From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020. And we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock. And of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020. When in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls and did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. Eric Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis. And we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Eric, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you in the Cube, my friend. Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. Well, let's get right into it. You know, let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Eric, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work. And we've listed a number of them here in this slide. You know, I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit. I mean, the pace of the vaccine rollout. You know, I've called this a force march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand and, you know, work from home. We're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just delayed, just delayed a little bit. That's all. Now, very much so, early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher. And that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have. It's a must-have and that spending is going quickly. That is a rapid pace on that spending. So I do think that's going to push it. And of course, security. We're going to get to this later on. So I don't want to bury the lead, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned. And there will definitely be increased security spending that might push us 4% even higher. Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT. There are fewer layoffs. There's more hiring. We're accelerating IT deployments. So that, I think 34% or the last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months. So that's great news. And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more headcount comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in the headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized settling in at an average of 34% by year in 2021. And now I love this chart. You guys, it's been amazingly consistent to me, Eric. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s. And we're going to stay close to that according to the ETR data in the first half of 2021. But by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Eric, that's doubled the pre-pandemic numbers. And that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six months. And even within the subsamples. Yes, super surprised by the consistency, Dave, you're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent. And that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change. It really isn't. And there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up. And we'll talk about that in a second. But if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting. They're working more. They're working effectively. There is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent, but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. Good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020. And productivity apps are going to benefit now. And of course, I've always careful the cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much the productivity increase is a very hard thing to estimate, depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are saying productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Eric, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even WebEx benefit. But how do you see this playing out in 2021? Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity. And our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time. So that's number one, but you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide, lifted all boats. Even Citrix got pulled up. But over time, you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need. Or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again. It's not happening.  This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in, I was a little concerned about it because it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working. So that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call that would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience. But when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there. Companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well. Not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? I mean, certainly Zoom just escalated this year. Yeah. Huge ascendancy. And Teams I look at a little differently because it's not just sort of video conferencing and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? There's no way around it. Our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects, it did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight, you know, huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward. And there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom because they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine. But you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in pricing. I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon. So maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile. But there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it. So we'll see. But the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. I think I'm inferring Teams a little different because it's Microsoft. They got this huge software estate. They can leverage, they can bundle. Now it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. It will be, but listen, just the other day, there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful on the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. Yep, I agree. Okay, let's bring up a prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work, sort of a hyper pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. It's been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, a couple that we called CrowdStrike Octa, Z Scalers really benefited. And I think we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Eric, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on micro segmentation and some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall, when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be, that's not changing. And that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with the CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking, but pretty close is the way he put it. So there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Octa, continued identity access, see no reason why that changes, CrowdStrike continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas like we just mentioned in network segmentation. Alumeo is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30% to 60%. So I am watching in real time as this data comes in in the later part of our survey that it's really happening. For Scout is another one that's in there. We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we could talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto is in this space as well, but I do believe that network and micro segmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out and I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends and catch something sooner. Veronis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Veronis is a name to watch in that area as well. Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player there, subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit on a Venn, which is ETR's proprietary round table, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work many of them anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, the Best of Breed, Best of Breed versus the big portfolio companies. And 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. I completely agree. And you nailed it again. And Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them. But let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like, you know, they're full-on platform in the cloud and they're starting to market that. I'm starting to hear more about it. And I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right. Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, a positive sentiment. Now let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space. You know, we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing. There is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. Yes, no question. There's a highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watchword. And so I would expect, which brings us, Eric, to prediction number five. You can't, it would be hard to do a prediction post without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending, driving more IPOs, SPACs, and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one, Airbnb, DoorDash, you know, outside of our enterprise tech, but still notable, Palantir, Jayfrog, a number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, you know, over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think automation anywhere is going to fall suit at some point. HashiCorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others. And Eric, we've seen some real shifts in observability, the Elkstrak, stack gaining prominence with Elastic. Chaos search just raised 40 million. So, and everyone's going after 5G, lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? You know, I think we're going to make this a prediction show. I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in Enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names, I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space is Grafana, along with the Elkstrak, is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been. So I think the observability area is certainly one. We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but Cloudflare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight and there's a few startups in that space. And CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days. And they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six. And this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer term prediction. And that prediction