Coming up on DTNS, Waymo pulls the safety driver from its autonomous cars, Google Stadia, talks about something called negative latency and the complicated mess of U.S. tech companies in China. We'll be doing that again, won't we? There we go. Decided not to work that time. All right. Let me delete that file. That read sucked anyway, Tom. Yeah, I could do better. Step it up. Step it up. It was, what the heck? No dropbox. That's not what I want to do. Yeah, it wasn't the technical issue. It really was. I was just disappointed in myself. All right. That's fine. It's good. It's good to hold yourself to a high spot. Yeah, yeah. Here we go. In three, two. Coming up on DTNS, Waymo pulls the safety driver from its autonomous cars, Google Stadia, talks about something called negative latency and the complicated mess of U.S. tech companies in China. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 10th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From the still powered Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes. So you are not in a region being unplugged in Northern California if people don't realize PG&E having to do some rolling blackouts again. It's like the early 2000s all over to prevent fire risk, but you've escaped it so far, Justin. I don't believe that we are on the map, although considering the fiasco that has already gone on, who knows, Tom? Well, folks, if you want to hear Justin's opinion on Galaxy's Edge briefly or a lot of talk about baseball and college football conferences, you got a good, good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start here with a few tech things you should know. Amazon announced Amazon Music is now available on Apple TVs, running TVOS at 12.0 or later in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Japan, and India. As the companies continue to play nice or keep antitrust arguments at bay, Apple's upcoming TV Plus streaming service also includes availability on the Fire TV. Genetics testing company Color Genomics will supply information from genetic tests to verily life sciences baseline health study participants, verily is owned by alphabet. Color Genomics does physician-ordered testing. Users take samples at home and then get a phone call about their results. Board-certified genetic counselors and pharmacists assist risks for certain cancers, heart disease, and genes that can affect medication responses, verily hopes that offering Color Genomics service will encourage more people to join the baseline health study, which aims to map overall population health. OnePlus announced the OnePlus 7T Pro. It's going to cost you 699 pounds coming to the U.K., October 17th. The Pro has a bigger screen, 6.67 inch QHD plus OLED screen. It wraps around the side, remember there's no notch because it's got the pop-up camera just like the 7T. Otherwise, similar in specs to the OnePlus 7T, it's just that pretty screen for the most part. There's also a McLaren edition of the OnePlus 7T Pro in black and orange with 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage for 799 pounds. That one arrives in the U.K. November 5th. The University of Maine and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory collaborated on the world's largest 3D printer. How large is it? It is 70 feet long with a planned extension that will make it 100 feet long. To demonstrate it, the University took 72 hours to print out a 25-foot, 5,000-pound boat, now holding the record of the world's largest 3D printed boat. Pretty cool. U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Angus King took the boat out on the water in the University's giant Endora ocean simulator to prove it was seaworthy. Some joking there about two politicians in a boat, I'm sure. But we'll leave that as an exercise for the audience. Let's talk a little more about Waymo, Jerry. Indeed, Waymo sent out an email advising customers in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, that autonomous cars with no human safety driver will soon be available in the area. Waymo One users will receive a notification if a fully driverless car has been dispatched. While the car will not have a safety driver, Tech Crunch notes that a Waymo employee may be in the car initially. And the email from Waymo says a rider support agent will be available at any time during the ride through the car's help button or through the Waymo app. Previous Waymo service in the Phoenix area always had a human safety driver in the car. I mean, anybody who's in the area who's already been part of the program will understand that the autonomous test has been ongoing. But imagine having someone in the car, but they're just like in the back seat with you and they're like, yeah, no, I'm not a safety driver. I'm just I'm just here just to make sure everything's cool still. Yeah, I want you to fill out the survey. I'm in marketing. Yeah. This is this is a big milestone, though. And the first thing that occurred to me is is not about safety. It's like these guys have folks have been using Waymo One and Phoenix have been in these cars and seen how they work. They're going to be they're going to be unafraid of this, I think. My question is, where do you sit if you're the only person in the car now? Do you sit in the driver's seat to make it look natural? Or do you sit in the back? Yeah, I I would, you know, I never really thought about that. I think maybe I would sit in the driver's seat just to be like in the event of an emergency, at least I could like put the brake pedal on kind of thing. I don't know if I'd even be allowed to do that. Yeah. Can you can you manually override the car? I mean, anybody else who's a safety driver would presumably be able to do that. That might be disabled in these cases. I don't know. Perhaps, perhaps, yeah. Yeah, because you're not supposed to be, you know, fussing with the with the grid. We have questions, Arizonans. TVZ gone right in these. Google Stadia, like any game streaming service, wants to make sure that it has as low a latency as possible so that most gamers don't feel like it's different