As of April 26, 2020, the World Health Organization reported a total of 2,804,796 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, with 193,710 deaths. There are now 1,094,846 confirmed cases in the region of the Americas. St. Lucia has recorded a total of 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19, all of whom have recovered and been discharged from care. A total of 446 tests have been carried out to date. We are still implementing our national response to the COVID-19 epidemic, and as such, we should collectively remain focused and committed to the actions for reducing the spread virus. At this stage, it is still difficult to accurately predict how the pandemic will progress for us in St. Lucia, but it must be noted that as we gradually facilitate the availability of essential services, the risk of transmission is increased. Also, the reality is St. Lucia cannot remain closed indefinitely. Our assumption is the likely scenario for the epidemic within our context shall be recurring waves with low-level transmission. This requires that the public work closely with us in maintaining the physical distancing measures at all times. The public must note that COVID-19 remains in all regions around us, and given it is a new virus, our entire population is at a risk of getting it at some point in time. As such, we need to learn to live safely in this COVID-19 environment. Every single sector must also prepare for the new way of operating in anticipation. The Government of St. Lucia has been providing these protocols. This requires a behaviour change and a new way of living. During the coming weeks, our public health and primary healthcare teams will be providing you with information to support you as we transition to coexisting with COVID-19. One such aspect includes the need to ensure our immune system is functioning at its best. This requires a balanced, healthy diet including the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables, drinking water throughout the day, regular exercise, adequate rest, sleep, and managing our stress level to keep it to a minimum. Also the avoidance of smoking, drugs, and excessive alcohol intake, which are all detrimental to the body and limits our ability to properly manage illnesses. Some individual measures that must be sustained include hygiene measures such as hand washing and respiratory etiquette, the use of homemade face masks, remaining home and away from public places when sick, regular personal hygiene and keeping our homes and offices spaces clean, the population more satirist, which include the elderly and persons living with chronic conditions would require special considerations to keep them safe and healthy. This includes staying at home as much as possible, ensuring control of their chronic conditions, and facilitating the services to them as needed. Periodically, additional public health and social measures may still need to be instituted to restrict and reduce movement as needed based on the stage of the outbreak. The Ministry of Health and Wellness has kept health services available to ensure care for our chronic care patients, urgent care conditions, emergencies, antenatal care immunization program to name a few. We have had to make adjustments to conform to the physical distancing protocols and to ensure a safe environment for our patients who need care. One of the new measures includes the appointment system for the specialty clinics, antenatal care and child health clinics. We ask the public to be patient and cooperate with us. The Ministry of Health shall remain vigilant and maintain the capacity for early detection, aggressive contact tracing, quarantine and isolation, testing and treatment capacity. The health education component is critical to keep you informed in a timely manner. The Ministry of Health and Wellness will continue to provide the public with regular updates on COVID-19.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to join this session about Introduction and Project Update of Provider OpenStack. My name is Lin Xiangkong from Catalyst Cloud. Together with me today is Anousha Remnani from NEC, and we are both maintainers of Provider OpenStack. In this session, we will first talk about some overview of Provider OpenStack. And then we will go through its components and their features, their design, and their updates. And finally, we will give you some information about how to get involved. Maybe some of you have already heard of OpenStack, which is an open source cloud computing platform. Actually, before Kubernetes was born, OpenStack was one of the most active open source projects in the world. And then Kubernetes just came from behind. So some people may say they are competitors. But from my perspective, that doesn't necessarily mean that one is replacement for the other. Actually, the two can be both capable of working in tandem in order to bring greater values to organizations and better service to the users. So actually, they are friends. And most importantly, they are both open source. Cloud Provider OpenStack was created as a sub-project of Sieg Cloud Provider. The responsibility of Sieg Cloud Provider is to establish the standards and the requirements that should be met by all the cloud providers to ensure their integration with Kubernetes. So basically, Provider OpenStack is just like Provider AWS, Provider GCP, or Provider Azure, if you are more familiar with those public clouds. So they are at the simulator. So there are actually a bunch of components in Provider OpenStack in order to implement some Kubernetes resources and functions. So here is a list of all the components in Provider OpenStack. The two important ones are OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager and the CSI plugins. Other than those, we also have Octavia Ingress Controller, which is implementing the Ingress resource in Kubernetes. And we have Magnum AutoHealer to achieve high availability of the cluster nodes. In security area, we have Kstonehouse Webhook for RBSD, and we have Barbican KMS plugin for the sacred data encryption. And we will go through them one by one shortly. So here is a diagram showing that the Kubernetes resource and functions each Provider OpenStack component has implemented and the interaction between each component and OpenStack services. Actually, OpenStack has lots of projects, lots of services. And you can see here some service is required by some particular Provider OpenStack component. For example, Magnum, the Kubernetes as a service in OpenStack is required for the Magnum AutoHealer implementation. And another one is Octavia, which is a load balancer as a service in OpenStack is required by multiple components by the OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager and Octavia Ingress Controller. Because as you know that in Kubernetes, the service of load balancer type and the Ingress both needs to create the external cloud load balancers. The release of Provider OpenStack is actually in the same cadence of Kubernetes. For example, Kubernetes v1.22 was released several weeks ago, and we just released the same version of cloud provider OpenStack days after. In addition, we have CI jobs running that could make sure that one version of OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager can talk to a different, I mean the latest of three minor versions of Kubernetes. But we are not following the patch release as Kubernetes. We only do patch release as required, especially when there is some critical bug fix we need to backpot. So basically, we have different manner, sorry, we have different patch versions with Kubernetes. In terms of artifacts, each time when we do release for Provider OpenStack, we will create and upload binary files to our release page. Meanwhile, we build and upload the Docker images for each component to Docker Hub. In both binary files and Docker images support multiple platforms such as AMD64 or ARM64 etc. And we also provide manifest examples in our repo, which could make it very easy for the user who want to deploy and test our components. If you prefer deploying those components using Helm, we also have Helm charts in GitHub. Most importantly, in our CI job, we are using the Docker images created in Docker Hub and the manifest example files in our repo to make sure that they can be working as expected. Okay, so the first and foremost, I want to introduce OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager. As you know, the Cloud Controller Manager is just a special controller manager but talks to the cloud API for the cloud specific functions. The OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager talks to Octavia, which is a load balancer as a service in OpenStack in order to create the service of load balancer type in Kubernetes. So if you are familiar with OpenStack, you must know that several years ago in OpenStack networking service called Neutron, there was a plugin called Neutron Airbus that could provide some simple load balancer functions. However, Neutron Airbus has been deprecated, I think two or three years ago, in order to promote Octavia in OpenStack community. As a result, OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager has also stopped support for Neutron Airbus. So if your cloud provider are still running Neutron Airbus, I think they need to upgrade in order to use the latest versions of OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager. We also support to create a TRS terminated service with Barbican, which is the OpenStack Key Manager service. At the moment, there are still some known issues. For example, we still don't support local external traffic policy. Which is looking for the port locally on a node to avoid extra traffic hub within the cluster network. I think this feature is supported by most of the public clouds, and we are still working on that. Another issue is if an application inside the cluster want to talk to the external load balancer with proxy protocol enabled, the request will fail. Because the code proxy is too smart, the traffic just bypassed the external load balancer and go directly to the service backend ports, which obviously don't support proxy protocol. So we have an ugly workaround for