is in the 2020, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms. And the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes, data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and abetted into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today. They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context, different data agendas. Those we think are going to be subsumed within the business lines and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation. And this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Eric, anything you'd add to this? I'm going to let you kind of own that one because I could completely agree. And for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought. And I think it's fantastic. And I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they're got over the hype of machine learning. They're sick of vendors saying machine learning. And I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics. We need them at the edge. We need them faster. We need them in real time. That's happening. And what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor agnostic tools, right? This isn't just AWS aligned. This isn't just GCP aligned or Azure aligned. The winners are the snowflakes. The winners are the data breaks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports where you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction is about the lines of business owning it. Because I think this is even bigger. Right now we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing. It's coming under the purview of sales. So we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user as a business lines and obviously data first. So I think you're a hundred percent right. Yeah. And if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics. The business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems. And we talked about snowflake and data bricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, you're applying data bricks, machine learning on top of snowflake. I actually see them going and diverging in places. I see data bricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh. And it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out the data behind snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. Yeah. It's just real quickly to add on that. If we have time, Dave, snowflake, our data on, we all know the valuation snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for data bricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile.  And our most recent data for data bricks is actually decelerating. So again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1300 or so, so it's not done yet. But right now we are putting data bricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. Well, it's interesting because I do see data bricks as more incremental on data lakes. And I see snowflake as more transformative. So, you know, at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. The battle to the, let's talk about cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started. And it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And Eric, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady march and share gains relative to on-prem. But the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. I mean, just a couple of years ago, right, AWS? They even talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates. It's so large now, 45 billion or so this year. And the data is mixed. The ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads. And then a similar in the cloud workloads and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds. So really interesting dynamic there, Eric. How do you see it shaking out? Yeah, the data is interesting here. And I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year. So we're not seeing a huge increase in spend. And coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective at various two point on AWS, let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center, they wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability. Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos, which is allowing you to have interoperability and more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher, law of numbers of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in the context of what the data is showing because I would agree in two areas that I would call out in the ETR data, VMware cloud on AWS, and as well as VM cloud foundation are showing real momentum. And also Redshift, open stack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal. And it's interesting to see. I mean, VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat throughout everybody's stack. And so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer friendly, right? It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with. But I don't see anyone moving to them that weren't, it wasn't already net new there. And I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic. But I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity. So really, those are the kind of the big four, cloud containers, AI, automation. And Eric, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud containers, AI and automation in the form of RPA, especially as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum. And we put an asterisk around the sort of cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary, because the survey is still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here. But cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares. Now, as you said earlier, you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. I mean, virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum. And even those two were seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before with the freezing of the IT projects, starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that. One on the machine learning automation without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now. And I've had a multiple number of people reach out in my interviews say to me, this is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly. Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney. And this guy obviously has big budget. And he was basically saying UI path and automation anywhere dominate RPA. And that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen. We needed to find way to get rid of these mundane tasks. We had to put them into real workloads. And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation. So we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick, you brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about you said, about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. Great, thank you for that. And then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now you may say, okay, well, this is a layup, but not necessarily UI path and automation anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UI path, I've said UI path and automation anywhere. If they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year. So I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together. So this is not necessarily a layup for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go forward. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation. And combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation. We think 2021 we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools. They're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Eric, how do you see it? And what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? Yeah, I completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment. And those two are the leader in our data UI path by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on automation anywhere. So they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling. So if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once, but not in depth. So we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data UI path is still number one, automation anywhere is number two. And Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but call it to Pegasystems. You know, we put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. They're spending momentum. The early signs in the latest survey are becoming starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UI path and automation anywhere ahead on. And so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Info. Everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here, who's a software player. I completely agree, but I do think there is a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to prove their ROI. Trying to say, yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back. Business process has always been at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the peg of the IBM is really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article about the post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company, said not only are UI path and AI dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well. So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing, and what Peg is doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that. But I did think it was an interesting comment for an interesting opportunity for UI path and automation anywhere. Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the models of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design. And the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower cost versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like NVIDIA, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got a companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs. And they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think. And they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years, they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors. Eric, look, we've seen cloud players, they're diversifying their processor suppliers, they're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year. Certainly, if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity, your thoughts. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I think you're right, it's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication. But right now, there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great ship famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again.  All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired. And you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer. And I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this, and maybe we can leave that as there and you could do this in another time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G rollout, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply, no doubt, it's also could have a really huge implications for the CDN network. All right, there you have it folks. Eric, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. Always have a great holiday everybody, stay safe. Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 in the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes, they're available as podcasts. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you got to check out etr.plus. So where all the survey action is, definitely subscribe to their services. If you haven't already, you can DM me at dvolante or email me at davidotvolante at siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Eric Bradley for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time.