from playing a game locally. In an interview with Games Radar's Edge Magazine, Stadia's VP of Engineering, Maj Baccar said, quote, ultimately, we think in a year or two, we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally. He used a term called negative latency that would be achieved by running at a super fast frame rate to act on player inputs earlier, predicting button presses and buffering actions. Baccar was comparing Stadia's potential to a console running at 30 frames per second using a wireless controller. Yeah, so part of this is a little bit of word magic saying like, oh, we'll have a higher frame rate so it'll have less latency than something that doesn't have as high of a frame rate. It's like, well, that would be true for a console, too. But the idea of using machine learning to anticipate what you might do and send those actions down the pipe and have them at the ready for when you do it, that's the kind of thing the machine learning is really good at. That's the kind of thing that would definitely be able to overcome the like physical limitations of broadband. Well, I guess even though negative latency is sort of a silly term, that's what it would be. Now, exactly. It's like you can joke about negative latency, but negative latency. Joke is it's going to know what I want to do before I do it. That's what they're describing. Look, the question that I would put to you, Tom, is, is this a press release or is this something that we believe the technology is here for and could happen? Because rest assured, folks, Google Stadia relies on the latency question. It will either solve this or it will die. I think that there is the theoretical possibility and I'm sure that Google has a working model of this, that they're not ready to implement. And that's why he's saying one to two years from now. I think him saying this in the interview is definitely resetting the goal line of saying everybody's going to complain about the current latency.  And it'll never work. And then they won't be complaining about the current latency. This thing's going to launch in November. We'll have the answer to the current latency in a month or so. Yeah, I don't know if it's necessarily a great sign, though, that they're like, oh, no, don't worry. We're already prefixing the problem. We know you're going to all complain about the fact that, look, streaming services will always suffer from this until they don't.  There is a psychological aspect to knowing it will get better, though, right? And so you're not you're never going to cut out.  But if you can have some people not complaining because they're like, well, it's not too bad. And he said in a couple of years, it'll be negative latency. No, no, if it's if it's good and you have a promise that it will be better than good, then you're happy. Right. If it's bad and someone's telling you, oh, no, don't worry, just remain a subscriber for the next year to two years. And it'll we will turn the corner at that point. That becomes that that starts rubbing people the wrong way. I think they think when I say they, I mean, Google, yeah, that it is good enough that you shouldn't complain. But they're not worried about how good it actually is. They're worried about perception. So this is all a battle for setting perceptions and saying because people who go in and decide this is not going to be good enough or going to see latency even where there isn't any, right? There's going to be some some weirdness and they're going to blame the latency.   What they want you on the other end to be to be talking to your friends about is, yeah, but it's good now. Yeah, like, I don't know why them. I don't know why there's a negative latency might be ridiculous, but it's pretty good now. I don't know. I kind of barely notice it. I mean, I'm not saying that's going to work, but I feel like that's kind of what they're doing. And I also but I also don't think it's entirely vaporware. I Google is good enough with machine learning that this seems plausible that there could be some machine learning algorithm that maybe even could send a couple of different anticipations down the pike. Like, well, most people do this or that, so we'll buffer both of those. And then when you actually make the choice, it has both of them at the ready for you. I mean, if there is any company that certainly knows enough about server traffic, it is Google. Yeah. And machine learning both. Yeah. Erwan does Mara group release two Android smartphones this week. Mara manufactures all of the parts of the phone itself, including the motherboards, but also the packaging. So this thing is the first smartphone manufacturer that can truly claim its phones are entirely made in Africa. A lot of phones are assembled in Africa, but these phones are made from the ground up in Africa. The Mara X has 16 gigabytes of storage, sells for 120,250 Erwandan francs. That's 130 bucks US. The Mara Z comes with 32 gigabytes of storage. And that one sells for a little more 175,750 Erwandan francs, about 190 bucks US puts them a bit more expensive than the most popular brand in large parts of Africa, which is Techno. That's a Chinese brand. If you've been following the Chinese market at all, you know that Techno's kind of become the dominant brand across the continent. But I think Erwanda just wants to do this as a demonstration. But also they're hoping they're at least in the country of Erwanda, there might be a little local pride causing people to plop down a little more on these. I just think it is remarkable that Africa has for the last you know, decade and a half been at the forefront of some of the most innovative uses of cell phones and credits and stuff like that. Granted, oftentimes it comes because of hardship situations that they need to get around or instability in certain regions. But I think that Africa has always been something that I've looked at with great enjoyment as they've innovated and made new headways in all cell technology. Yeah, if I don't know, 20 years ago, we were doing DTS, we probably would have done a story about