that. But I know that someone is working on that in Kubernetes community, and hopefully we will have a available bugfix soon. Another issue is we have limited annotation support when updating the service. So we will keep working on those issues in the upstream. And here are some updates from our latest releases. As mentioned, we added helm chart support for Cloud Controller Manager and our CSI plugins. And also we added support for TLS termination with the Barbican with the Key Manager service deployed. And also metric support for monitoring purposes. Another improvement we've made in the past releases is to use one single API call to create the load balancer, which significantly decreased the service creation time. And the last but not the least, we added the Octavia version check for some advanced features, because we know that there are some cloud providers are still running different versions of Octavia and even different versions of OpenStack. So we added this feature to make sure that the OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager won't break when talking to different versions of Octavia, especially for some advanced features. And we have something planned. In the next release, we are going to implement a feature that will reuse a single cloud load balancer for multiple services, which brings a cost-effective solution for the cluster users. And also we need to stabilize our CI to make our contributors life easier. Welcome to Octavia Ingress Controller. Well, the Ingress Controller is responsible for the reconciliation for the Ingress resource in Kubernetes cluster. Similar to OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager, Octavia Ingress Controller is also communicating with Octavia in order to create load balancers. The same, we also support TLS termination with Barbican, which is a key manager service in OpenStack. So it's very similar to the OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager. So basically the job of Octavia Ingress Controller is very simple. It's just maintaining the mapping relationship from the Ingress definition to the resource dependencies in the cloud to make sure that when there is changes in the Ingress definition, and we will update the resource dependencies in the cloud. Magnum AutoHealer. Magnum is Kubernetes as a service in OpenStack. So it provides cloud API to create, update and delete the Kubernetes cluster. And additionally, it provides advanced features such as the cluster certificate rotation and cluster rolling upgrade and the cluster node resize. So it's very useful. The Magnum AutoHealer was initially designed for Magnum, but after that we changed the architecture in order to support multiple cloud providers. So in Magnum AutoHealer, we have a health checker and cloud provider. Both are pluggable. So if, which means if you are the cloud administrator or the cluster administrator, it's very easy to customize the health check by integrating with your own monitoring solutions. And also if you are a cloud provider, it's very easy to implement some API, some interface in order to manage the Kubernetes cluster running on your cloud. And by the way, the Magnum AutoHealer supports both master nodes and worker nodes for the detection and auto healing. Keystone AutoWebhook is providing authentication and authorization for the clusters, but actually the tool feature can be running separately. I think the most significant value the Keystone AutoWebhook brings is to simplify the logging process and the resource permission management for the OpenStack users. For example, if you are OpenStack project administrator and you have your existing OpenStack users in your project and you have some Kubernetes clusters running on top of OpenStack, the user management and the resource access management will be very simple by using Keystone AutoWebhook. If configured, the Keystone AutoWebhook can create the Kubernetes name spaces automatically for the OpenStack project. And also it can do the mapping from the role of OpenStack user to Kubernetes user or group. So it's very convenient. Speaking of authorization, I think Keystone AutoWebhook provides more flexible RBAC policy than the Kubernetes built-in RBAC. As we know that the Kubernetes built-in RBAC is quite least based, which means it's very easy to define the roles such as which user can have what operations of what resources. But with Keystone AutoWebhook, you can define the roles. For example, a user can access all the resources except for some special ones. So it's more powerful. And the policy change can be made dynamically without restarting the service. The last component I want to cover in my part is Barbican KMS plugin. Well, Barbican is a key manager service in OpenStack. And the Barbican KMS plugin is pretty simple. It's a KMS provider that running as a GRPC server which resides on the Kubernetes control plane but talks to the Barbican service in the cloud in order to fetch the key encryption key. And using the key encryption key, Kubernetes can manage the data encryption key and the data stored in the storage. Of course, mostly it's ETCD. So the Barbican KMS plugin is just responsible for receiving or fetching a sacred in Barbican in order to encrypt or decrypt the data for the sacred in Kubernetes. And you may notice that I haven't covered the components in storage area which I will hand over to Anusha. Okay, Anusha, please go ahead. Thanks, Lingzian. So next component we are going to look at cover is on the CSI drivers. CSI drivers are used for volume management in Kubernetes. So we do provide an OpenStack repo host couple of CSI drivers that we'll be looking in a bit. Before diving in, so let's give a brief intro on what is CSI and why is it used. So CSI is a container storage interface. It is an industry defined standard to expose storage systems to containerized workloads. With the adoption of the CSI, Kubernetes entry volume plugins have been moved to the out-of-free and also the volume plugins can be containerized. So these plugins can be returned without the need to touch the Kubernetes code. With the deprecation of the entry volume plugins, CSI drivers must be used with the Kubernetes for the volume management. This is the high-level component diagram that involves in the Kubernetes cluster with the CSI. So we have a CSI driver here at the right-hand side. It implements the volume plugin behavior and exposes GRPC as defined by the CSI spec. It implements the identity service, controller service, and the node service. This CSI driver in turn communicates to the underlying OpenStack Cinder Manila services to give the volume management in Kubernetes. Coming to the next sidecar containers, these are helper containers. These assist to the communication between Kubernetes and the CSI driver. So we have, I think, five or six sidecar containers which are optional and can be enabled as per the requirement. For node driver registrar, it registers the CSI driver with the kubelet and external provisions and deletes the volumes and external attachments. As such, does the attach and detach operations external snapshotter is for the volume level snapshotting and external resizer with the volume expansion functionalities. So these can be enabled as required by the driver. The Kubernetes, we have Kubernetes core component here which has kube API controller manager kubelet. In this kube controller manager communicates to the external CSI driver via kube API server. So sidecar containers have to watch the Kubernetes API server for the events and then invoke respective calls on the CSI driver. Coming to the first CSI driver that is Cinder CSI. So as you know that Cinder is an OpenStack block storage service. This CSI compliant driver used used to manage the life cycle of the Cinder volumes. This plugin is compatible with the CSI spec 1.3.0 and also efforts are being made always for every release to be on the with the latest CSI compatible with the latest CSI spec. The release cycle of the plugin is in sync with the Kubernetes releases like the recent release Kubernetes 1.2.2. So we have released the latest version of 1.3.3 which is incompatible with the Kubernetes release. In the likewise we also update the sidecars for every release to the latest to the latest versions. And we do share we do have the sidecar versions that are supported by the driver in the manifest. So we do recommend use the same versions to ensure that there is no breakage with the driver. Coming to the driver deployment, there are two types of driver deployment that is supported one through Helm charts. And also we do provide the sample manifest in the repo that can be used for the easier deployment. This is a bit deep dive into the driver deployment. So here we have CSI driver is commonly deployed as a two sets of plugins. One is controller plugin and other is a node plugin. So controller plugin is deployed as a stateful set or a deployment. Inside this we have to we have containers of the single plugin. And along with that the sidecar containers of external provisional snapshots or the attachment resizer these can be enabled as required. This needs to be installed on any node in the cluster. The communication between the sidecars and the plugin happens through GRPC over the UTS socket. Unix reminds of it. The next is the node plugin of inside the demon set. This this runs on every node. We have two containers. One is the Cinder CSI plugin along with the sidecar node driver register. This node driver register registers the driver to the Kubelet. So the communication do happen over the GRPC here as well. These are the wide range of features that are supported by the Cinder CSI. So if you would like to explore any of it and would like to know how to use it. So we do have a detailed documentation in the repo. Please check it out for it. This for the users who are still using increase in the provisional. So starting from Kubernetes 1.2.1 the flag for the Cinder CSI migration flag is supported as a beta feature and is on by default. So by default all the plugin operations from the existing entry are redirected to the Cinder CSI. It is going to fail if you have if you don't have the Cinder CSI driver installed on your cluster. So if you you need to