkboards and programming with an abacus, yes, I even know what that is. When you attach something to a house in the state of Hawaii becomes property of the house. Right. So, you know, and again, if this came back from the old days when everything was hardwired and we were actually running a wire out to every window and every door, nowadays everything is wireless. So can you remove it and walk away? Yes, that's why they're, you know, that do it yourself for apartment owners and stuff. They're using Belcro and sticky back tape. Because that's an untapped market. But again, nine times out of 10, you're going to cancel your contract with your alarm company. And if you've signed anything more than a, you know, to the standard, they try to get you to sign as a five year contract. So if you say, Hey, I've sold my house, I'm moving, they're going to pull the, oh, well, you have a five year contract, but we can continue it. We'll just do a relocation chart. But what they're actually doing is going to sell you a new system, excuse me, add your new home, leave the old system in and then try to go back to whoever buys your house to sign them up for service as well. And that's how they expand the customer base. So that's a good tip then. So make sure that you read your contracts and be, be certain about how many years you're signing up for as a homeowner that's enlisting home security. Right. Cause again, the other structure is most salespeople's commissions are structured on how long the contract, you know, as we were preparing for this, for this think tech show. And I remember a movie called, what's it called panic button with, or there's a movie about, you know, panic buttons. And is that something that, that's still, you know, you still install for like retail stores or? Absolutely. We just finished a large clinic and there were 97 panic buttons installed throughout the property. But again, it all depends on who's monitoring it, where it's being monitored and what for, for a reason. But those buttons are still used in banking and retail as well. And maybe for security purposes, you can't really reveal too much about the process. But I was just, just more curious, is it just, you know, a single button that you press or are you able to? There are different devices and obviously we try to use a dual action type of device, something that you have to like pull and then push a button or squeeze or that kind of thing. Cause nothing's worse than your knee under your desk, setting up a panic button. You're just working away at a cop show up. That's right. That's right. There's different devices out there and there's different uses. Earlier, like I had, you had mentioned that, like in stores and things like that, cameras have picked up some interesting footage and, and so I was wondering if you could share some stories with us. Oh, well, so now you're putting me on the spot. I knew you were coming here. Yeah, no, I would tell you in my vault, I have some pretty interesting footage of some interesting things that have happened. I will not divulge any of the securities footage we pulled from elevators. This needs to stay G rated. But you know, simple things, honestly, the shift of our customer base is turning towards risk management versus security because it's a dual application. In other words, I've had clients that my contract was budgeted and driven by the risk management division, meaning they want to make sure the cameras are working. They're clear. They're running and properly installed because they got great footage of this lady with a broken foot that limped into the lobby of a hotel, squirted her suntan lotion on the ground, and then slipped on it on purpose so that she could sue the hotel for a loose tile in which she broke her foot. But by watching the video, you can see her foot's already broken when she walks up to do this. So they, she sued them for $750,000. They played the video. She immediately dropped the suit and they trespassed her from all properties. So that was where risk management saved. And we get this kind of video in a retail and grocery stores all the time. People take the cooking oil off the shelf. They dump it on the floor. They put the bottle back on the shelf and then they slip on it and then drive wolf, in other words, for trying to sue the store. Wow. The risk management definitely ties into this and I can totally get it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Even for the condos, a lot of your condo markets, they have the common area camera systems. The problem that's probably neglected the most is preventative maintenance. Coming in on a quarterly basis and cleaning the cameras, making sure they're working, make sure they're recording. There's so many times people go back to get the video of what happened and it's a beautiful shot of a dead gecko inside the camera. Or the camera hasn't been recording at all and they never even knew. So for an example of changing technologies, I can install software now that tells me and sends me an alert when the camera's been moved. The video's changed. It's not video. It's not recording or whatever. We can put analytics on the devices. And so that's like another benefit of going with a professional security service is preventative maintenance is someone's going to be paying attention to it because all of our lives are so busy. And so it's good to have someone that's kind of regular about it just like we have. They go back to bed, personnel bed. We think about a regular condo. They've got a maintenance guy. They've got an engineering. Or the hotels were the best.  