We're going to be looking at some of the very complex issues that museums collections and archives face when trying to determine the most sustainable ways to preserve and make available their holdings. I was looking at the forthcoming Museums Association UK conference and I noticed that they had a number of of sessions around climate change. They have a sustainable procurement. They have climate change programming. They have transfer and reuse of collections and they have something called the power to act on climate, which has the wonderful subtitle why status quo should only be a rock band. So lots on sustainability. Interestingly, not so much coming through. I'm sure they will mention it and not so much going through specifically around sustainable sustainability and the digital. So fascinating subjects and one where we're really pleased to be joined by colleagues who have been working within this area. So first you'll be hearing from Kate Gill and Sarah Phillips who are from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Q and they're going to share their ambitious project to digitize entire collections of more than 8 million plant and fungal specimens. That will open up a treasure trove of information to help scientists understand and protect the natural world. And then later we'll be hearing from Stacy Anderson who's the media archivist at the box in Plymouth, who will share beyond analog, which is a journey towards sustainable digital preservation within museums and archive service. So wonderful to be joined by those by those colleagues.  Yes, thank you for the invitations joining research libraries UK and Sarah and I are going to be talking for the next 20 minutes or so about what we're doing at the Royal Botanic Gardens Q. I'm actually at Wakehurst, which is down near Gatwick Airport and Sarah is joining you from Richmond London. Again, we're kind of living the virtual dream of actually going through this kind of presentation to remotely. And I'm going to do the first few slides which is kind of about the conversation that we're trying to the message we're trying to do about that sustainable conversation that goes to leading to as to why is this important why digitization such a critical conversation to have. And then I'm going to hand over to Sarah who's actually been living and breathing the nuts and bolts of this project for a number of years. So I won't steal her glory with any more intros than that. So one of the most common conversations we have with people is to why are you digitizing what's the point in digitizing. And so we kind of come up with a couple of slides as to five ways that digitizing anything, but particularly digitizing Q specimens can help save the world. And there's a lot of information and data that's kind of kept within the Q environment and I don't know how many of you have been to Royal Botanic Gardens Q. There's probably very few of you that have actually wandered around the Q science buildings that are hidden behind various hedges that most public don't go to. And even out of those people, there's probably even a smaller population who have actually wandered through our herbarium collections and opens and covers and had a look at what's inside. Now that means it's really, really hard to reach those people.  What we're trying to do very much with the digital conversation is reach to the next generation. It's to those people that are in key stage three key stage four undergrad postgrad to go right you're now very excited climate people.  And at Q we've got over 200 years worth so it's really good for us to kind of start that conversation to give people the right language about how they can save the world going forward. So five things you can do with digital specimens you can combat climate change which is the obvious one that people kind of come to as to what's useful part about the kind of digital collections. We know there's great rising global temperatures and what we don't understand as well is that that link to the plants and fungi that we rely on around the world, both in terms of food and medicine, but also in terms of materials for buildings and infrastructure. If you look at the worldwide need for natural, natural elements, we actually have a huge amount of those in our herbarium and from Gary. And we've got things called the economic botany collections, which basically talks about things that have economic value over the last 200 years. And it's really interesting watching how that story has changed what was important and what is now important going forward. We still really don't know what's going to be important in the next 50 or 100 years. So it could be that some of the plants that we've currently got in herbarium could then be genome matched could then be receded then be Germanized, germinated sorry, and actually then grown into some of the future crops that we're actually going to be eating. Currently, our particular diet preferences are very, very commercialized. So we actually focus on a really few number of species, which kind of brings into the next one as to about 40% of the world's plants are now threatened with extinction.  And some of those plants are again what drives economic value for some of those communities. We have relied on timber relied on coffee, and now in a geographical location where they can't grow the crops they used to, and either they have to physically, you know, up move their family into different areas, or look at more sustainable crops for that particular environment at a slightly higher temperature more salinity, etc, etc. So understanding what plants did grow in certain areas, which we of course having again in our herbarium specimens. There's a very, very large catalog of these things were grown at this point in time and collected at this geolocation. So you can actually map how some of the crops have moved geographically because of the climate being changed, or the environment being changed or the geographical political barriers being changed. So things like that are actually really interesting to track as to where they were to hopefully then look forward to where we're going in the future. I mean the last one for those of you coffee drinkers amongst us 60% of the wild coffee species are now threatened with extinction. So just bear that in mind next time you go for your Costa tomorrow, which brings us into feeding. And again, the kind of food we choose we choose has been very commercialized over the years and the species that are now being driven are being driven because of productivity not because of actually sustainability wise. And just 15 crops account for 90% of the world's energy intake, which again is really quite frightening when you think about the options that we should have and around the world. If you go to some of the indigenous communities they don't rely on any of the crops we rely on because they're just not local to their area. And actually they've got more sustainable and immunity to certain areas certain diseases in that particular area. So if you go back to the Irish potato famine, you know, an areas like that, you actually got areas where they adapted and they now know what foods they can rely on for the 50 years that they've been around and hopefully for the next 50 years in the future. Drought and salinity and fire actually I could also have added to this conversation is a big issue for certain parts of the environment. Some areas of Australia have have got very resistant fire resistant plants, but unfortunately we now get to the point where actually the fires are actually raging in areas that are outside of that into areas that have got no fire resistance whatsoever. So we're losing quite large swathes of land, and some plants just never recovering from that. And if you think about again that plants in local areas do actually feed communities, we really need to think about what were how it survives, and then how we can actually sustain the people in those areas. And in that area, we have more than 7 million plant specimens 70,000 sorry 700,000 those are legumes. So again it's a really big area as to how do we make enough, enough food to food the world really coming back to one of those live aid quotes from many many years ago. So moving on to agriculture, this is one of the big commercial drivers and again there's also a point at which we have to appreciate that we have limited landmass. So with staples that we've got we have to extract the most amount of value out of the land we have available. And in some areas, particularly in serials the warming world is going to be kind of have a significant effect on our food security and the areas that can grow the food that sustains the world. We've kind of seen it with some of the geopolitical conversations with Ukraine in the last year or say, but actually that could be that could be that conversation can take place in so many other areas where certain staple diets are actually being threatened. So with