explicitly disable offer it if you don't want to use the Cinder CSI. But this all the plugin entry plugins are targeted for removal on from 1.24. I think maybe targeted couple of releases mostly by 1.24. So it is expected that everyone must migrate to the CSI driver instead. We do provide the detailed guide on how to migrate from the using increase in the provisional to the external CSI driver. So you can check it out. The major updates that are contributed to this plugin over the past year. So these we did add generic ephemeral volume support and support for the multiple config files have been added like cloud config can be specified multiple times now. They will be merged updated. I think later site cars or every release we do update it to latest site car. And there is a we have added support for ignore volume is it where if you have the cluster with the node is it and volume is it as different. So this can be enabled to enable the port to be deployed on any of the node availability zone and several talk improvements that have been contributed to the report planned for the future. I think for this cycle the main focus would be on the CI improvements, stability and increase in test coverage. We have been recently migrating to the new probe so we have much work there and also there are some plans for adopting the new implementing or supporting the new CSI features as well. The next CSI driver that is hosted in the repo is the Manila CSI driver. So Manila is the open stack shared file system service. As you know, so CSI Manila driver is able to create expand snapshot restore and mount the open stack Manila shares currently supported Manila back into our NFS and native CFS. The release I think latest have been done in sync with the Kubernetes 1.22 which is 0.9.0. This is compliant with the 1.2.0 CSI spec. There are several features that are supported include dynamic provisioning topology volume snapshot and volume online volume expansion. For this also the driver deployment through help and samples manifest both are supported. Major updates of this plugin over the past year, the expand volumes in the online mode have been added and injecting metadata to the newly created shares either through cluster ID or those storage class parameters that has been added. Influence the selection of NFS share export location by specifying desired subnet and the next I think pass mount options specific to CFS CSI. A couple of features that are for the future releases that is improve the validation and handling of volume access modes and work on mountable snapshots and also improve selection heuristics for NFS export location. So that concludes our component overview of all the plugins hosted in the repo. If you would interest you to get involved in the project so there's a getting started guide which would help you on board into this project. We are actively looking for developers who could contribute or either in the test area documentation area or in the plugin enhancements etc. So you're welcome. So you have it called all the all it is host of all the plugins is hosted in this repo cloud provider openshrack and for the users do raise the feature or bug if you have come across any if you'd like to report so And Communicate I think flat channel we are active on provider openshrack channel windows flat so feel free to be I have added couple of contacts as well so feel free to ping us on the flat to get to know more about the plugins or contribution how to start so we are happy to help. Thanks all for joining the session. Let's open it for Q&A. Thank you.


The Cube at Hadoop Summit 2014 is brought to you by Anchor Sponsor, Hortonworks. We do Hadoop. And headline sponsor, WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible. Okay, welcome back everyone live here at Silicon Valley. This is The Cube, our flagship program to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon A, joining my co-host here, Jeff Kelly. Big data analysts at Wikibon, industry leading analysts and our next guest is end user Demetra with Cetrica. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. So we'd love to have people who actually deploy the technology. You're one of those. So tell us, what do you think about the ecosystem here? What's your take on Hadoop Summit, the vibe, and what things are you seeing that attract you from a technology perspective? I think it's growing. That's the first thing I would like to say. I've not been here in San Jose before or in the Hadoop Summit in the US before, but I certainly was at Amsterdam. I was actually speaking as one of the panelists there. I was just getting bigger and bigger in a span of three months. So vibe is really positive. We're using Hadoop and we have great expectations from it. And obviously it's great to see that the team here at Hortonworks are really putting a lot into the core itself which directly helps us as end users, customers. Yeah, well tell us a little bit about Centrica for those members of our audience who aren't familiar with you. Sure, Centrica is actually a very billion dollar company. It's a global company. I actually work for British Gas, which is one of the largest business units of Centrica. What we do in the UK is we talk about, we actually are in the energy utilities market, as well as home services market, as well as a number of other different, so we actually cover a broad range of things, also in the insurance market. So quite a vibrant and quite a dynamic company. So tell us a little bit about, how you're using Hadoop at British Gas? Yeah, so we started really the journey about I think now just over 12 months. We started with trying to solve our data problems within the organization, the advent of smart metering, as well as the fact that we wanted to reduce a lot of ID costs. So that's when we started with the journey, started looking at the strategy around how do we completely transform our data landscape with Hadoop. But we've come a long way. We've moved on from just the strategy and the architecture definition to a proof of concept and then moving on now to almost going nearer to production. So you mentioned smart metering, and of course that has huge implications for a company like yours, I would imagine. It does, yeah. If it's similar to here in the US, where with a traditional metering, somebody goes out maybe once a month, and reads the meter, and now with a smart meter, it's every 30 minutes or whatever the interval might be, where it's sending data home. Is it mainly a data volume issue that you could either look at this or? It's not so much just the smart metering concept here at British Gas. It's the connection that that has with the rest of the estate. That's what drives the complexity. As in, everybody is now trying to understand what benefits can we get out of this data if we try and join it with the rest of the estate. What insights can we drive? Using that insights. It's a direct implication to the way we run our business, to the way we... Can you care of it momentarily? Sorry. So yeah, it's mainly about the connections, and it's mainly about the complexity, and it's also about our existing systems. How can we actually run them better, run them efficiently? It's a host of things, really. So it's about using that data to run your internal operations, to understand how the... Internal operations, yeah. How we can better manage our resources, how we can efficiently manage our processes, as well as how can we think about the future, new applications that we can generate with this data? Well, it's interesting because we've recently conducted a survey. One of the big use cases was just that, kind of optimizing internal operations, which is a huge area where companies can find a lot of efficiency, rocks a lot of savings, and potentially you can route those savings to new analytic projects and to find new insights.  So take us from kind of where you were, to kind of where you are, to where you'd like to be, if you could kind of walk us through the journey a little bit. Yeah, I mean, where we are, really, we're pretty mature in terms of what we're trying to achieve from a Hadoop perspective, from modernizing the data fabric or the data operating system that we keep talking about. That's where we are. Where we'd like to be is, we would like to be that data-driven organization where we can proactively identify opportunities to make the best of our investments. And that's where we would like to be. And I think we're in a pretty good shape right now. Where we were, not even like to think about at this point in time, but pretty much a lot of the same kind of problems that large enterprises face with respect to legacy applications and complexity of the architecture. And if that's where we started from, we are on a journey to clean that up, kind of modernize our foundations before we venture out into running new business applications on it. And what's the culture like at British Gas relative to making kind of data-driven decisions? Is that, has data always been, whether it's small data or big data, part of the kind of culture of British Gas? Or is that something you've got to work on instilling in employees? I think we've got to do more work on that. But data has always been an integral part of the way we make our decisions. It's obviously improving every single day with the advent of big data, not just big data, with the advent of new opportunities that energy markets are facing, not only in terms of cost reduction, but also in terms of revenue generation, looking for new opportunities, making life simpler and better for our customers. So it covers a wide range of things. And all of that, if you look at it, can only be made possible with data and the right utilization of data. So I'd say it's never enough what you do with your data. It just has to be a continuous iterative process. And that's where I would like to see British Gas. How has security been a big force in your organization? Obviously, everyone does not even care about security. No one says that, but when you look at Hadoop and what's going on there, obviously security is the big power move first Hortonworks, and then now Cloudera following suit to Hortonworks. So, you know, that's a huge issue. And it's a tell-tale