the first manufacturing plant in China to make electronics and it would have sounded like this. So, you know, keep an eye on this. So go ahead and keep an eye on for the 20 years from now. The weighty main topic that we'll have about our relationship with Africa. Yeah, and make sure you're at the co-executive producer level so you can have us look at this lineup five years from now and talk about it then. Hey, a new survey conducted by Ofcom of 150,000 mobile phone users in the UK between January and March this year shows that Liverpool residents have longer phone calls than residents of other major UK cities. Liverpoolians spend an average of six minutes and 51 seconds on a single call. Londoners came in second with 40% less time spent on the phone. What are you guys talking about, Liverpool? Bradford folks kept the shortest amount at three minutes and 15 seconds. However, the surveys did not include calls made on Skype, WhatsApp or other VoIP services. Notably, the research found people predominantly use their phones over Wi-Fi with mobile data services, such as 3G and 4G, use less than a third of the time. You know, I at first I was like, OK, well, this is sort of interesting. I wonder what it is about this particular region.  Maybe that has to do with it until I was like, oh, wait, we're not talking about Skype or WhatsApp or any other VoIP service. We're just talking about, you know, phone calls made over over over 3G or 4G networks within the UK. That is a little bit harder to swallow. Well, or Wi-Fi. I mean, a lot of the calls made over Wi-Fi. But yeah, we're talking about using the phone app, not using a messaging app. They did they did point out in this study that the time spent on voice calls overall fell for the first time in 2018. And they think that's because more, especially younger users are messaging. They're not calling. So I don't know if you include WhatsApp and Skype voice calls, whether it makes that much of a difference on this, because it's it's a dying art to actually call someone, as we've talked about before. Sometimes it's rude to just call someone. You're supposed to text first and say, is it OK if I call you? Yeah. All right. So undoubtedly, we are talking to people right now in Liverpool and apologies if you had to have this podcast broken up by a seven minute phone call from somebody. But I need to know what I mean, is it do you guys notice that you guys call each other more or talk for longer than people in other regions? Well, Nick with a C says, as a Brit, Liverpoolians are the most talky people here. And the very kindly did not correct our pronunciation of Liverpoolian earlier. But yeah, it's it's apparently a stereotype. That they're the most talky folk. That is interesting. I don't know.  It's like, I don't.  I mean, we just don't talk about stuff like that. It's not. It's it's if you look at this graph, it's almost flat. I mean, there is a difference in London to Bradford, but it's a it's a nice even curve going through Leeds, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, Cardiff, all the way down to Bradford. Liverpool is off the charts more. I feel like, yeah, maybe Angelino's talk a little bit longer because of the California draw or something. No, no, that's that is not actual. There isn't a real stereotype like that that we could we could point out over here. And apologies to all the Liverpool for murdering Liverpool. Well, Liverpoolians, if you have some insight, please let us know. Feedback at Daily Tech News.com. All right, moving on. Bloomberg reports that Amazon uses teams in both India and Romania to review clips captured by its cloud cam security cameras that are submitted by cloud cam users for troubleshooting. Video clips are then reviewed to help improve the performance of machine learning algorithms used to detect issues from unrecognized people to crying babies or smoke, for example. Video clips are typically 20 to 30 seconds in length. Amazon says that any clips with inappropriate content are discarded and then not used to further train the AI. The cloud cam teams, cloud cam teams and conditions state that terms and conditions rather state that Amazon reserves the right to process images, audio and video captured by device devices to improve its products and services kind of boilerplate stuff in a Q&A about cloud cam on the web. Amazon did say, quote, only you or people you have shared your account information with can view your clips unless you choose to submit a clip to us directly for troubleshooting. Now, Bloomberg's article does kind of hint around that maybe clips are showing up that weren't submitted for troubleshooting, but they don't have any smoking guns there. There's just sort of some suppositions. So short of a report that confirms that, this doesn't feel like much of a story when it's like, hey, there's a team that when you send your video clip for troubleshooting, looks at that video clip, but they don't specifically say in the terms that it would be a human. I mean, so, OK. I mean, what we need and maybe DTNS is the body to launch it is just some kind of like code of ethics that all these companies that in these situations where you're feeding back either audio or video for approval or improvement on the service that we just know, OK, this is how it's going to go. This is how it's going to be randomized. We are pledging to do this because all these stories that keep coming out are all in various different goalposts shifting like, oh, well, these these are are being reviewed by humans. These are being, you know, anonymized on some level. There's just no standard for us and I think for consumers to know, OK, this company is being reckless. This company is going above and beyond of what they should be doing. Like, yeah, what's the standard? Because to me, this is very clearly like, yeah, all if you if you didn't catch it, folks, only when you send your clip to Amazon for troubleshooting. Yes, does a person employed by Amazon look at it and use it to upgrade the machine learning that runs this. That's it. This is not it's doing