the herbarium conversation again we have the raw material, literally, to actually talk about how wheat has evolved over the years, which varieties of species have have sustained in certain areas. And then also for those areas that have been destroyed by natural disaster how we can actually rewild those how we can actually get that those crops back into that environment, using either the content we've got the millennium seed bank, or some of our Hungarian areas. So we're very committed in terms of our network of contacts, in actually making sure that that the ethnic kind of environment for certain foods is actually sustained for as long as we possibly can, and then also feeding the population around it. And then finally one that I find really quite interesting could talk about medicines plants and funghi and this is the first slide that I actually talk about funghi, but funghi are not another part of the conversation that we're actually going through at Q where digitizing our herbarium, but also digitizing our fungarium. And a fungarium specimen is not flat, it's a 3D kind of environment. So actually, some of the techniques we're having to use for digitizing our fungarium are fundamentally different to some of the techniques that Sarah is going to be talking about in the herbarium. But the whole point is that we're actually trying to capture the useful information from the specimens that we have in our buildings, and again make them accessible to as many people as we possibly can. We're kind of agnostic about this, we're open to people having as much information as they possibly can. We share as much as we possibly can because we know there's people around the world who have some really intelligent questions and way more than we could probably come up with. And actually giving them some of that core data is really, really important to them being able to answer some of their really groundbreaking research questions that they're coming up with. And it's really gratifying to see that. And if we can mobilize the world's researchers around the world, based on Q data, that will be a great achievement for us. So within the fungarium, we're actually also exploring different tools to analyze a specimen as to how you actually engage with some of these specimens. What's important? Is it the physical image? Is it the image side of things? Is it some of the trait data that goes in it? Is it genomic data? Is it the X-ray? Is it for fungi? Is it the mycelium that's under the ground in a LIDAR scan? There's lots of different ways we can gather information about plants and fungi. And what we're trying to do is make sure we don't miss anything in our digitization conversation. So actually it's a really big, exciting experiment to be part of. And actually at the end of this, we're going to have a huge, enormous database that's open to the world to actually help all those researchers go on and come up with some fantastic questions in years to come. So this is kind of the digitization project that we're going through in a minute. We're about 15 months into it. It's a huge, large-scale digitization project. We're hoping to actually digitize 8.5 million items in four years. Like I say, we're about a year and a half into it. We've just got to the three million specimen points in the herbarium. So we are literally ripping through the building, covered by coverage, table by table, and capturing all these items into a huge, enormous database that we built in-house, which is our integrated collection management system. And then once we've got that populated with as much as we possibly can, we're then enabling the data portal. And our data portal is basically our doorway to the world, which is where we wish to engage with the world by communities of researchers. So that's the project that I lead. It's been a great journey so far. And now I'm going to hand over to Sarah. Hi, thanks, Kate. Yeah, so as Kate was saying, so it's a four-year project to digitize the herbarium and the fungarium. We think, but we don't know. Our estimate was where 7 million herbarium specimens and 1.25 million fungarium specimens. Because we don't have a catalogue. We don't really actually know how much we actually have until we do that. Yeah, so it was costed us 29.3 million. We have 10 million pounds funding from DEFRA, which was secured in April 2022. And then we're just negotiating further funding with them at the moment. It's just sort of how government funding happens, as you may know. So what we do here is obviously is to, as Kate said, there are quite a few streams. We've got the digitization. We've got a new collections management system. And so a lot of our systems are out of date. They were not fit for purpose. And then we'll be able to create links between our different collections. So you'll be able to link the seed collection that you took with the herbarium specimen voucher and make those links a lot easier than you could in the past. And then we've got a data portal that will be releasing all the data to, to freely available to everybody. Okay, so next slide. So the, we have, we had to put a business case to. Sorry Sarah. That's fine. So you had a business case to DEFRA. And so we have mainly we've discussed the main reasons to do this was obviously all the science addresses who want to facilitate all the strategic and novel scientific activities. I mean, we want to use people to use it in many novel different approaches and people should use it in any way they want to. And also, if Q doesn't do this, then we're starting to become obsolete. There is like an, we want people there is an expectation now that our collection is digital. And sometimes we have more and more people going, oh, you haven't got had it digitized. Why can't I have those records for my research. So we need to do it to become to make sure we become a global leader. The digitization will never replace the physical specimen. You can't get DNA from a, from an image. You can't look at its chemistry, but it would protect if anything did happen to the specimen. It would mean that some, at least some data was still available. And you also have more efficient tracking of the use of specimens with links to the permits that when it comes in, and you have, you can track access to genetic resources and benefit sharing and translation and Nagoya. And hopefully all this will make it also more efficient collection management system, although you will have the added also of the added digital curation that you still need to do alongside the physical curation later. Okay, next slide. So, I'm doing the business development took a lot of work and it shouldn't be as dress made it how long that took. So we, and we had to, you know, you have to make a strategic economic and commercial case. So we actually had a leader team of four, and which included Deffra economists to do the review. Again, putting we had all the benefits to do that that we're tracking quarterly. I mean, a lot of the benefits will only come after the data is online, but part of the benefits is like would be involved like upskilling our digital team that is also happening at the moment. So our team has started from actually a case of three. And now we're up to a team of about 60 people. So it's been very big to big recruitment. There's also been a big lesson and big upskilling of learning about digitization in the team. Okay, next slide. This was our benefits. So the other benefit will also be when we digitize we will hope that we'll be able to get further funding for other projects that we wouldn't be able to do without the digitization because the cost of digitization was prohibitive. Yeah, next slide. So, like I said, the whole process for that took three, three months to do the full going through the business case, but we've done a lot we've been doing digitization for a long time at Q and we've learned a lot. And now the technology was in the right place where we can do rapid digitization. We're doing a mixture of in house and external supplier. So the ex we to the tender for an external supplier, he was doing the majority of the digitization they're a company called Max communications, but we are doing the more complex material. So we're doing material where if you know normal specimen you might have one specimen on a sheet. But sometimes you have specimens where there are many, many specimens on a sheet. There's more the case with things like orchids, which is small and they just happen to be lots, usually lots on a specimen sheet, and also the finger and you have many packets on a sheet. So that involves a lot more noticing sort of skill to work at how many collections they are so we've got a mixture of an in house and an external team. We've got a collection of palms, which were which are bulky and in boxes, so that and they take a lot longer because you have to refocus in between. So that's also why we're doing those in house. Next slide. And so, so the risk, I guess, is that we haven't had funding funding post March, but we've got very strong indication that that Q is committed to doing this. And we're also approaching deffer for funding. But because we're not sure we want to try and where we have funding we're trying to increase and do as much digitalization as possible in this period. So we're trying to bring in a lot of the team to do this at the same time as doing business as usual in the herbarium. So finding space in the herbarium still allowing researchers to work and carry on that so not to disrupt their day to day activities is a challenge. It's been amazingly everyone is so committed to the project at Q outside of the project that everyone knows how important it is so everyone's been very accommodating and giving us logistics and resources that we need. Next slide. So where are we so we're now October 2023. As I said, we had a team of three before this project started occasional small digitization projects and now we're a team of 60. And we have completed. And almost two wealth we completed two wings of the five wings of herbarium. So we've completed the legumes we completed the composite which is a daisy family. And we've also completed our monocots which is our grasses our lilies and our sedges. So that's the imaging. So we can see these pictures of every time we use a