sign that, guys, that's table stakes. Is that true? Yeah, I think it's a great move by both companies, and especially for enterprises like us, securities in the core, it's the foundation really. So we're quite happy that those acquisitions have taken place, and we're looking forward to how that integrates with the product, with the core, and then how can we benefit from the opportunities? So I was talking earlier, we had the CTO, Wendis, go on. I said, lay out the differences between Cloudera and Hortonworks. In a way, if a friend asked you, what's the difference between Cloudera and Hortonworks? How would you answer that question? I wouldn't comment on that because I haven't used Cloudera really. So, I don't know how to comment on that, but if you ask me without the... Well, Cloudera, a lot of sales reps, so that's, you know, obvious, everyone talks about that there. Penn and Dave, a lot of guys on the street, this field organization, Hortonworks is a more open source focus. Yes, yeah, I mean, that's almost right in the face, that differentiation between the two companies. But if you ask me without, you know, as just an observer of the community, I'd agree with that statement really. It's the open source, and it's the number of times you actually can innovate, and the number of people you can engage, which is really the differentiating factor. So, as John has kind of alluded to, Hortonworks is very much focused on kind of a lot of their reseller arrangements with SAP, Teradata, et cetera. And I imagine at British Gas, as you mentioned, you've got a lot of legacy applications. I imagine the environment there is a heterogeneous one. Very heterogeneous, indeed. Does Hortonworks' approach make it easier to integrate with kind of some of your other technologies? What are some of the other technologies you're using? I'm just curious to kind of get an understanding of the relationship between Hadoop and some of the other data management tools and technologies you use. It's very important to us, the integration factor. As you rightly pointed out, we are a very heterogeneous and, you know, the environment is really heterogeneous. I've got almost all the names that you mentioned, plus some more. And it is very important, and it was when we started off with this journey, it was very important for us to seek a product and operating system, which is what we're talking about here, which can connect and integrate as an open service into all of these ecosystem partners. And I'd like to say we're pretty pleased with the way it has worked out so far. There's obviously a long way to go with some of our vendors in terms of how they can push down queries natively down into the platform so that we can utilize the potential of the platform better. But I'm glad to say that the way it has panned out, it's a very collaborative community. And they stick to the word, the way they work with each other, whether it's Microsoft, error data, or SAP. And, you know, another finding in our survey recently was a vast majority. I think over 70% of the end users applied some type of outside consultants. Was that something you did? Or do you guys have the internal expertise to kind of architect the system? Or did you bring in some outside professional services to kind of help you architect and deploy some of these big data technologies? I think it was mixed up all of that. The approach that we took was we were very certain from the very beginning that we would like to develop in-house capabilities because we see the potential, not only in the market, but in the product. And it is important for us as a company to gain the skills that we need to in order to exploit the platform in the best possible way. So the way the approach that we took was the architecture, the strategy was pretty much our baby. The vision was ours. And then in terms of implementing it, we brought in expertise from companies like Wharton Works and some other infrastructure companies and then we integrated them into the team, the in-house team. We also gave an opportunity for our team members to learn. Let's say, we gave them raspberry pies to start with, just to play with it. And then laptops. And then it was a gradual upgrade for them as well. But they enjoyed learning with it as much as we did. So question on our crowd chef from the audience here is just basically asking, how do you guys deploy Hadoop? The question that followed up in the audience is, how do you guys hook Hadoop into other big data tools? So it's pretty much the integration point that I covered a minute ago. In terms of deploying Hadoop, we do have a disaster recovery approach as well as a kind of high availability approach to Hadoop. So we, across data centers, we have deployed that. And the way we integrate with most of our existing ecosystem partners is pretty much using the connectors that they provide us. And also, where we can't get to that, we allow them to natively try and push the data out of Hadoop into those ecosystem partners. Okay, well, final question for you is, what is the future for Hadoop in your mind? How do you see it evolving over the next five years? Whenever somebody asks me that question, the first thing that comes to me is there's no straight answer to that. The opportunities are huge. I think it's what we do with it. That's where the future lies. I think Jeff Kelly said 51 billion and there are people who pood that number. Was it 51? Yeah, just over 50 billion dollars. But that's from a revenue perspective. I mean, we think as big as that number is it's going to be practitioners like British Gas that are going to drive the most value. And the value that you drive and companies like yours are really using Hadoop, I mean, the size of that mark is going to be much better. Internet of Things is a big part of Europe there's energy, you think about energy, you think about exploration, you think about all kinds of things involving energy, transport of energy, all this, that's a big data challenge from the Internet of Things standpoint. What do you think about that market? Is it just early adopters now? Is there a lot of thinking? Is there a delivery around it? What's there, peg that evolution of that industry? Early days? I think it's early days, yes. It's fair to say it's early days. Things are going to pan out in a very, very wide distribution of use cases that you just mentioned. But yeah, I would categorize that as early days but I think we're strong thinkers as well, we're learning from other industries as fast as we can. And I think it's a great time with this technology kicking off and we being in the early stages as the early adopters, we've done the right choice in picking up the latest state of the art technology to solve our big data problems. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, D. We really appreciate hearing from a practitioner, someone out in the trenches, buying and deploying and using the technologies. Obviously we're bullish on big data, we just think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Cost of ownership, value chain integration, new devices. It's just amazing, it's a fun time. This is theCUBE and of course we're documenting it, breaking it down, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.


Yn ymdyn ni'n ddweud, dwi'n ddweud o'r bwysigol i'r gweithfodol yn ei ddweud o'r gweithfodol, ydych chi'n ddechrau'r ffordd cyntaf o gyfrwyr cwr, y cyfrwyr y combineid yma yn advantages gyda gwyllus a yw'r yourfawr ar ein cyhoeddol yn gydych chi wedi gweld i'r gweithio'r cwysbeth, ysgan blaenodau, ynddoch chi'n bod yn y ddych hunohau. Yn ydych chi'n ddod i wirio â Waldran Llywodraeth Cymru, yma sy'n Argynodau Cyfansol Cymru, i gyd-di-ddiw. Rwy'r Llywodraeth Cyfansol. Ddod i'r gwyllgor. Welcome everyone. I'm really pleased to be here this evening with you. And thank you for joining me at this very timely webinar. Recent global data and research from organizations, very respected organizations such as the United Nations, Harvard Business Review, including businesses such as KPMG, Ernst and Young, clearly show that corporate social responsibility is incredibly important for all types of businesses and brands irrespective of sector, whether the business or brand is a startup, established, big or small. Critically, and this is really important and I hope I get this across this evening with you, is that corporate social responsibility, or from now on I'll call it CSR, is not a trend, it's not a flash in the pan, but it's vital to accompany and a brand's longevity. So I can safely say you're all in the right place this evening. So before we begin on the CSR journey, I want to go through some elements with you and I always get a lot of sort of lots of kind of feedback and lots of queries about what's the relationship between a phone and a toilet and actually there is a connection and the United Nations in 2013 reported that more people in the world had access to a mobile phone than they did to a toilet and I think that's quite a shocking statistic but then how does that fit into the context of marketing? Well it shows that over half the world's population is now online and according to statistics published this year in 2022 from our world and data, there are 7.7 billion people in the world and 3.5 billion of us are online. So from a marketing perspective, it means digital communications is really driving everything where the three most important elements are affecting us as marketeers and publicists and anyone working in comms because we need these elements and we're looking at these elements of social listening, digital storytelling and real-time marketing. We're also in an industry that really demands and involves creative ideas and thoughts and then being able to communicate them via the media whether it's through TV, magazines, radio and of course social media channels such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube where the purpose is to raise the profile of an organisation, promote a campaign, promote an initiative because we all know that good old proverb awareness drives consideration and we also know that marketing and PR is for all types of businesses and all types of sectors and it's about sending the right message to the right people in the right