it without your permission. And the only smoking gun Bloomberg has in this story is, but it doesn't say it's a human like, OK, did I guess you expect that it would always be a machine? But now I don't I don't know that that's that bad. So yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com Earlier this month, Apple rejected the app HKMap Live, which crowdsourced locations of police and tear gas in Hong Kong and displayed them on a map. We talked about that. Then last week, Apple changed its decision and decided to allow the app to be published in the app store in Hong Kong. We talked about that Tuesday, a state run newspaper in China called Apple an accomplice in Hong Kong protests for allowing the app to be published. We talked about that yesterday. Now Apple has removed the app from the store, as well as a mirror app called Backup HK. Previous installed versions still work as does a web based version of Hong Kong Map Live, but Apple flip flopped. Here's why Apple put out a statement saying many concerned customers in Hong Kong contacted the company about the app and the app displays police locations. And we have verified with the Hong Kong Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. So Apple's saying this is being used to commit crimes. That violates our terms and we're pulling the app. Also, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to Apple employees that is now leaked out, saying that while the information in the app was on its own benign, the company had credible information from the Hong Kong police, as well as Apple users that the app was being used, quote, maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong law. Similarly, widespread abuse clearly violates our app store guidelines, barring personal harm. So that email kind of narrows it and says maybe this was being used to target individual police people, not just saying, hey, the police are here. You might want to avoid that street, which it definitely was being used for, too. But Apple's saying it was also being used for this other thing. Tim Cook's email continues to say national and international debates will outlive us all. And while important, they do not govern the facts. In this case, we thoroughly reviewed them and we believe this decision best protects our users. Now, Apple's not alone, nor is HKMAP. Developers of the app said moderators were deleting content that solicited criminal activity and banned repeated attempts to post such content. So the developers are saying, well, if this was targeting an individual, we would have put a stop to it. But apparently Apple, that's not good enough for Apple. Also muddying this issue, Apple removed the Quartz News app from the app store in China, not in Hong Kong, because the Chinese government said it violated local laws. The Quartz website has been blocked in China as well. That's probably not shocking. Quartz has been reporting on the Hong Kong protest. New York Times has blocked in China as well. Earlier this week, Apple removed the Taiwan flag emoji from iOS 13 for users in Hong Kong and make how at the request of the Chinese government. China doesn't consider Taiwan a separate country, so they don't think it should have a separate flag in the emoji set, even though it's a standard. And if you're thinking, well, that's all Apple, Google pulled a game called The Revolution of Our Times, which is part of a slogan from the Hong Kong protests from the Google Play Store. Now, keep in mind, Google Play does not operate in China. The game let users play as Hong Kong protesters. Google said that it was, quote, prohibiting developers from capitalizing on sensitive events, such as attempting to make money from serious ongoing conflicts or tragedies through a game. So imagine if it was a Pearl Harbor game right after Pearl Harbor. I think more recently, you know, if it was a World Trade Center game right after September 11th, that's kind of what that policy is for. And Google is saying that this is close enough that they're going to pull that. All of these are being seen as China having its say over what US tech companies do, Justin. And I know you've done a lot of talk both on politics, politics, politics, as well as TMS about this. You know, we've alluded to the NBA situation as well, where the NBA is losing some lucrative contracts right now. We don't know where that's going to go because the commissioner stood by the Houston Rockets GM's posting, even though that person deleted it. This, where are the lines here? I mean, some of this feels like, well, we're just obeying local laws. Some of it feels like maybe it's not. These stories, to me, feel like things that we are paying a lot more attention to because we saw the NBA story, because the South Park episode happened, because the blizzard banning of Blitzchung after he made a Hong Kong statement during a Grand Masters Hearthstone tournament. These are echoing stories because, Tom, you know very well, on DTNS, we've covered stories like this, where apps disappear or go away or aren't launched in China all the time. The fact that China has decided that courts is no longer cool to be displayed if you want to play, you know, along with the government is the same as them deciding the New York Times shouldn't be there. I mean, and Daily Tech News show not available in China because we cover China in a way that China doesn't approve of. Which I mean, at that point, thank you for noticing us Senpai. But yeah, seriously, the this to me is an echo. I don't believe that this is necessarily totally out of bounds for how Apple has handled stuff. Are they capitulating? Yeah. I mean, I think on a certain level, we need to understand that when you are making money in China, you have to understand that this is a different world and we have a we have a right to be uncomfortable with it as American customers. We have a right to ask of something better or different from the companies that we buy products from. But this is not new. If anything, the last two weeks to me and this Hong Kong protest and everything that's kind of come from