finish a bit of the collection we have a like a little celebration to celebrate it. And the in house team of the Hungarian started a bit later we're taking images of the packets for transcription. We're not doing any we're not doing any of the fancy 3d imaging or like microscopic imaging or anything like that with a finger in the moment but we're building on that work. After the images are taken they've been uploaded and quality their quality assured we got big quality assurance team they're uploaded into our digital and asset management system. We had to upgrade that system because of the work and the whole infrastructure so we had over 1.5 petabytes of dedicated storage and our dam is capable of ingesting over 15,000 images a day into our system. So it's getting that correct. And so yeah did our dam now holds over actually it's near 2.5 million herbarium specimens, and the images are sent to actually through our supplier max through a team in India, and that and where our team quality assured it, but the now just last week the first transcription data have been started being uploaded into our ICMS system into a collection management system so is available to our staff and researchers, and soon it will be available externally. So we kind of just finished the complete cycle of that work which is quite exciting, but we still got to up that and make sure we get the flow correct. But it's been a huge journey. And we're still we're almost there, but it feels like we're in full flow now. That's been great. Okay, next slide. So, you know, as you can see the real world impact of our collections is fast, and we want to get the data out as quickly as possible. We're doing an ambitious project in a short amount of time with a big team with a lot of staff. And, and we're working through those challenges, but I think it's been very sort of successful and we're really excited at the next stage and getting it all out. So, yeah, thanks for listening. I think we'll take any of your questions. Thank you very much Sarah and thank you Kate for that we're going to take questions after our next speaker. So, so, so you can have a little breather and listen to Stacy for a while thank you to those of you who are, who are popping questions into the chat we're getting a list of those together so that's going to be great. We're going to see things that I know are going to spark some really great discussions, but for the next time being we're going to hand over to Stacy Anderson who's media archivist at the box in Plymouth. Let's talk about beyond analog which is their journey towards sustainable digital preservation within a museum and archives service over to you, Stacy. So hello everyone thank you to the RL UK for inviting me along as one of the speakers today and I come to you today from our media workroom at the box, which is where our digital decarbonisation in practice happens so it's very apt that I'm presenting from this space today. Now, digital decarbonation is a huge topic and it's certainly not something that we can cover in 20 minutes so for the purposes of this webinar. I just want to touch on a small percentage of the baseline thinking which has informed our practice. Now, it's not something that we're doing an isolation either. And throughout the presentation, I will be evidencing some of the ways in which the wider sector is responding to this agenda throughout this presentation. So just to quickly move forward, and I just want to start with looking at some of the challenges, what the challenge is, and why we need to be talking about digital decarbonisation and there's some examples like on the screen there for you. Digital has often been seen as a solution for mitigating the heavy carbon footprint for caring for our physical collections, but digital also carries a carbon cost and that can be quite significant depending on the size of your collection and the scope of your organisation. And furthermore, the collective impact of countless digital archives, data centres and online services adds weight to that impact. Now, I don't want to scare anyone with some pretty heavy statistics, but they can be quite alarming when we start to look into it. And between 2.5 and 3.7% of global commissions, emissions are generated from data centres compared to the aviation industry at about 2.1 to 2.4%. And furthermore, an estimated 65% of data is considered to be dark data and what we mean by that is that it's used once or never at all. And another 15% is redundant data, so it's out of date and it has little or no value. And there is also the challenge which I'm sure affects all of us around duplicated content. Now, often the figures that are attached to this can be quite alarming and that's led to a bit of a reluctance to collect or even consider collecting digital assets. But the danger there is that we risk compromising the access pathways into our collections that many of our audiences rely on, which is often achieved through digital technology and systems and the act of digitisation itself. So it's a really tricky challenge in the sense that we live in an increasingly digital age collections benefit enormously from digitisation and digital preservation. Digital helps us and our users to to reflect on pertinent narratives of the day and also to reveal hidden narratives and diverse representation within our collections. So how can this challenge be confronted? How can we ensure that continued creative audience engagement and collections care through our digital projects whilst also being mindful of the realities of climate change? So I now want to spend a little bit of time looking at what the sector, what the wider sector is doing about this challenge.  And it's actually been on the radar for for many, many years, many decades, albeit perhaps not as strongly as it is today, as you can see by some of the thinking some of the articles that appear on the screen here. What's also driving this is that increase in digital consumption and increasing expectation to be digital. And Sarah, I think you mentioned that in your presentation just a moment ago. But another driver is of course the rates of digitisation, particularly for at risk collections and to build resources that then feed into programming schemes. And of course, our own understanding of the climate change and global warming, which has brought much more of an awareness of the impact of the work that we do and how that can contribute to climate change. Now the sector is getting on board with this a lot of work is being done to support decarbonisation. And that's coming through the developments of tool kits, carbon calculators and research into green technologies, which essentially are providing us with a baseline of information to them review our digital practice and inform future practice. Academics from Loughborough University are doing brilliant work to lead on this agenda, and they've actually launched a data carbon school card, which I've provided a link at the bottom there for organizations to measure and forecast the co2 relating to any digital project. There are also conversations within the archives, within the archives and records association, particularly within the environmental sustainability group of which I belong, and also the archives and technology section. And above all, the sector is working really hard to advocate a positive opportunities focused digital preservation approach, which reduces those anxieties around collecting and storing digital content, whilst also acknowledging the impact of what we do and encouraging us to to undertake work that safeguards the planet. So I now want to come on to the practice that we are rolling out here at the box. Now, we briefly looked at the challenges and some of the driving forces, but actually stepping into this agenda can be quite hard work. Now, the following slide does reflect the practice that I'm involved with at the box. We certainly don't hold all of the answers. We are certainly on a journey and we haven't overcome this challenge, but we are keen to share our practice with others. Now what's driving us in our work is very much wrapped around funded projects we've got funding at the moment from the British Film Institute, which is called the reimagining the film archive program. So there are kpi specifically attached to digital decarbonization. As an MPO, we are also working towards supporting the Arts Council's investment principles around environmental responsibility. And this work more broadly reflects our own mission, vision and values to be progressive and relevant and to address pressing issues of the day. I'm certainly not doing this work in isolation on my own, and I do have a team of digital preservationists, I'm going to call them but they are media technicians who are contracted to the media archive collection specifically, and are supporting our digital decarbonization devils. And one of them is this chap that you see on the screen here. His name is James and he's one of our media technicians and he's particularly passionate about climate change and and digital digital refinement. So, given the volume and specialist nature of our collections, we recognize that to achieve carbon zero within our approach to collections care will not happen overnight, but we're currently doing what we can. And our aim with this work is to build improvements and efficiencies into our workflows and technology to reduce the carbon footprint of undertaking that work. So with regards to digital preservation, we're aiming to achieve the highest possible standards of best practice for digital preservation with the resources we have, but this has a carbon cost, and that increases the more we digitized. So we take measures to ensure that we aren't digitizing material just for the sake of it. We're working to the principles of preventing pointless preservation. And in consultation with our depositors and digital creators and wider staff, we're choosing to prioritize and digitally preserve the most important and frequently used and at risk parts of our collection. In terms of digitization, part of that process traditionally has involved making three different quality copies levels for each file, a preservation and access and a viewing copy. But we're actually now only opting to make the highest