place to build a brand's reputation. It's a dynamic that can actually change the face of a brand and a business. It's important because we know it builds credibility, it enhances online profiles, it drives profits, sales leads and fundamentally it changes the way people think about you, your brand and your business and within that we know that storytelling is a key component in PR and marketing. We know that storytelling creates the brand and we know everyone loves the story. It helps to engage people, people listen to the brand story, they engage with the brand, it engages with clients, consumers and influencers. We use storytelling on social media, on websites but the key here for corporate social responsibility is authentic storytelling. That's fundamental to what we're trying to do with corporate social responsibility and for a long time and I would actually say I'd go back as when I say a long time I would say prior to this pandemic companies and brands did not really understand CSR. They weren't really sure where CSR fitted within an organisation it was so misunderstood it was bolted on to human resources so it was put into HR as a good feel factor or it was put into the comms team to drive a campaign but no one really understood or appreciated what CSR could really do for a brand and essentially corporate social responsibility is about the ethos and the purpose of the brand. It's about a brand's relationship within the location it's operating, it's about its societal responsibilities, it's about the ethics of an organisation and crucially and this is really important CSR is not a fluffy concept it's a strategic business management concept it enhances reputations of a company, it strengthens brands and also here I want to just mention something called ESGs you might have heard of ESGs which means or stands for environmental, societal and governance and ESGs came out of CSR as a way of measuring a company's impact, measuring a company's ethical impact and a lot of people will say now that ESGs have replaced CSR but in my opinion and from my experience and research I'm going to say something that's probably a little bit shock horror for some of you maybe but I believe ESGs and CSR are the same thing because if a company or a brand is doing the right thing with regards to CSR and CSR is authentic and it's effective then it will be easy to assess the impact of a brand you won't need ESGs and what's changed what I you know why I believe CSR has really become powerful is because of this global pandemic and while we know this pandemic has changed our lives and it's you know for a lot of people it's taken a lot you know it's affected lives incomes but at the same time the global pandemic has really accelerated corporate social responsibility the pandemic has fundamentally changed how we think behave and consume there's been no rapid return to normal and at this in you know this new world we're now experiencing one of the key terms is trust and during this pandemic when it first started in 2020 consumers were really looking to brands to protect and care collaborate and behave differently and do better than actual governments to during this crisis and people's expectations of companies have changed during this pandemic and the pandemic has accelerated corporate social responsibility and at the start of 2020 in March an organisation called Edelman brought out a trust barometer special report and it's called the brand trust and the coronavirus pandemic and this report showed that consumers really wanted brands to step up and they wanted brands not just to step up and do better by the planet but also to protect their employees work with governments and direct their resources to help solve the virus problem and then last year another report came out and this is a report I really like to draw on because I think it's a really it's a fantastic report and it was done by the Zeno group and it's called the strength of purpose and it surveyed more than 8 000 people in eight different markets which are the US, Canada, UK, France, China, India, Singapore and Malaysia and what this report found is and I think this is really fascinating 76% of consumers were ready to vote with their wallets so if they thought a brand was not authentic, was not purposeful, was not doing what it said it should, they would go elsewhere and you know and fraternise another brand and 77% of the consumers from this survey said that a company's leader should embody the purpose and mission of their organisation of their brand in their personal life and that's really fundamentally changed how brands are now looking at corporate social responsibility is a whole different energy about CSR and while I've quoted these two surveys there are so many reports coming out nearly every other day report surveys data showing how important CSR is because it's important because when you get it wrong because we're living in this digital age there is nowhere to hide and when marketing is leading the corporate social responsibility it's not authentic and that actually leads to what we call greenwashing and these days because we're living in this digital era you know digital comms is driving everything there is nowhere for brands to hide when they get it wrong they're called out and sometimes brands find that they are being cancelled in real time when brands are operating on a you know they're not they're not doing authentic corporate social responsibility then it becomes a crisis issue that's when crisis communications comes into play so the fundamental bottom line to avoid greenwashing to stop greenwashing is to ensure that CSR leads the marketing in everything not just a one-off campaign but it really sits at the heart of the brand and sits at the heart of a business strategy and that kind of leads on to where we go next is how do you get started and so before you even start your marketing plan it's really to have a whole I would say a mindset a change of mindset where us as marketers and us working in this comm sector we really have to understand what corporate social responsibility is and what are the issues affecting the planet what needs to be done because only then can we have an authentic viewpoint and it means understanding the corporate social responsibility values of the brand you're working with the business you're working or part of the organisation you're part of and these corporate social responsibility values are the heart of the brand they're the core values of the brand yet many companies are confused about their own brand identity and values and I always wonder if you don't understand your own brand how can you expect others to know what you do and what you stand for many companies now are recognising the link between successful business and strong branding and we all know here that branding is not just a logo but too few realise that successful brands have corporate social responsibility values positioned at the core of their business and this is the essence of CSR you know when I started off I said you know for a long time companies brands didn't know where to put CSR they kind of bolted it on to different things but really CSR should be at the driving at the driving seat in all departments within an agency and branding we need to recognise that branding is entwined with CSR values define your business for yourself your team your customers and the external audience be clear on what your objectives are and I was reading something early today and it really kind of this kind of spoke to me in today's modern world and modern business world the business landscape means past traditional perspectives of success are no longer relevant you know for brands and marketers just to think about the brand in terms of ROI return on investment money pounds dollars is not enough for brands and marketers who really want to stay relevant we really need to become aware of the impact of that business on the world businesses need a soul brands need a soul brands business leaders us of marketers need to adopt thinking that is scented around sustainable practices for the environment ethical approaches to our customer relationships it's so important to have this mind shift this kind of new thinking and then how do we do it so you've got started you understand what your values are and I always recommend not having more than five values and that's very simple having anything more than five becomes complicated it's not easy to communicate people forget what they are so I always say have not more than five and remember that these five values are your brand's business commitments make them values that you can deliver on and are passionate about and make business sense and that's critical that they make business sense there's a growing number of brands now making environmental claims we need to recognise that underpinning a lot of environmental claims is a complex science and it you know and there's need for detailed evidence which often looks at a whole life cycle so you've got to think about the whole value chain when you're creating a marketing campaign because whatever you're doing on the campaign affects the business affects the brand especially in this digital age you can't just work on your campaign believe it's CSR led when other parts of the business are doing different things and they're not aligned there isn't a holistic approach so CSR is very much a fundamental mindset and you can't just enter into CSR likely you've got to really think about what you're doing and I've kind of put together some ideas of what CSR values can look like and you know you've probably know a lot quite a few of them have heard of carbon footprint fair trade employee well-being is really key right now ethical supply chains no longer can you say well we didn't know what our supplier was doing that doesn't wash anymore that's part of greenwashing but within this within these values there's one that I really want to kind of hone in on and that's diversity and inclusion because diversity and inclusion is very much part of the corporate social responsibility remit it's not a standalone it's integral to CSR and having this as a value means that from a marketing marketing perspective mistakes won't be made glaring bad