it is is I'm thankful that from an American perspective, we now just have a little bit more of an idea of exactly how China plays with its foreign allies as specifically in the corporate world. Yeah, when you look at these cases, certainly if you want to make a case that tech companies are are being too easy and giving into China, you can make that case out of these. There's no doubt that you can. If you look at them in isolation, each one of them has a plausible deniability to it. Revolution of our times might just be considered to be like a bad taste, right? If this wasn't China and Hong Kong, if it was protest somewhere else, maybe Google pulls it too, because they're like, that's just not OK. Don't don't make don't make light of this situation. It's a very serious situation. We also we also don't know exactly the mechanic. The I haven't played the game. Yeah, exactly. That's another element. As you mentioned, courts getting pulled. No surprise. That's day reguer. I'm surprised. I was surprised to find the courts was available in China up until now, to be honest. But this other stuff with Hong Kong live, I think the fact that Apple was like, probably not. Well, maybe so. Oh, wait, maybe not. Shows that this is a complex issue that there is not one answer to that you you are helping people that you may agree with by publishing it. You're also hurting the police and you're dealing with the Hong Kong government, which while controlled by the Chinese government is not the Chinese government. So while you may not want to annoy the Chinese government, you also plausibly can say, look, the local police. Let's say this was, you know, Austin, Texas, the local police in Austin said, this app is endangering our lives. Look, our officer was targeted and wounded because of this app. And Apple said, you know what? This is too much. We're pulling it. I don't know. Would this be the same sort of conversation? Because that's what's happening. The Hong Kong police went to Apple and said, this is an endangerment app. Yeah, I think that that's the other thing by the HK app or the HK live app is I don't know if there was a New York City police tracker that that would survive in the app store for very long, especially if there were disturbances going on in New York at the time, right? What if this was a tracker in Ferguson a couple of years ago? Yeah, I mean, incendiary, incendiary. A different conversation, certainly. One very, very last quick thing. I do believe that these are compounding issues. As we mentioned, I think these are echoes of larger things that have happened almost assuredly. This has been touched off because of these Hong Kong protests. And also something to just keep an eye on is the fact that look, China is an authoritarian regime where there are no free, there are no big elections where the chairman who runs the country is decided on. This is the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party. This is a very important thing. They just got done with their national week. They just got done or it's our golden week and national day, which was the actual day to commemorate. This is a sensitive time for their leadership. And there are a lot of things that are happening around it. I am not surprised that China is pulling the chain on some of the relationships they have with the West. One last thing. If you are going to send us a comment on this, don't send us a comment that there are speed tracker apps allowed in the U.S. There's been a lot of controversy of that. Yes, Waze can tell you where the speed trap's at. But that was not an easy decision. But if you know of some more interesting examples of tracking police in the U.S. apps, let us know about those. We'd love to hear that feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks, everybody who participates in our subreddit. A lot of these stories are submitted and also voted on at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Join the crew. Also, we're on Facebook, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Sean wrote in about our conversation yesterday about what do people understand about privacy in the U.S. Sean said it was sort of bemoaned in episode 3634 about the low percentage of people that understand HTTPS, meaning an encrypted connection. I'm not surprised about this because Chrome has gradually hidden a lot of that information. Sean says, for example, if I open up HTTPS, colon slash slash www.google.com in Chrome today, Chrome only shows a lock icon and Google.com in the address bar, both the protocol, HTTP or HTTPS, and www are all hidden, but Chrome does show not secure for HTTP sites. If you're paying attention, you do know that, but I think he makes a good point that this is obfuscated for a lot of folks. Well, and in that Pew study, it said people don't recognize HTTPS, but maybe they recognize the green icon, the green lock icon. That's a really good point. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels to keep us going really strong, including Adam Carr, Andy Beach and Martin James. Thanks to y'all and also thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. What's been going on in a very slow news week? We have the opposite of that, obviously, in the world of politics, both domestically and internationally.  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Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's continuing coverage of SuperCloud 5, The Battle for AI Supremacy. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, with that a great segment coming up here. We've got Peter Gubert, he is the Senior Director of Product Management at Aptio. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Peter. My pleasure, Rebecca. So we're going to be talking about all things cloud financial planning. Peter, why don't you start by talking a little bit about how cloud financial planning is different from traditional IT planning? Sure, that's a great question. So traditional IT planning is basically a technology span. There's many different components of it and there's things like who are you going to hire, like your headcount plan, things that you're going to buy that don't have anything to do with cloud, like equipment, phones, various office supplies, facilities, et cetera. In other words, there's a bunch of costs that are generally a mix of fixed and variable, but there's things that you can plan out for. You get a certain amount of headcount budget for the year and you can kind of manage to that. On the contrast, cloud expenses are 100% variable. They're very dynamic. Even though you could build the best plan in the world that says this is exactly what we're going to spend for the next three months, see like you could have a viral event that makes everyone run to your website and all of a sudden you've spent 10 times more than what you thought you were going to spend. And it's just like that. It just goes out the door because just build directly to your accounts. So because of that, it requires a different set of techniques, if you will, in terms of managing it. And also because cloud expenses are now becoming increasingly more important, they're more largely used, they're being a larger expense item in someone's budget. And oftentimes organizations that actually contributes to their cost of goods. So it's literally something that affects their bottom line. So there's much more attention to it now and you can't apply the same kind of traditional budgeting and forecasting techniques that would work at like cycle times of once a year or maybe once a quarter every half year you might update it. With cloud expenses, you need to keep a very close tab on it. So it requires a different set of tools. Okay, so what are some of the goals and benefits for organizations for forecasting cloud costs? Sure, so today, most people are just approaching cloud costs as to, look, this is what I spent last month. So I'm going to expect, I'm going to spend the same or if I don't then, you know, like I'll try and figure out what that issue was. See if I can adjust my next month. So they're kind of managing it just months by months, but mostly by looking at what happened in the past. What that doesn't really, and so as a result, most of the tools today on the marketplace basically provide just what we call a trend-based forecast. It just takes what you've spent in the past and projects it forward, does some kind of statistical analysis on it to give you like a growth rate based upon your prior spending. Now the problem with that is it doesn't incorporate anything about what you know you're going to be doing. If you're planning on adding next quarter, 10 new workloads or expanding into a new region and deploying all your existing workloads there and a whole bunch of usage now is going to happen as a result. Like none of that's in your past spending. So you can't really, you know, forecast, you can't use a trend-based forecast for that. So the challenges that people have today are just producing accurate forecasts just because cloud spend is so dynamic and they don't have the proper tools to do that. They need to do it far more frequently and wait for their traditional IT spending if they're going to manage it more effectively and they need to manage it more effectively because in a more agile or shorter cycle time because it's so variable.  The lack of tooling to support really the finance role on the FinOps teams. Most organizations have moved to adopting FinOps as a best practice for managing cloud expenses and a lot of the tooling is basically dedicated for supporting the developer and the operations roles within that but the finance role is really limited to just providing views of spend. There's not a lot of great tooling to help people build consolidated forecasts. The finance people ultimately have to turn around every single year or, you know, every quarter, whatever the forecasting frequency is for the company and say, here's what our consolidated cloud costs look like and that needs to be accurate and they're challenged to do that today.  So what is the answer here? How do you come up with the right solution and what are you providing to decision makers? Right, well, first you need a system that's going to actually be monitoring your cloud spend that's pulling in costs on a daily basis and able to aggregate them from all your different CSPs and give you views at a level that makes sense for your business. And of course, a tool like Cloudability does all that. But then second thing you need to do is you need to be able to generate a forecast from that that you can then not just, you know, that is a trend-based forecast. It's a reasonable place to start because that's effectively what your run rate looks like projected forward but you need to be able to make changes to that. You need to be able to add in new investments and update the costs that are in your run rate to reflect changes that you know are going to happen as a result of business activity. And it's not enough just to basically drop it into a spreadsheet and make edits. You ultimately want to capture why you're making these changes. You want to, in other words, move from a forecasting and kind of target setting to a planning exercise. And planning is the act of saying we're doing these investments is going to have these impacts on costs. We're making these changes as a result of this business strategy or this business activity. And then being able to stand back and look at that and say, okay, you know, if you're doing an annual planning exercise, does that make sense? Are those the right priorities? So you need a tool that's going to basically be able to support driver-based planning in addition to trend-based forecasting so that you can capture these details and make better decisions. That's how you achieve alignment with your limited funds. And once you've set that, you know, there's kind of two exercises that finance typical is through an annual budgeting exercise and then a regular forecast update process where they're monitoring what they've, what spending has happened relative to what they've planned to spend. And as a result of