and lowest quality versions, which significantly reduces our storage space requirements, saves on resources, energy and money. And access copies are only generated and created and generated when they're needed rather than as a general ingest concept. And furthermore, we like many of the other film archives that we work with, including the British Film Institute. We're using a lossless compression format for our moving image collections content called FFV1. And typically those files are about one third the size of the uncompressed files, which means that they take up less storage on our digital systems, saves on resources and doesn't use as much energy. But crucially, there's no loss in quality, so it seems like a win-win situation. So moving on to digital storage, the question of digital storage is by far one of the most challenging aspects for any organization that is undertaking digital work, digital preservation. Our master preservation files, which represents the majority of our digital content, around 200 terabytes are stored on LTO tapes, and they only actively consume energy whilst being read or written to. So they represent a huge energy saving over traditional spinning disks. The slight downside to that is that there is a very small delay in terms of when those files are accessed, but it's only by a few minutes or so. So that's a compromise that we're willing to take. In terms of monitoring, so monitoring our ingested files. Regular checking, regularly checking the integrity of digital files is really important to ensure against bit rot, to ensure against decay and also corruption, but it does use energy. So we've opted to balance the frequency of those checks and the need to reduce energy consumption with the need to meet best practice. So integrity checks are undertaken occasionally and they're run at off peak times during the day. So in terms of advocacy, more broadly advocacy is one of the most important things that we are doing around digital decarbonization. We've actually created a green group within the box, which has members from across the service that sit within that. And we're vigorously encouraging a green sustainable approach to service wide activity, which very much looks in at our digital journey. There is a lot more that we need to do. We are just rolling out a carbon literacy scheme for all members of staff to achieve that understanding that knowledge around why we are focusing in on this. We are also looking to review our collections and development plans for acquisitions, particularly around digital acquisitions to ensure that we're not binding ourselves to any unsustainable practice in the future. And we're also looking more broadly not only out the way that we store and manage our digital assets, but also our physical collections as well. But I think it's really important to point out here that none of what I've talked about compromises our ability to meet professional digital preservation standards. And in fact, there is a growing shift within the archive sector to review those standards against the values of decarbonization within the climate change agenda. So moving on now and I need to say that I've just touched on some of the practices that we're involved in around looking at our digital preservation activity here at the box. There's so much more that we are doing and I'd be very happy to share further information about that. But for now, I would like to share some of the pointers, some of the lessons that have come through the work that we have undertaken so far. Now, I appreciate that this might be overwhelming for a lot of people the thought of shifting practice can be terrifying. And strategically, it can be a big mountain to climb and that's certainly a perspective that we are hearing through the our environmental sustainability group. But there are very small practical steps that we can all take to support this agenda to achieve wins for the planet, but also for our own organization, but more broadly to serve as a leverage for when we have those strategic conversations. So here are some of those recommendations. So around selection and acquisition of collections. Do you need to keep everything do you need to digitize everything and does everything need to be out super high quality do you need multiple copies of a digital object that's certainly something that we've reflected in on our practice and you can make some quite significant savings if you reflect in on that and make the necessary adaptions. So in terms of management of digital assets, we've certainly reimagined how we preserve. Does everything need to be checks and does everything need to be monitored and can those processes be automated and set to run off peak hours. Do you using the most efficient storage mechanisms, and do you actually know the energy use values of your systems and infrastructures and as I as I mentioned before there are a lot of emerging tool kits and calculators that can help a service monitor and measure its carbon output. In terms of meaningful evaluation, this has been really important for us for measuring and evaluating what we're doing. And also the carbon cost of undertaking the work that we do around digitization is evaluation is not just about meeting KPIs, but it can be a point of continued reflection and responsible refinement of any future digital ambition. And of course there be visible advocate share and learn from others we are all much we're part of a much wider information ecology. So sharing best practice around how we digitize and how decarbonize our practice is incredibly valuable in inspiring that broader climate action. It can also help to drive innovation in the development of greener technologies to support the sector in that. So, you know, perhaps think about setting up a green group for your organization, and something that we've done here which very much fits into the advocacy agenda is embedding environmental responsibility within our exhibitions program. And the image that I've used on the screen there is an example of one of the works that will feature in our exhibition next year, Planet Ocean at the box which will seek to inspire visitors to imagine new futures and also serve as a call to action as well around climate change. So just to finish off then, whilst decarbonizing digital practice within our organizations alone may not single handedly solve the climate crisis, it is much much more part of a larger movement to reduce carbon emissions and to promote sustainability within the digital realm, which is increasingly vital in our interconnected and data driven world. Strategically speaking, building sustainable digital archiving practice can result in more efficient use of resources, which can save money, build wider organizational resilience, as well as help support the planet. And for those reasons alone, I think it's an entirely good thing. And I hope that you agree with me on that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Stacey. That's absolutely fascinating. And sorry you had some trouble with your slides. We haven't got a lot of time for questions, so let's get straight into it and bring back in Sarah and Kate as well. I'm going to summarize some of the things that are in the chat. We're now going to enable mics and cameras as well. So if you want to, for everybody, so if you want to ask a question live then pop your hand up. I've got a couple of kind of themes coming through in the questions that are in the chat. One is a bit about file formats, and particularly about, you know, we've heard the word petabytes here and you know we know that that's the data storage is the issue, one of the big issues that we're needing to deal with. You mentioned LiDAR, microscopic imaging, I think Kate or Sarah, I can't remember which one of you mentioned it. So there is a question about what file formats you use for preservation and quality and the extent to which you take into account data storage size within the project. So, I mean, is that something that's very much a factor? I'll first crack that one then hand to Sarah. So yes, it is very much so. So yes, LiDAR and some of the spatial imaging we do, clearly of trees and things like that. We're now in a situation where we've got the technology that we can do a complete scan of the entire tree. And that's actually quite a huge amount of data as you probably expect. Kind of similar to what Stacey was talking about. At the minute we are still in the situation of we're going to capture anything just in case it's important. We haven't kind of got to that filtering point yet, but having said that in terms of the petabytes and terabytes conversation, we are more than conscious of the amount of data farming and data storage and wild heat that we are using in doing that. So we're kind of engaged with a number of supply chains providers down around the world who, for example, one of our data server farms is actually going to be under the swimming pool for the Paris Olympics because actually they can use the heat to power the swimming pool. So we are trying to do that kind of circular conversation with some of our suppliers be tries and efficient as we can. I mean, and coming down to the file storage, to be honest, we take it in any format is part of the, the joy of the internet collection management system is with delivery set it up to ingest any data in any format because our research is worldwide, regardless of what we said, the best practice will will collect data, whichever is most appropriate to them. And we have to respect that. So actually, we don't actually impose too many file formats on anybody. We basically say just make sure you collect it and make sure you castle get appropriately and then we'll hopefully do something useful with it. Sarah, do you want to add anything to that. And so obviously with the digitalization project, we're trying to get we're used to we use a tiff format, we do have some compression, we're trying to use it so the high enough resolution image that you taxonomous can look at details and microscopic is as are you looking at hand lens is not the same as microscopic you could go higher but we're, we're, we didn't want to do to lower resolution so we've been trying to get that balance between storage size and what resolution we have. So in the earlier people asked about scanning we had slow slant scanning equipment, whereas now cameras and technologies have gone on and it's much easier to do those so 600 dpi images in that in that standard. So we have to stand try to standardize our actual herbarium image formats. And yeah, for that, that reason, and we have like surrogate images are created automatically, but again, we'll probably have to look at how much what sizes that we really need and try and reduce that. Thank you, Sarah. There's a question that's just come in the same that Stacey but actually picks up on something that you mentioned just now, Kate, which is about tech companies and it says do you do you find, Stacey there are good amount of tech companies that came to the table with green options for storage and collection growth options or did they just propose continual increasing in it already so but Kate you also mentioned didn't you about I don't know who wants to take it but Kate you also mentioned about about talking to the tech companies. It's been quite a journey. That's that's the diplomatic response there. And it's actually been an opportunity to through sharing practice as well because a lot of the tech companies that we deal with, you know, a source of they service lots of different organizations, working with us as a specialist sort of repository was was quite a new thing for them.  