 Hey everyone, welcome to the Keeps special program series, Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host for the program, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to this special series, Dr. Tendu Yogurtzu joins us, the CTO of Precisely. Tendu, it's great to see you. It's been a while, but I'm glad that you're doing so well. Lisa, it's so great seeing you too, and thank you for having me. My pleasure. I want the audience to understand a little bit about you. Talk to me a little bit about you, about your role, and what are some of the great things that you're doing at Precisely. Of course, as CTO, my current role is driving the technology vision and innovation, and also coming up with expansion strategies for Precisely's future growth. Precisely, the leader in data integrity, we deliver data with trust, with maximum accuracy, consistency, and also with context. And as a CTO, keeping an eye on what's coming in the business space, what's coming up with the emerging challenges is really key for me. Prior to becoming CTO, I was general manager for the SingSort, the big data business. And previously, I had several engineering and R&D leadership roles. I also have a little bit of academia experience. I served as a part-time faculty in the computer science department in a university, and I am a person who is very tuned to giving back to my community. So I'm currently serving as an advisory board member in the same university, and I'm also serving as an advisory board member for a venture capital firm. And I take pride in being a dedicated advocate for STEM education and STEM education for women in particular, and girls in the underserved areas. You have such a great background, the breadth of your background, the experience that you have in the industry as well in academia is so impressive. I've known you a long time. I'd love the audience to get some recommendations from you. For those of the audience looking to grow and expand their careers in technology, what are some of the things that you'd experience that you would recommend people do? First, stay current. What is emerging today is going to be current very quickly, especially now we are seeing more change and change at the increased speed than ever. So keeping an eye on what's happening in the market. If you want to be marketable now, some of the things that I will say, we have shortage of skills with data science, data engineering, with security, cybersecurity with cloud, right? We are here talking about the cloud in particular. So there is a shortage of skills in the emerging technologies. AI, ML, there's a shortage of skills also in the retiring technologies. So we are in this like a spectrum of skills shortage. So stay tuned to what's coming up. That's one. And then the second piece is that the quicker you tie what you are doing to the goals of the business, whether that's revenue growth, whether that's customer retention or cost optimization, you are more likely to grow in your career. You have to be able to articulate what you are doing and how that brings value to business, to your boss, to your customers. So that becomes a important one. And then the third one is giving back. Do something for the human in technology while being a human in technology. Give back to your community, whether that's communities gender-based or whether it's your alumni, whether it's your community, social community in your neighborhood or in your country or ethnicity. Give back to your community. I think that's becoming really important. I think so too. I think that paying it forward is so critical. I'm sure that you have a long list of mentors and sponsors that have guided you along the way, giving back to the community, paying it forward. I think it's so important for others who might be a few years behind us or even maybe have been in tech for the same amount of time that are looking to grow and expand their career. Having those mentors and sponsors of women who've been through the trenches inspiring, it's so helpful and it really is something that we need to do from a diversity perspective alone, right? Correct, correct. And we have seen that, we have seen for example COVID impact in women in particular, diverse studies done by girls who caught an eccentric that showed that actually 50% of the women above age 35 were actually dropping out of the technology. And those numbers are scary. However, on the other side, we have also seen incredible amount of technology innovation during that time with cloud adoption increasing with the ability to actually work remotely if you are even living in not so secure areas, for example, that created more opportunities for women to come back to workforce as well. So we can turn the challenges to opportunities and watch out for those, I would say tipping points. I love that you bring up such a great point. There are, so the data doesn't lie, right? The data shows that there's a significant amount of churn for women in technology, but to your point, there are so many opportunities. You mentioned a minute ago, the skills gap. One of the things we talk about often on theCUBE and we're talking about cybersecurity, which is obviously it's a global risk for companies in every industry is that there's massive opportunity for people of any type to be able to grow their skills. So knowing that there's churn, but there's also so much opportunity for women in technology to climb the ladder is kind of exciting, I think. It is exciting. Talk to me a little bit about, I would love for the audience to understand some of your hands-on examples where you've really been successful helping organizations navigate digital transformation and their entry and success with cloud computing. What are some of those success stories that you're really proud of? Let me think about, first of all, what we are seeing is with the digital transformation in general, every single business, every single vertical is becoming a technology company. Tactical companies are becoming a technology company. Financial services are becoming a technology company and manufacturing is becoming a technology company. So every business is becoming technology-driven and data is the key. Data is the enabler for every single business. So when we think about the challenges, one of the examples that I give, a big challenge for our customers is I can't find the critical data. I can't access it. What are my critical data elements? Because I have so high volumes growing exponentially, what are the critical data elements that I should care and how do I access that? And we work precisely with 99 of Fortune 100. So we have 12,000 customers in over 100 countries, which means we have customers whose businesses are purely built on cloud, clean slate. We also have businesses who have very complex set of data platforms. They have financial services, insurance, for example, they have critical transactional workloads still running on mainframes, IBMI servers, SAP systems. So one of the challenges that we have, and I work with the key customers, is on how do we make data accessible for advanced analytics in the cloud? Cloud opens a ton of open source tools, AI, MS stack, lots of tools that actually the companies can leverage for that analytics, in addition to elasticity, in addition to easy to set up infrastructure. So how do we make sure the data can be actually available from these transactional systems from mainframes at the speed that the business requires? So it's not just accessing data at the speed the business requires. One of our insurance customers, they actually created this data marketplace on Amazon cloud. And the their challenge was to make sure they can bring the fresh data on a nightly basis initially, and which became actually half an hour, every half an hour. So the speed of the business requirements have changed over time. We work with them very closely, and also with the Amazon teams on enabling, bringing data and workloads from the mainframes and executing in the cloud. So that's one example. Another big challenge that we see is can I trust my data? And data integrity is more critical than ever. The quality of data actually, according to HBR, Harvard Business Review Survey, 47% of every new record of data has at least one critical data error. 