campaigns I don't know if you all remember the Gucci blackface balaclava jumper which was a huge clangor when you have the right talent in the room helping work on these campaigns when you have when by right talent I mean you have a diverse and inclusive group of marketers working together then these campaigns won't be created and if they are being created they're going to be discussed and hopefully they won't be leaving the boardroom and now lots of brands luxury brands such as Chanel and Gucci have appointed diversity and inclusion directors to ensure that they are working with the marketing and comms team and that the thinking is joined up and holistic so I can't stress this enough diversity and inclusion is always again it's sort of bolted on different aspects but it's very much part of the CSR value and it's important that CSR is understood within an organisation it's about real change and once your CSR values are decided you've got those four or five values and they're sitting at the heart of the brand and they're at the business strategy then everyone is speaking from the same script and they're communicated bottom up top to bottom sidewards holistically every campaign is CSR led not just a campaign you're working on but all campaigns or promotional materials everything's baked in within your business culture and everything's baked in with the processes and relationships and when you have them really understood within an organisation when everyone's working together when everyone understands the CSR values it boosts so much of a brand so much of a business and it really is it can create um high return on investment because what it does is when you have CSR it means you're you retaining employees you're attracting new talent you're attracting investors investors now want to see companies and brands have authentic CSR baked into their business strategy why because these kinds of companies are low risk there's less chances of these companies being cancelled online um when you are um when you are really investing in your CSR you're creating customer loyalty it gives your brand a competitive edge there's less chances of crisis management because everything is flowing seamlessly from your CSR from your marketing you don't have to really work hard at your marketing because everyone is talking about you it creates a stronger brand and also you create the right relationships and the right partnerships and business and for the brand you create the right partnerships for your supply chain you don't have to work at it it's just effortless and millennials and we come to millennials and generation said and I'm not sure if you've heard of what we call now the Greta effect but Greta Thunberg is very much you know she's probably the the the icon of this generation and this generation wants change this generation wants better from brands and from business and brands are waking up to this and if they want to engage with the next consumer or they want to attract the next talent the next the next best thing the big thing then they know that they really have to invest in authentic corporate social responsibility companies now have been called out when they are just paying lip service to CSR and this generation is not afraid to call out brands this generation is not afraid to use social media to cancel brands need to really have this mind shift this thinking to put CSR at the heart of its business strategy and at the heart of the brand and that's a kind of a refrain that I'm going to keep sort of talking about and mentioning and then we have brands that are doing it right Lego I love Lego and Lego is one of the I mean it's won so many awards for its corporate social responsibility its sustainability I'm not sure if you're aware but the little Lego pieces are now made out of sustainable sugar cane so they are biodegradable pieces and during lockdown when we were all sort of various stages of not being able to go anywhere one thing that did we did sort of buy a lot of is Lego and this year there's a great story earlier this year Lego decided with all the profits that it made last year it was going to give all its staff a bonus now this isn't a story that Lego promoted this is a story that its employees were talking about and that's how the story got traction and everyone was talking about it so Lego gave all its employees a bonus and they also said to their employees we're really going to look after you because you looked after Lego and we're going to really look after your well-being so it comes back to this corporate social responsibility Ben and Jerry's is another one an ice cream brand American and the interesting thing about Ben and Jerry's and I'm not sure if you will remember but in 2020 that's when we had the rise of Black Lives Matter and a lot of brands jumped on the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter and you know made these very empty statements that Ben and Jerry's were the only brand that's actually been working on diversity and inclusion for a long time they really put diversity inclusion at the heart of their brand so when lots of brands were called out for just kind of whitewashing on Black Lives Matter Ben and Jerry's was the brand that was able to say very strongly we've always been committed to this to this issue and another brand I really love is called Glossier and Glossier is a makeup brand and what's really unusual about them is they've now become a very successful brand but they started online they've never done any advertising any big marketing campaigns all Glossier did was create a sustainable brand an ethical purpose led brand and made sure that their brand was diverse and inclusive with the products it created that it it it's a brand that speaks to different ethnic groups and no social influences for Glossier they just did what they you know they did what they do really well and their customers and their consumers started to talk about them on social media because they were authentic they were sustainable and they were diverse and they just spoke to their consumer and that's how the Glossier brand has evolved is through social media is through marketing but not not a not a campaign as we would know is a campaign just by doing the right thing just by knowing what their CSR values are and other brands that I think that are doing great things and ones that I would like to mention again it's another beauty brand and that's called Lush so you might have you might have heard of Lush uh fresh handmade cosmetics and Lush has set itself aside from its competitors because it sees itself as a campaigning brand first and a cosmetics brand second and I think that's really interesting and what that means is and what the brand actually says in its statement which is this creating a cosmetics revolution to save the planet and this is also that the brand just doesn't make these empty statements it stands by these statements it's built into the business strategy it's built into the heart of the brand and the brand is communicating this across all its social media channels and when again they're one of the few brands that were really campaigning for Black Lives Matter diversity and inclusion way before uh the Black Lives Matter movement start really came into the Ferrari in 2020 and also Lush is a brand that's been really active and fighting against fossil fuels which is now another big um issue for brands another good example is uh super drug and super drug recently launched uh which was um in 2020 launched its first ever CSR report and it is committed it says now it's really committed to sustainability a new sustainability program and it's becoming recognised now for being an ethical brand so super drug has put a lot of thought into this um and brands are you know brands that are doing it well haven't just jumped on a bandwagon brands that are doing it doing CSR well have really thought about what their passions are what their values are and worked and made sure that everybody within the organisation understands what they're what they're doing what they're about and then of course there are brands who get it wrong and who've done wrong and we learn a lot from the mistakes we make we also may learn a lot from the mistakes others make boohoo.com is a fast fashion um label and you might recall in 2020 at the start of the pandemic when we went into the first lockdown here in the uk in march boohoo.com was actually called out for now it was treating its staff and that a lot of its staff in the um in its manufacturing warehouses weren't socially distanced weren't even being paid the minimum wage and strangely enough I mean boohoo.com had its sustainability report that it issued in 2019 but yet it wasn't doing the right thing it was just paying lip service it was just greenwashing and boohoo.com was called out for this it shares did plummet um and uh there was a lot of outcry about what they were doing another brand who got it wrong and this is a brand I love and I was really surprised that Oakley which is um an oak it's a vegan milk it's a brand that started to help with CSR at the heart of its brand but somehow it's lost its way in my opinion it's it's not really kept on its path it's it's tried to over complicate things promise things it can't deliver on and as a result has been recently called out for greenwashing and um it recently did an ad and the the advertising agency authority called out Oakley for misleading on its environmental claims and credentials and that's really sad and now we're seeing lots of brands that started out really well on their CSR have have just lost their way because they've not really built it into their into their brand they've not built in those values into the business strategy other sort of fails I don't know whether you remember but McDonald's the fast food chain had decided it was going to get onto the bandwagon of reducing its plastic so McDonald's used to have plastic straws and then it decided it was going to have paper straws which in theory which would be great but it found that they could not actually recycle the paper straws so again it was something that they jumped on didn't really think it through didn't really understand how it's going to work for the brand and it was a marketing campaign that failed another one is Volkswagen and this is where a brand has lied to its consumer and um it's never really been able to recover that trust issue so Volkswagen the car manufacturer admitted it had equipped 11 million of its diesel cars with software that could be used to cheat on emission tests while marketing the vehicles as clean diesel and it kind of this this statement goes back to you know when I when I talked about marketeers having a mindset a shift in in thought and we as marketeers and people within the comms industry have to really become ambassadors um and really do our research and know what we're talking about with corporate social responsibility if you want to do CSR right you've you've got to do your research you've got to learn about CSR you've got to learn about what's happening with the planet you've got to learn about the resources what are the issues what are the challenges you can't just bolt it on because that when you bolt it on that's when it fails that's when things just go miserably wrong and you're having crisis management and brands are called out so I didn't want to just stay with the negative I wanted to also talk about and leave you with a positive and I saw this ad about two weeks ago and I loved it and I thought oh next day when I'm back on the tube I'm going to take a photo of this ad so when I went back the way I was traveling the ad wasn't there anymore so I had to hunt this down Keony is a really interesting brand and I didn't know a lot about it until I actually saw this ad which spoke to me and Keony is the biggest travel company that that came out of Switzerland and it arrived in the UK in 1965 but I think this ad says everything to me and hopefully to you and it's this line I want to just read out by staying true to our values we pulled together and did the right thing by our customers because valuing individuals and relationships has been key to our success since 1906 and I think that just sums up everything that I've been trying to communicate through this webinar with you and what's also really interesting about this brand is that it if you go onto its website it really talks about its CSR values what it's doing on sustainability and it talks about responsible travel which is you know we know travel is not easy trying to have green travel trying because when you are traveling you are increasing your carbon footprint but it's trying to offset it in other ways and still keep the trust at the heart of the brand and the other thing Keony says is that it respects people the planet and animals and also what they do is they partner with hotels around the world who have signed up to their responsible promise and I think this goes back to when I was saying when you're working ethically with a brand when you have your CSR values baked in you automatically make the right partnerships you create the right supply chains you you attract the right influences for your campaigns it just works really well and as a result Keony has won lots of awards for what it's doing I mean that wasn't it's that wasn't its mission when it puts the heart of its brand it wasn't to win awards it was just to be an ethical brand and that's the thing when you are really genuine about your corporate social responsibility when you're not doing it for the the spin or the PR it works so much better because others will start talking about all the fabulous things you're doing your customers will start talking about you and importantly your workforce your colleagues your employees will start talking about the brand that they're working for so corporate social responsibility isn't just a sort of a good feel phenomenon it's it's so it's so much more than that and that's what I really wanted to leave you with and I thought this Keony while it talks of the promise of holidays it also just talks about their value which is trust and we're living in a time now where trust is so important and trust is so it's so valuable it's they say data is gold but I think trust now is almost it has a great value for a brand thanks very much sangita a really insightful presentation on a topic that's become very key in recent years so before we head into the q&a session with sangita I'd just like to give you a little bit of information about CIM's new level six diploma which is in sustainable marketing which will be available from the July 2022 submission period and see CIM partner with the carbon literacy trust it's been designed with a panel of sustainability and marketing experts from both academic and practitioner backgrounds to enable marketers to explore concepts of sustainability and to better understand how to embed these to create long-term value for your organisation existing holders of the CIM diploma and professional marketing can gain the additional qualification by taking the sustainability module and you can find further information about this on the qualifications page on the CIM website we also have the sustainable transformation hub which has some brilliant resources including blogs podcasts and webinars for you to access and links to some of our training courses delivered by marketing specialists and sustainability so we'll go to our questions now first question it's more of a comment on the lego thing but I didn't realise they were made from different products now and but the question is could could there be an allegation that there's been made that they may be simply greenwashing by using bioplastics rather than recycling waste plastic apparently it's should CIM plastic may not come from fossil fuels but produced through farming that uses up a lot of resources you know could could there be the allegation or is it a step in the right direction that they've made oh that's a really interesting question and you know the thing with lego now creating its pieces from sustainable biodegradable sugar cane is that it's a step in the right direction and lego it has said that this is just a step it's constantly innovating it's constantly wants to do better by the planet and it's been it's this isn't just um something it's done in the last couple of years lego is really focused on its corporate social responsibility it's been doing it for a long time and it's constantly innovating to make its product better for the planet they're also doing recycling schemes where instead of just throwing your lego away you can take it in and recycle it upcycle so they're doing so many different things and they're not just stopping here they want to continue to do better thank you next question comment from the the question there is a lot of the examples that you gave would be to see focused how would you say the best way to get started would be for a b2b company um i would say is to really understand what's your what are you trying to do in your business what's the main objective of your business and you you know it depends again how big your how big you are if you're a small business if it's just you on your own um find out what your passion is and what and even if it's not five things that you could put as your CSR value if it's just one thing but to do that one thing really well that's important it's to just it's to define the one value that you can do really well and put it at the heart of your business strategy and that way you can deliver on it and then in time you can grow you can grow the values you can increase the values to maybe two or three but it's first of all finding out what's the objectives of the company finding out what the passion is and what can you deliver on so it's wider than just the marketing team it's the whole business and the ethos of the company and that's the thing and that's what i hope i got across is that corporate social responsibility is a mind shift it's it's a change of attitude for a brand for a business for a company and it's got to come from the top and it's got to be sideways it's got to you know feed up and you know top to toe it you can't just have one team or the marketing team championing CSR it's got to really then filter through the rest of the organisation otherwise it won't work because you'll have colleagues doing other things that are not CSR led yeah of course next question you mentioned about companies such as Oakley who make a great start sometimes losing their way do you think this is down to struggling to make CSR communication stand out in comparison to other brands and what would you say is the best way to do this that's a really good question um i don't know why Oakley's lost its way um i think yes you know it's a competitive market and when you try to compete um and you know you're going to compromise your marketing you're going to compromise your brand uh brands that really are not trying to compete they're just doing the right thing because they know that they they whatever they're doing they're doing really well they're not trying to over promise those brands such as Glossier um have less risk involved with them i mean that another brand that has recently been called out is um innocence uh which again started like Oakley a good brand doing good things by the planet but recently it was called out for an ad where they said that you know Oakley products are in plastic bottles and plastic campaigning groups called out innocent drinks because they said it wasn't really championing or doing right by by the planet because of their their plastic brands i think are losing the way and the way they can get back is just to go back to what they're again what's their objectives what are they trying to do look at their values and make sure those values are back within the business strategy are back within the the heart of the brand and then it's it's really you know re-looking at themselves um and it's a shame because these brands have done so well um next question how would an organisation choose the best fit for CSR suppose that's deciding what your five key points are how would they decide in that uh the organisation has to come together so you need uh a conversation everyone has to be part of that conversation you can't just be the CEO saying this is what it is it's got to be joint it's got to be a big pow wow with everyone everyone feeds in and finds out what their core values are uh so everyone can buy into it everyone can feel you know this is something that they believe in something they trust in and then you create your values that's the first starting point is that everyone is involved in that conversation right and then in the sort of a similar link question someone has is the question that they have in their mind is that who should be more accountable and the one to initiate CSR if it's not at all a practice in an organisation um that's a really good question if you want to drive corporate social responsibility then and it's not coming from the top then you as employees you know you need to you need to get the buy-in from your other colleagues from your other departments and take your corporate social responsibility agenda to management and get them to see the business benefits that's you know CEOs um they always want to want to know what's the ROI well the ROI is when you're doing corporate social responsibility well you're spending less on your PR you're spending less on any kind of crisis management you're retaining staff you're attracting better talent and these kinds of companies are far more profitable as well they also attract investors so there's a lot of business reasons why CEOs should be doing corporate social responsibility and should really be embedding that into the business strategy and sometimes CEOs you know need a bit of a a wake-up call sometimes um and also need to understand you know going back to that Zeno group survey 77% of consumers want to see CEOs walk their talk and you know live by the brand and if brands want to evolve if businesses want to endure then they have to really change their mindset otherwise they're going to be dinosaurs they're not going to be able to exist and we can see that now just when we're discussing or looking at well-being of employees those brands and organisations that are not committed to hybrid working they they will struggle yes yeah I think we've seen that quite a few organisations I mean next question is will corporate sponsorship fade away as companies turn to do their own CSR? Well that's a really good question and you know companies that are that have really strong CSR and if they are being bought by another organisation well first of all you find that these companies that are really strong in their corporate social responsibility don't just compromise and they don't just sell out if they happen to be in bed with a with a partner that isn't CSR led those companies will struggle because A they will they will not keep the talent in the in the in the organisation they've acquired because those employees are there for for a reason they believe in that brand and that brand won't stay on top of its game because you're changing the whole dynamic that brand is successful that this company whatever company buys it is because of its CSR is because it's purpose led is because it's ethical if they try to change that they're changing the whole chemistry and therefore the DNA of that company won't exist anymore and sometimes what you do find and I can't think of any I can't think of an example but I have read when companies have been bought by saying ugly non CSR company they've actually influenced the company you know the holding company and that company has changed its mindset so I don't know if that kind of answers it right um so when you're saying about the ethos of company somebody's asking a question about a new brand how can they start off by being ethical in the current climate and with the current technology for messaging I mean for a new brand you've got a whole new exercise book um you know you're not is A to find your niche what is your what is your thing what's your the purpose of your business and what drives your passion and then what what is the one thing one commitment you want to make for the planet and just do that one thing really well um and it will just flow and it's a bit like Glossier it decided it was going to be an ethical sustainable makeup brand from start to finish from its packaging from its messaging from it from the brand being diverse and inclusive and that's how it started it started really small but it was committed to its ethical and sustainable products and from that it grew and and its social media just grew from that so if you're a new brand just think of what the purpose is that you want to be what's the objective that you want to achieve and what is it that you drives you as a business what's your passion and then those two things will work together it's nothing complicated and it doesn't have to be four values it can just be the one value but do that one value really really well okay um the next question is how how could we looking in and see if a company is doing real CSR brands that are doing doing corporate social responsibility really honestly really ethically they'll be talking about it on their website because they are they want to talk about all the good things they're doing and they want to share what they're doing so for example Keoni that I mentioned in in my presentation you go on to their website it's so easy to find out about the brand and what they're doing so there are ways do do your research go on to the website and I if I can't remember this platform but when you type in the brand it will tell you what their green listing is and also now you know lots of organisations um you can go on and see the advertising the authority I think they've got a list of what what kind of green companies are there what kind of green brands there are and there are lots of experts in this field as well ethical consumer magazine is a really good one they're doing lots of they do lots of lists um regularly you know the best denim brands the best makeup brands the best food brands there's a lot out there you just have to do a little bit of google research right okay and the next question is I suppose when we're looking at put this in the context of them global brands that we have now and the the early slide that you showed about the statistic about more people have access to digital or a mobile phone then have to a toilet are the you know this is a global concept are there certain countries around the world that are doing better on this issue or are the people you know who are less fortunate do they are they still focused on CSR as well has that message spread around the world in different cultures yeah interestingly and that's a really good question um India is the first country in the world to have implemented a CSR law in 2014 um and that with this law all companies in India whether they're national or multi nationals um have to give 2% of their profit to a not for profit or a foundation and to actually improve a low wherever they're operating improve the local community or give it to something which is going to uplift vulnerable people in society so India's made big strides on that and I think here in the west we always think we've got a lot to teach the east but I think we can learn a lot from countries like India also France has done some fantastic work France is the first country in Europe in the western world well actually it's the first country in the world I should go as far as saying that created um in last year uh to say that any brands that were greenwashing they could be fined uh and so from that french law we now have um we now have the advertising agency authority here um now looking at those kinds of powers but France has done a lot in this with regards to corporate social responsibility but India is the first country in the world to have a mandatory CSR law interesting um so I think we've got time for one final question um and as we've got a lot of majority of students um viewers who are listening to this um presentation will be studying members or studying at university do you think that in future business management courses and studies will start to incorporate CSR and sustainability or are they doing it already I mean I know we've just mentioned our new qualification at CIM but have you seen this happening um in a wider context yes and um there are business courses around the world that have now we are teaching corporate social responsibility and making sure the next generation of business leaders or people going out in the workforce have an understanding about corporate social responsibility also very interestingly what came out of COP26 last year and Glasgow is that businesses governments around the world are recognising that businesses have a really important role to play with regards to sustainability and climate change and they are making sure that businesses are part of that around the table and are part of of that agenda so yeah business courses are adapting they they realise they need to have a change of mindsets and now also to with regards to marketing and public relations universities are talking about sustainability they're talking about sustainable comms they're talking about corporate social responsibilities being you know before it wasn't given any respect now it's it's an element that is very much part of business management excellent that's very thanks Sungita um so we've had some really good questions there from our viewers and it's a shame we've run out of time and couldn't get through more of the questions that have come in but thank you very much for answering the ones that you did some really great advice and hopefully some useful tips that our viewers can take away so sadly that's all we have time we have for our webinar this evening I'd like to say a big thank you to Sungita for her excellent presentation and we do hope that you found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be back with our next marketing club webinar the values economy how to deliver purpose driven service for sustained performance which will be delivered by Alan Williams on Wednesday the 23rd of March you'll find further details listed on the events page on the website where you can also register for the session so on behalf of CIM that just leaves me to thank Sungita once again for a fantastic presentation and to say thank you to you for joining us today we hope you've enjoyed the session and we look forward to welcoming you again to our webinars in the future take care everybody goodbye