We always look at whether they carry green credentials because that's often a really good indication that, you know, you can have that constructive conversation. But with our tech company in particular, they actually looked to us to help co design the system that we ultimately ended up with so if you find a tech company that is open to working with you. They didn't know anything about the NDS say levels of digital preservation, we had to kind of, you know, inform that process and the result was that we ended up with a system that works for us and meets our, you know, sort of objectives around being sustainable.  But I think decisions that we make around what we capture how we capture it is sort of keeping keeping that that at bay as it were, because we're reducing our file sizes that that kind of mitigates the need to then, you know, get get further, further storage. And one thing I would say is, you know, again, the importance of monitoring and review just because you have a system in place, you know, doesn't mean that that you shouldn't be open to actually changing that system. And I'm reviewing it and those calculators and toolkits which, you know, sort of empower you really to get a sense of your carbon footprint that enables you to have that that sort of leverage to then make those changes to your systems and work with other tech companies that hold those green credentials. Sorry, that's probably a really long winded way of responding to that. Really, really, really interesting. Kate, did you did you have anything to add on that? Yeah, so the thing that we again, I think we're we, along with other organizations are a lot more aware of the supply chain conversation and the carbon responsibility for the supply chain and some of the requirements we put on our companies and then what they have to then do to service it. Again, much like Stacy said, a lot of it's about communication education, and then also working with those companies who kind of get it. And we've been, you know, as part of most of the community, how kind of there's a greenwashing conversation as to let's just let's don't plant a plantation in the middle of nowhere. We're all good. We don't really kind of abide by that. We're very much digging into what are actually your green credentials and how you're going to do it. And more important than that, look at the the waste products conversations because I think if you can find a tech company who's got a good waste disposal policy, you tend to find that actually got quite good green credentials. So you kind of work backwards with some of the things you need to work and again working with those companies to be as efficient as they possibly can. But that's very interesting. I'm looking at those proxy kind of markers for that. Before I move on to talk about metadata, I just wanted to pick up on something that you'd said, Stacey, about the strategic problem. The problem about having those strategic conversations and getting a shift in terms of perhaps higher levels of management in terms of thinking about the change and how the institution is resistant to change. And I just wondered whether whether we felt that the there's a very strong overlap and perhaps even I'm wondering even a total overlap between carbon cost and actual financial cost in terms of the kind of the kind of petabyte problem. I mean, is that something you found or does it get much more complex than that? No, it's a really good, really good question actually and an insight. And yeah, I think there is definitely a synergy between particularly when you are talking to sort of senior management who don't necessarily, you know, want to understand the granular details, the technical details of what it is you are doing and the impact that it has on storage size, etc.  That's one that I heard the other day. That's, you know, even greater. But actually getting into the habit of talking about it in terms of ton of CO2 emissions, because that then leads to conversations around, you know, sort of cost savings, resource savings, building efficiencies into the work you do is something that we do use quite a bit when we're having those conversations to get investment and funding. So I think it's kind of broadly knowing the audience that you're dealing with and making sure that, you know, what you're sort of what you're advocating for is something that they are going to resonate with in order to achieve the ultimate goal of what you want to do. Great. Thank you. I want to, before we close, I do want to make sure we talk about metadata and particularly is a great question about to queue really about whether you're incorporating linked data into the specimen digital record. And this for me just picks up on those things you were saying as well Stacy about about the kind of dark and redundant data and the idea that, you know, what is this a single source of truth kind of approach is that you know presumably that's even if you're not saving the the storage and the, and the, the, the carbon energy making the carbon carbon saving as well. Because you may be someone else's if we're not duplicating. I just want to take say something about link data and, and those kinds of things. Kate, did you want to come in on that link data a big part of what you're trying to do. It is actually I was just kind of applying in the text as well as some of the comments because I was trying to do that at the same time. And so yes, it is no not at all. Now, one of the big challenges you guys what's important and what's not important and you just don't know. So we're kind of, at this point in time we're capturing everything we possibly can and appropriate fidelity because what we, what we've taken the view that the specimen in front of us is the authentic specimen. And that was corrected, collected by that person at that point in time, etc. So we're trying to not only look at the specimen the transcription label the geolocation, and we're also trying to link that to field notes, plus also anything else we have to know. And at Q particularly we're just beginning now we've got our collection management system we're going to see some of the links to some of the living collections. And some of the other collections we've got that we didn't actually appreciate that we held the seed we also have something planted. And then we've got a field set of notes in the library we just didn't know that because we hadn't realized all these kind of things were linked up. So yes, we are committed to linking up as much as we possibly can. And then also obviously supplementing that with any future, you know, DNA coding LiDAR etc etc geolocation conversations and just adding that to everything.  That barcode is a single point of truth for everything. So everything gets linked to that specimen by a barcode. So we're trying to kind of build those webs of all the information sets that we've got.


John Stuart has been one of the few, and one of the first, I believe, in mainstream media to actually call out Tucker Carlson and the threat that he poses to America. In fact, back in 2004, we've played the clip on this show, I'll play it again in this segment.  But time has passed, and Tucker Carlson's influence has grown exponentially. And now the threat that Tucker Carlson poses to America is far greater than the threat that he posed while he was working at CNN, and it was just the standard Republican party talking head. So now, Tucker Carlson, he doesn't just feed conservative, standard right-wing talking points about trickle-down economics. He has gotten them to accept white supremacist propaganda, the great replacement theory, this idea that immigrants are making America dirty. And what he's doing is incredibly dangerous, because he is contributing, perhaps, more so than anyone else to the far-right radicalization of conservatives in the United States. So John Stuart kind of knew the danger that Tucker Carlson posed, and he was asked again in an interview with Cara Swisher, who hosts the New York Times podcast, what are your thoughts on Tucker Carlson today? Now he was asked specifically about Tucker Carlson's flip-flop on Vladimir Putin over the course of the last couple of weeks, and I don't really care about that. What I want to get to is the broader critique of Tucker Carlson, because what John Stuart says here is absolutely 100% accurate. As Dominic Mestrangelo of The Hill writes, Comedian John Stuart torrent of Fox News host Tucker Carlson when asked about recent comments the host made about Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of Russia's attack on Ukraine. When you deal with such a dishonest propagandist, and that's what he is, there's nothing you can take out of context, because none of it is real, Stuart said, of Carlson during an appearance this week on New York Times reporter Cara Swisher's podcast. He's admitted, when he's cornered, he lies. It's all a game and a performance.  On Swisher's podcast, Stuart accused Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the Fox News Corporation, which owns Fox News and employs Carlson, of trying to destroy the fabric of this country. I don't know if it's ideological or he just thinks this is where the money is, but how somebody can, in good conscience, put a shithead like that on television every night to say those types of things, that's where the responsibility lies. In my mind, Stuart said. So first and foremost, he refers to what Tucker Carlson does as theater and that's accurate. And we'll look at the clip from Crossfire and he says the same thing that what Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala was doing at that time was nothing more than political theater and it was hurting the country. But what John Stuart is saying here is, you know, Tucker Carlson, he's going to say what gets him the ratings. Who knows if he truly believes the white supremacist propaganda that he disseminates. But really, what you have to blame are the people who put him on the air, the people who employ him. I mean, at some point, you have to look at Rupert Murdoch and this media company and ask what is their goal for the country? What's the long term goal to just disrupt the country? I mean, I feel like to me as a leftist, at least perhaps my perspective skews my opinion on this, but it feels like the right has unquestionably won. You defeated the left. You defeated Democrats. You got what you wanted. We live in a late stage capitalist hellscape. Neoliberalism has overtaken the country. We've commodified everything, including elections. So what more do you want? You've won politically and economically. So what now? Why are you still doing this? Do you just want the country to fall apart? Do you want to see division? Are you just trying to make more money and hence profits? What's the end game here for these far right outlets? And that's that's really hard to discern. But regardless, unquestionably, what's happening is absolutely damaging. Now, I do want to go to that clip from Crossfire from 2004. This is relatively lengthy. And again, I've played this on the program before, so feel free to tune out. It's worth watching again, though. The premise of the show is you have a Republican and a Democrat and they debate various topics. But as you're going to see, John Stuart points out that this isn't actually debated as political theater. You have Paul Begala, a Democratic Party hack versus Tucker Carlson, a Republican Party talking head and hack. And this isn't really them actually debating ideas in a substantive way. They're just representing their respective party's donors. So John Stuart, you know, he he called that out. He called them hacks. He called Tucker Carlson a hack to his face. And one thing that I want you to keep in mind as you watch this clip from 2004 is that a lot of the criticism that John Stuart had of Tucker Carlson back then is still applicable now. Take a look. You're partisan. What do you call it? Hacks. Wait, John, wait, let me tell you something valuable that I think we do that I'd like to see something valuable. Yeah, no, it's it's I would like I would like to hear it when I'll tell you when politicians come on. Yeah, it's nice to get them to try and answer the question. And in order to do that, we try and ask them pointed questions. I want to contrast our questions with some questions you asked John Kerry, if you want to if you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to show. No, no, here's here's the point. If that's your goal, it's not. I would name for us. I'd aim for the problem. That's a very good show. Kerry will come on this show. He will come on your show. Let me suggest why he wants to. Well, we have civilized discourse. Well, here's here's an example of civilized discourse. Here are three of the questions you asked, John. Yeah, you have a chance to interview the Democratic nominee. You asked him questions such as, quote, How are you holding up? Is it hard not to take the attacks personally? Have you ever flip flopped, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. Didn't you feel like you got the chance to interview the guy?   And I actually was giving him a hot stone massage. You guys sounded that way. As we were doing it. You know, it's it's interesting to hear you talk about my responsibility to the, you know, I didn't realize that. And maybe this explains quite a bit of the opportunity is that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity. So what I would suggest is when you talk about you're holding politicians feet to the fire, I think that's disingenuous. I think you're how are you holding up?  No, no, no, no, I don't. But my my role isn't. I don't ask him a real question. Don't you think instead of saying, you know, I don't think I have to, by the way, I also asked him, you know, where you in Cambodia. But I didn't really care because I don't care.  Well, but my point is this, if your idea of confronting me is that I don't ask hard hitting enough news questions, we're in bad shape, fellas. We're here to love you, not confront you. No, no, no, but what I'm saying is this, I'm not, I'm here to confront you because we need help from the media and they're hurting us. And it's, the idea is. If the indictment is, let me get this straight, if the indictment is, if the indictment is, and I have seen you say this, that Crossfire reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white, yes. Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show. It's like saying to one channel. No, no, no, that'd be great. That'd be great. To a store. I would love to see a debate show. In a 24 hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them. No, no, no, no, that would be great. And have them fight it out. To do a debate would be great. But that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition. I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you a question on the news. No, this is theater. I mean, it's obvious. How old are you? 35. And you wear a bow tie. Yeah, I do. I do. So this is. I know, I know. So this is theater. Let me just go. Now come on. And listen, I'm not suggesting that you're not, you're not a smart guy because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is that this, you're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. No, so it's not pro. It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I'll tell you why I know it. You sign hackery on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery? Absolutely. You're. You've got to be kidding me. You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?  It's not as embarrassing.  I was so far. You would not believe what he ate two weeks ago. You know, the interesting thing that I have is you'll have a responsibility to the public discourse. And you fail miserably. I think. You need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is when you have people on for just knee jerk, reactionary talk. Well, I thought you were going to be funny. Come on.  What? I watch your show every day and it kills me. I can tell you love it. Oh, it's so painful to watch. You know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy. It's someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore. I just can't. What's it like to have dinner with you? It must be excruciating. I've seen this clip countless times and it still is entertaining and important. So what's interesting is that shortly after John Stuart made that appearance, guess what happened? CNN decided to cancel Crossfire. Now you can't necessarily say with certainty that they canceled Crossfire because of John Stuart there and that appearance was just so devastating. But I've got to say, then CNN president Jonathan Klein said that he actually agreed with Stuart's criticisms of the media at that time. And I mean, the media I feel like has only gotten worse since then. So, you know, you see, no actual structural changes made at CNN because they're still doing the same exact thing, the same political and partisan hackery. But everything that John Stuart said, there was absolutely on the money. And that media landscape, it's gotten worse since then, don't you think? Now we've seen more radical outlets pop up. OAN, Newsmax. And I don't know what specifically is driving hyperpolarization, but I know for a fact, this type of media, it's responsible for the lion's share, I think, of hyperpolarization in the United States, you know, not taken into consideration the lack of policies that are needed to address crises in this country. But Tucker Carlson is a dangerous propagandist because he's so effective. I mean, he's priming Americans. He's been priming Americans for years to subconsciously and sometimes explicitly accept white supremacist talking points. And he's radicalizing the right. And as the right becomes more and more radicalized because of media figures like him, the country becomes further destabilized.  Now I do believe that we can minimize the level of extremism, perhaps make people less susceptible to radicalization if we address some economic needs. But you know, you're not just gonna get racism to go away if we have Medicare for all our socialism. So I'm not trying to make a class reductionist point. But what I am saying is that the damage that Tucker Carlson is doing is long-term. It's irreparable. I think that the way that he gets people to think about issues as it's them against us, they're against us. It's whites versus everyone else. And he may not say that explicitly all the time, but it's, he's priming you to think in this way. Like what he's doing there, irreparable harm, irreparable harm, brainwashing an entire generation. And he knows the way to market himself as this populist. He knows how to sell it. And that's so dangerous. So it's nice to see John Stuart call him out. John Stuart canceled Tucker Carlson before. Maybe he'll be able to do it again, but I doubt that because he brings in the ratings. And because he's so successful, Fox News is not going to let him go. But the damage that he is doing is just truly immeasurable.  Cause Mike's doing a great job getting to watch his videos before everyone else is tremendous. Many people are saying this. Join today, folks. You won't regret it.