47%. So imagine I was talking with the manufacturing organization a couple of weeks ago, and they were giving me an example. They have these three letter codes for parts and different chemicals they use in the manufacturing. And the single letter error caused a shutdown of the whole manufacturing line. So that kind of challenge, how do I ensure that I can actually have completeness of data, cleanness of data and consistency in that data? Moreover, govern that on a continuous basis becomes one of the use cases that we have customers. And in that particular case, actually we have them put a data governance framework and the data quality in their manufacturing line. It's becoming also critical for, for example, ESG environment, social and governance supply chain, monitoring the supply chain and assessing ESG metrics. We see that again. And then third one, last one, I will give an example because I think it's important, hybrid cloud becoming critical. Because there's a purest view for new companies, however, facilitating flexible deployment models and facilitating cloud and hybrid cloud is also where we really, we can help our customers. You brought up some amazingly critical points where it comes to data. You talked about, you know, a minute ago, every company in every industry has to become a technology company. You could also say every company across every industry has to become a data company. They have to become a software company. But to your point and what it sounds like precisely is really helping organizations to do is access the data, access data that has high integrity, data that is free of errors. Obviously that's business critical. You talked about the high percentage of errors that caused manufacturing shutdown. Businesses can't have that. That could potentially be life ending for an organization. So it sounds like what you're talking about data accessibility, data integrity, data governance and having all that all in real time is table stakes for businesses, whether it's your grocery store, your local coffee shop, a manufacturing company and e-commerce company. It's table stakes globally these days. It is and you made a very good point actually, Lisa, when you talked about the local coffee shop or the retail. One other interesting statistic is that almost 80% of every data has a location attribute. So when we talk about data integrity we no longer talk about just accuracy and consistency of data. We also talk about context, right? When you are going, for example, to a new town you are probably getting some reminders about where your favorite coffee shop is or what a telco company has an office in that particular town. Or if you're an insurance company and a hurricane is hitting Southern Florida then you want to know how the path of that hurricane is gonna impact your customers and predict the claims before they happen. Also understand the propensity of the potential customers that you don't yet have. So location and context, those additional attributes of demographics, visitations are creating actually more confident business insights. Absolutely and as the consumer we're becoming more and more demanding. We want to be able to transact things so easily whether it's in our personal life, at the grocery store, at that cafe or in our business life. So those demands from the customer are also really influencing the direction that companies need to go in. It's actually, I think it's quite exciting that the amount of personalization and the location data that you talked about that comes in there and really helps companies in every industry deliver these, the cloud can these amazing, unique personalized experiences that really drive business forward. We could talk about that all day long. I have no problem but I want to get in our final minutes to attend to you. What do you see as in your crystal ball as next for the cloud? How do you see your role as CTO evolving? For what we are seeing in the cloud I think we will start seeing more and more focus on sustainability, sustainable technologies and governance. Obviously cloud migrations, cloud modernizations are helping with that. And we are seeing many of our customers, they started actually assessing the ESG supply chain and reporting on metrics, whether it's the percentage of phase or energy consumption. Also on the social metrics, on diversity, age distribution and as well as compliance piece. So sustainability, governance, I think that will become one area. Second security, we talked about it, security and data privacy. I think we will see more and more investments around those, cyber security in particular and ethical data access and ethics is becoming a center to everything we are doing as we have those personalized experiences and have more opportunities in the cloud. And the third one is continued automation with AI, ML and more focus on automation because the cloud enables that at scale and the work that we need to do is two time intensive and two manual with the amount of data. Data is powering every business. So automation is going to be increased focus. How my role evolves with that? So I have this unique combination. I have been open to non-linear career paths throughout my growth. So I have an understanding of how to innovate and build products that solve real business problems. I also have an understanding of how to sell them, build partnerships. That's combined with the scale of growth, the hyper growth that we have observed in precisely 10 times growth within the last 10 years through a combination of organic innovation and acquisitions really requires the speed of change. So implementing change at scale as well as at speed. So taking those and bringing them to the next challenge is the evolution of my role. How do I bring those and tackle, keep an eye on what's coming as a challenge in the industry and how they apply those skills that I have developed throughout my career to that next challenge and evolve with it. Bring the innovation to data, to cloud and the next challenge that we are going to see. There's so much on the horizon. There are certainly challenges within technology, but there's so much opportunity. You've done such a great job highlighting your career path, the big impact that you're helping organizations make leveraging cloud and the opportunity that's there for the west of us to really get in there, get our hands dirty and solve problems. Tendu, I always love our conversations. It's been such a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us on the special program series today. Thank you, Lisa. And also thanks to AWS for the opportunity. Absolutely, this is brought to us by AWS. For Dr. Tendu, you're good too. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud. We thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon.