 From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, on the ground, with Accenture Labs 30th anniversary celebration. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here for a special on the ground presentation or Accenture Labs 30th year celebration of being in business at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, our next guest is Yvonne Wasnar, who's the CEO of Airwave. Good to see you, CUBE alumni. Welcome back. Thank you so much. So you're an integral executive at this event here. You've worked at VMware, you've worked at New Relic, you're now at Airware. What do you guys do? First, explain what Airware is, because this is fascinating. Yeah, yeah, Airware is the most fun and impactful company on the planet. I'm a bit biased, but fundamentally, I explain it as commercial drone software analytics. And the reason I say that is, commercial drone is important, because it's not just hobbyists, it's businesses using drones to collect data. But ultimately, the important part is, what do you do with the data? And we provide cloud-based software analytics, machine learning, AI to derive business insights from what they collect. And drones are very practical other than my kids loving them for the GoPro on it. But you can go, instead of saying, go drive out and check that meter, or go out and take those trash out of the power lines, there's all kinds of applications that drones could do with not only tactical, but also getting data, visual data. So what is that looking like these days? Because it sounds very magical and fantasy-like. What are some of the applications? It's a great question, and I want to start with, what are some of the changes that have enabled drones to go from personal use to commercial use? First thing's the technology. And so if you think about the drones, it's kind of like the cell phones 10 years ago, the iPhone came out, it didn't do that much compared to today, but the advancement has been amazing. So we actually had an innovator, one of our customers, duct tape a cell phone to the bottom of a drone, like four or five years ago, to get the visual imagery that he needed to drive insights. Now you can just buy from DJI or Sensefly really powerful drones. So you're seeing a huge uptake in what drones can do. And then on the other side, you're seeing the ability with cloud-based analytics to get insights in things such as, think about it, insurance, rooftop inspection. You don't have to climb a two-story steep on a ladder. You can fly a drone up less time, more safe, and you get the historical information. Mining and quarrying, we do a lot in that space. Sock pile measurement. It's really fascinating, all the things you can do. It's almost, what do you not do? So I've been fascinated with drones ever since two years ago when Amazon had that big hype announcement where packages will be delivered to your home. And everyone can relate to that because they know Amazon delivers packages. But who's going to deliver, how does that work? Is there a namespace for airspace? That's a hard compute challenge. So how are you guys dealing with the spatial imagery aspect of it, because this is fascinating, because a new set of companies are redefining what was an old, established, boring, static industry. Uber remaps New York City every five weeks, or some number. Well, I was going to say, what's important is you have the geospatial coordinates. And so what we do is to actually align the images we take to geospatially where they are. We use GCPs to do that. And then we know exactly to the pinpoint how to stitch images together, how to relate images over time. So actually, that piece is quite easy. The harder part is when you're doing like large queries or commercial inspections, just the volume of data you're collecting and being thoughtful on how you can upload that process that that's the more interesting and challenging part. And certainly data ingestion's huge. So given that, I got to ask you the Internet of Things question. Internet of Things, the intelligent edge. Drones are moving, so they're real time. They're going to the edge of the network. They are the network and they're pushing the edge out. How are you looking at the IoT? What's your perspective of the current IoT landscape? Intelligent, dumb, not yet defined, not even at the school yet. This is a big topic. Microsoft talking about it. We've been talking about it on our research side on intelligent edge. Yeah, I think we are just on the cusp of what is possible. And to me, I think about the true power being and marrying that visual data that comes from the drone with the other Internet of Things data. So for example, if you think about in the aggregate space and in queries and mining where we play a lot, you have a lot of big equipment that has a tremendous number of sensors around fuel efficiency and what's going on with the machine. You can map that against the haul roads that they're driving and other elements that you can see from the sky. You can start to redesign your roads. You start to get huge fuel efficiencies and other benefits. So to me, the magic is really in marrying the different data sources, which is now becoming more possible as like broader technologies in the cloud and analytics evolve. So I got to ask you some technical kind of high level questions. You don't have to go deep under the hood. But because you worked at VMware, you know the Federation, which is EMC. You guys are helping the storage guys out big time because there's a lot of data coming in. So two questions. How do you move all that big data, big fat data through little pipes called the airwaves into the storage? What's the strategy? Is there any kind of emerging trends you see with respect to architecture? Yeah, so we actually spent a lot of time thinking about how you pull the huge, vast amounts of data and get it into the cloud. I'm not going to give away all our secrets there, but what I will fundamentally say is we are big users of the cloud. So we're taking advantage of somebody else building up big data centers and their ongoing reduction in costs. Storage only gets cheaper and cheaper. And so for us, what we're really focused on is the processing power and what you can do in the clouds you put your data. So cloud helps you? Totally, yeah, yeah. What would life be like without the cloud? Would you be in business? It would be really hard. And it'd be hard on two fronts. One, because it takes a lot to build and scale up your own data centers as a company today, particularly as a startup. But I think even more importantly, the ability to do training of these AI algorithms on large data sets, you want to be able to look across data sets and that's most easily done and aggregated in the cloud. So you guys are cloud native? Yes. So what's your advice to CIOs as they look at their hybrid or private cloud or on-premise IT, that's not even private cloud? These guys are trying to transform fast, essential labs and others are helping them. What does the CIO have to do to get to the benefits of being that agile? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And when I was at New Relic, I was a CIO, so I have a little bit of experience with this. What I would say is it is hard and I feel the pain. You have a lot to do to run the day-to-day business. But ultimately, I think being really strategic and carving out the time and the big initiatives. And fundamentally, it comes down to all your net new stuff should be in the cloud. The stuff that's really critical that's on-prem that you can convert, you should do it and the rest you got to get rid of. You can't be held back by legacy because it will only prevent you from innovating and somebody else will have somebody else. And do you see CIOs ultimately going to an operating model that looks like cloud even though it might be on-prem? It does, particularly some of the larger companies and for certain applications where you have to have, for whatever reason, data within the company. But it will be more utility-based. It will be more burst capacity. You'll see more sharing as the tools and monitoring gets better. So I got to get your take. So as AI comes down the pike, you're an analytics is a big part of your business. You understand analytics across your career. As jobs get automated away, we have a survey in market size that Wikibon just did that says that by 2025, $150 billion of non-differentiated IT labor is going to go away and shift to other high value activities. So automation is going to replace those non-differentiating jobs labor. That means some other things are going to happen. So you can almost connect to, doesn't say software, analytics, some sort of new model. How does a company do analytics? Because what are those new value creation? Like you started a company on drone trend, real application, analytics is a differentiator. How does a company use analytics to help them figure out a differentiating strategy for their future? So I think it's a couple of things. One is how do you use analytics and automation to do what you currently do better, faster, cheaper? The more interesting thing is what you were talking about is if machines are doing that for you, if software is doing that for you, you have more time to think about, well, what's that next set of more advanced analytics I might do? Or how might I translate into better customer service? Or what's that new business model? So I think rather than jobs going away, it's really kind of like in the banks. The ATM didn't get rid of the bank employees. It just gave them the ability to be personal advisors and take other backpacks. And they opened up more branches. Exactly. And it's more people. It's actually helped create jobs. Exactly. Kind of that fallacy kind of goes away. Okay, we got a little bit of time left. Do a quick commercial on what you guys are doing. I'll give a plug for AirWare. How many employees you guys have? What stage you're at? What are you guys looking to do? Your hiring? What do your customers look like? Who is your customer? Take a minute to talk about your company. Yeah, so like I said, AirWare is an amazing company. We're about six years old. We're a series C. We've got great investors and backers with Andreessen, Planners Perkins, John Chambers is on our board. We're about 100 people. We've got global operations, both in Emmaia and in the US. The beautiful city of Paris as well as San Francisco. So hard to beat that. And fundamentally what we're focused on is global enterprise, commercial drone software analytics. And I call out enterprise because part of the reason I ended up at AirWare is I spent 17 years at Accenture. I understand what it takes to sell into enterprise. I know what they're looking for in terms of security, in terms of scalability, deployment, ease of use. And so bringing that, not just fund innovative experiments and innovation departments, but scale deployments. And we predominantly focus on insurance and agriculture mining construction right now. But we're building a platform that can be leveraged across industries. And so the real value add is how we reassemble the components to quickly innovate for other industries as well. I know we got time to break here, but one final question. We're going to be at the Grace Hopper celebration this year for our fourth year as part of our Women in Tech celebration. With all the recent Silicon Valley scandals around women in tech, I got to ask you, you've been in the business for a long time. You know, you've seen a lot of stories. I'm not going to ask you to share any specifics. What is the future have to look like to get through this nod-hole of the generational shit that's having new generations coming on board? What kinds of norms and practices would you like to see? And any comment or color you can share on, what is the preferred outcome of the current situation? Yeah, so I deeply believe that for companies to be competitive, you have to be diverse in perspective skillset and your employee base. And that in this war for talent, if you're only going after a certain profile, you're going to lose. So I think the winning companies will diversify. I'm on the board at Harvey Mudd. He's done amazing work increasing the number of women in STEM. They had more than 50% of their computer science majors were female last year. So it's definitely doable. I think we all have a lot of unconscious bias. And fundamentally what's going to shift is having more role models and quite frankly, having more white male sponsors. I mean, John Chambers is a huge sponsor of mine and that makes a big difference. And including men in the conversation is a really important part of it. Yeah, 100%. My best sponsors have been men and that's what we need is that community to make a difference. Yvonne, thanks so much for sharing your insight and data here. Accenture Lab celebration, your role of Accenture, you working with them, you've worked with them. What's the take here? I'm super excited to be here. I was at Accenture for 17 years starting in 1990. So I'm old. And I got to grow up with the labs. Arthur Anderson, were they Accenture? Consulting at that point. It was Anderson Consulting. Anderson Consulting. I'm not old, it was Anderson Consulting. But I'd say the value of the labs is it's hard when you're a big enterprise company to reimagine the future. And so having places like Accenture Labs where you can see what the possible is and you have some of the experimenting with you is really powerful. And I got a good team of people, the cloud, really good timing to have a cloud operation too. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to be here. Yvonne, thanks so much. Cube coverage here at the Computer History Museum. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE on the ground for Accenture Labs 30 years. The next 30 years ahead of us. A lot of exciting things. AI, new workforce, great action happening. Drones. First of all, the drone racing league by the way is really popular in my household. We're going to have drones in the Cube with Cube coverage with drone cameras coming soon. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.