that, making adjustments. And this is really critical for cloud costs because they are dynamic. You have to move to a more agile kind of planning model. The budget is what you initially start with. There's some top-level envelope. Of course, the company's willing to spend for cloud expenses, but there's lots of variances that happen all throughout. If you do get that big spike, you know, in one area of your business that was unplanned, then you need to make adjustments perhaps in other areas. You need to be able to defer, for example, new workloads and new projects that were produced, new costs so that you can accommodate or absorb those types of expenses. And you need to be able to do that frequently. Every single month, take a look at it. So you can't spend a whole bunch of time manually aggregating up costs, you know, actual spending today and aligning to what your forecast is for each of the areas of the business. If you're gonna basically every single month or even every single week, look at how you're performing it. You need automation to help you do that. So much of the advantages that you're talking about are, yes, it's about simplifying the automation, but it's also about increasing information visibility and being able to communicate that information, loop in teams so that people understand where, what's actually happening and interpret it in certain ways. Can you talk a little bit about the conversations that you're having with customers in terms of how this is changing, how they do business, sort of what they were struggling with and how using these solutions has helped them? Sure. So this has been something that, you know, our cloudability customer base has been asking for a while. And we, for the first time, like in Apgu's history, we really leveraged kind of that interest to have a very extensive open beta. So we actually delivered a form of this product very early this year, like in the April timeframe. We spent the last nine months going through a very extensive beta process with them. And as a result, like we heard a lot of different stories about how people needed to plan their assets and what kind of impact they had. So for example, we had a very large financial services company that was literally running this entire process in spreadsheets. They had over 300 individual cost owners that basically own various applications or products that were contributing to cloud costs. And the finance team would have to meet with those when they pull together an annual forecast, would have to meet with every single one of those or a good portion of those, the top drivers of cost and manipulate their inputs. And by gathering all this stuff together into a single spreadsheet, they'd have to maintain it kind of off the books, if you will. So we had a lot of input from folks that were looking for how they specifically wanted to automate this process. And we took all that feedback in and that's been the result of what we have today in cloud financial planning. Capabilities that are really designed to help finance organization build a consolidated forecast through collaborative engagement with individual cost owners, not so that they have to have conversations but so they can create a consolidated plan, break it down into segments that preach the individual cost owners, share it out with those cost owners so they can put their own inputs in at the same time, have it be reviewable as a consolidated forecast and then use that to set budgets that they can measure from and then automated dashboards and reporting that show performance spend to date relative to what was planned in forecast with proactive alerting to tell people when their variances are large and they should come in and make some changes in the forecast. So these are kind of the tools that we've put in place in the product integrated directly in with all the other cloudability, powerful functionality that allows you to analyze what you've been spending on, how much uses you have, providing optimization recommendations so that when you have this new overlay of like, hey, you're projected to exceed your annual budget by 20% if you continue spending at this rate and we're sitting here maybe in June when you get that then you can go in and you can look at the various optimization possibilities you have to reduce your expenses going forward and capture that in the updated forecast. This informs everyone, right? That you've got a fix for that variance.  It's something that we're giving you tools to find earlier and make corrections earlier. And all of this was direct result of a lot of engagement and input from our cloudability customers. The finance people and the roles that have been using in the FinOps organizations have been trying to use cloudability for this in the past. Right, I'm thinking about the finance team and sort of hearing about, oh my gosh, we're gonna have so much better visibility into knowing what's going on in our organization and where money's being spent and what's happening, what's our usage looking like. But I'm also thinking about the person whose job it was to deal with all those individual lines on the spreadsheet. Are you hearing anything about how it has helped them maybe devote their time to more interesting or more meaningful projects in the company elsewhere? Yeah, that's a great question. The fact that we've automated a bunch of things that used to be part of their job, right, means that which really isn't part of their job. Their job as a finance role is to basically provide transparency and visibility and cost, but then also control and help manage costs. And so when there are, and as we discussed with cloud, there are going to be variances, right? It's just, it's impossible to say to nail your note, like with headcount plans, you can nail your headcount plan. That's pretty easy to do, right? But with cloud costs, you don't have that much control. So you have to be able to react to variances. So that is the job of the finance team is to figure out, okay, we've got a big spend over here and it's completely justified. We need to continue to do the other things we're planning to do. Where is another area we can go take money from today? Take in the sense that, you know, like we can defer some of that spending, we can make a strategic decision to delay certain things so that we can afford to continue spending, even though we've had the experience in this other area. That's really what their job is, the solving problems. And when they spend all their time, like they do today, pulling together a spreadsheet that allows them to even have the conversation, then they have less time to actually fix the problems and have better. So what this means for the company is that they have more efficient management of their cloud budget. They have better alignment to what their strategic goals are at the end of the year. They've delivered the right things, despite the fact, the things that were most important to business, despite the fact that there were pickups or unplanned events along the way. That's what finance's job is for, is to help the organization do that. Well, Ray, it's allowing them to be more strategic in their role rather than reactive. So talk to me, this is kind of a fun question. What is the forecast of forecasting? What's the future for forecasting? I mean, what are you seeing? Companies are able to be more strategic. So in some ways, they won't even feel it because they just are acting, they're able to respond to information and then make decisions in a more timely real time, I should say, fashion. But what do you think is going to be the upshot of this in 2024 and in the years to come? Well, I think as with every area of business today, AI is going to play a huge role. So AI, of course, needs to be fueled by data. The better the data you can give it for, the better you can get help in making decisions. But ultimately, forecasting and planning are really decision support tools. I mean, you plan so that you are going to be able to accomplish strategic goals and cloud expenses are just one component of them. But as you said, it's increasingly a very important component. So the strategic planning aspect is being able to make better decisions at the time. There's the annual budget cycle where you're laying out what are the big things that we need to do, but then there's as you're in the year making those decisions that we talked about like where we have to react and their AI can play a huge role. It can basically help make surface up recommendation maybe even take automated actions to help like reduce workload or usage or switch to different RIs or cost configurations to do that first order of like, okay, how do I reduce my costs so that I can fit within the budget I was allowed? Or we can have the strategic conversation about how we might ship more budget here. So there's more opportunities for AI to get involved, taking advantage of customer specific data to make better recommendations. I think the other thing is that there's better tools that will continue to add. So today, if you think about it, what we've really done with cloud financial planning is we've added to existing trend-based forecasts and everyone's had the ability to driver-based planning and strategic plan. And to do that in a consolidated way with collaboration across multiple stakeholders, kind of that process, workflow aspect. But the next big thing is that people want to move to more healthier or better measures of performance. So just looking at cost is not enough. Unit economics is a better way. You're taking a look at what are your unit rates based upon some sort of demand metric that also accomplishes cost. So the next step for cloud financial planning is really to add in demand-based plan. So in addition to saying what the costs are, let me actually forecast my demand based upon my unit rates and how my cost structure has been evolving, all of it dynamic, then I can get a more accurate forecast of that. So there's different tools that will bring to bear. And then finally, there's like, from a bottom-up perspective, like everything I've talked about is more top-down, but there's a, you know, driven by strategic need. But there's also a huge amount of work that or planning that's done by the individual dev teams themselves in the form of planning new workloads. And today that's done using cost calculators, right? We've just shipped, or we're in beta on another feature, we call workload planning, which is really like a better version of all of the platform cost calculators. Why? Because it's a single interface that allows you to plan costs for any different CSP. It takes into account your pricing. But it's something that teams would use as they're building workloads to help them make better decisions, you know, about the resources they're planning on using to support those workloads, better costing decisions. But at the end of the day, it's also a great way of planning out what new workloads in detail, what their cost structure looks like going forward. So think about the ability to pull together many different workloads that have been estimated that are in development, running them through architecture reviews to decide, you know, if they're correct, but then using those costs from a deployed perspective, when those workloads are gonna hit your production data centers or production environments, what does that cost structure look like? So we wanna bring together all of these pieces of information, both from a bottoms up, dev driven perspective, and from a top down strategic perspective, into a, you know, a better planning tool, one that gives you multiple tools to fit the right job, trend based forecast, driver based planning, unit based, demand planning, et cetera. Well, this has been a really exciting, interesting conversation. I think better tools, better metrics, and of course a lot more AI in the years to come Peter. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really fascinating. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of SuperCloud 5. You are watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise technology coverage.