I'm not cleaning. I'm not housekeeping. And the housekeeping people are like, I'm not getting on a ladder and climbing up and opening up the camera to clean it. That's engineering. So we kind of resolve that form. But even on the smaller condos, you've got a resident manager. That's it. Maybe a maintenance guy for a time. Some of the bigger condos may have maintenance, but they've got enough on their plate with every condo owner calling them because their door squeaks or something, right? So that's a good point. Yeah. And yeah, I was just curious in terms of, you know, we hear about like 4k zoom or, you know, on our iPhones or TV, drones in terms of the quality of the cameras and the ability to zoom in. How has that changed in recent years? Well, it's interesting, you know, because I even sit here in the industry, I've been in the industry over 30 years. I know what the cameras are. I know what they cost. And then, you know, I look over and there's iPhone touting a 50 megapixel camera. I'm like, how the hell do they do that for that price? But again, they're buying, you know, a couple hundred thousand at a time. So, you know, yeah, we can do 4k, which is actually eight megapixel. There are some companies that have 30 megapixel and 50 megapixel cameras, but they're not priced properly to sell on a regular basis. So if you're not selling a lot of them, the price is higher because of demand, right? So, yeah, no, there's definitely, you know, 30 megapixel camera. I can zoom from miles and miles away, but the more I zoom, the more pixelated it gets. So you have to remember that your megapixel calculation is based on what we call a PPF or pixels per foot. How many pixels am I putting into that imager per foot? And that's where the megapixel comes from. So again, it's all about hiring the right professional to consult you on what you need for the right application. From what you're hearing in your industry, I know that it's kind of looking forward and it's newer technology, but you know, artificial intelligence, do you think that's going to become a component in terms of your overall security industry, whether it's commercial or residential? Oh, absolutely. It's either going to be in the setup, the programming. I also think, I mean, we're already starting to use, we call it analytics. So I can tell you, I can draw a line in the screen and I can tell you, if everybody's going right to left, I don't care. That's fine because it's a one way street. If anybody goes left to right, ping me and tell me and give me a note. So we're already trying to, we're already doing that in what we call analytics, objects left behind, loitering. We're using that a lot for the homeless population. You know, people, they're camping out in nice dry areas that happen to happen. It's an ATM best of people. And so the banks are losing money because people don't want to come up and use the ATM because there's a homeless guy sleeping there. So we're using that for loitering, objects left behind, things of that nature. I will only see that grow and get more powerful. Yeah, I can see that. So hopefully when that happens, I'll just retire and I won't have to worry about it. You're too young, sorry. Hey Rick, do you see kind of like drones as part of the commercial space in the future? So we have started pilot programs for that on the mainland. And we've actually also started robotics for replacing guards. So we're starting pilot programs in multiple locations to run robots and drones. The drones are more for industrial monitoring. So we're going to look for heat, water, things of that nature. We're going to be touring warehouses, data rooms, things of that nature. The robots will be able to set up on tours of the buildings. And then that robot actually will send a signal and in turn contact our central station. And our central station operators, amazingly enough, are sitting there wearing Oculus goggles and gloves. So that if it does connect to somebody or connect to something based on its interactions or something, it then connects to a live person. So we can literally open the door, pick up a bag. A lot of times we get door left open alarms from access because the cleaning crew have put a bucket to prop the door open. Because they don't want to use the car to go back and forth. It's too much on bug. And then they forget it. So now our robot will be able to pick up the bucket, move it and lock the door remotely. That is amazing. It's common. It's actually here. We're doing it in multiple locations like Boeing and Google and Amazon and things of that nature who are already there. That's both exciting and kind of scary at the same time. Yeah, that's for the next generation. Well, I mean, it's already here, but Rick, thank you so much for your time. I mean, wealth of knowledge. We've learned so much about security and commercial space. Yep. Well, thank you guys very much for your time. I appreciate it. And anytime, give me a call. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Rick Osborn Jr. General Manager of Ebron Security. Thank you so much and aloha.