 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE Conversation, a little bit of a break from the road. We'd like to have guests come into the Palo Alto studio and have a little bit calmer conversation without all the buzz of the show. And we're excited to have a return guest. She hasn't been on for like two and a half years, which I find extremely hard to believe, it's been too long. Marie Hatar, she's the CMO of Keysight Technologies. We're great to see you. Wonderful to see you again. Yeah, so last time we had you on, I had to look it up, it was October 2016 and you were the CMO of Ixia, which is a little bit different, but really not that different. Tell us how you got from Ixia to Keysight. So Keysight Technologies acquired Ixia and I was fortunate enough to be chosen to be the CMO for Keysight Technologies. So it was a great evolution, both for me personally and professionally. Right, and very kind of similar product and solutions portfolio, bigger obviously than what you were doing at Ixia, but for people that aren't familiar with Keysight, give them kind of the quick overview. Sure, so Ixia served two audiences. They really targeted the QA engineer, as well as the IT infrastructure. And Keysight actually targets, I would say, the design engineer, the manufacturing engineer. Part of the Ixia business, which is very closely aligned to Keysight, is in the test and measurement space. So Keysight Technologies really help any electrical engineer develop and innovate and bring products to market that basically have an electric signal going through them. What Keysight delivers are things like soloscopes, network analyzers, power supplies, signal generators, and anything in terms of the test and measurement of design of electronics. So you guys, and the company's been around for a while, it's four billion in revenue, so you guys are basically testing and measuring pretty much everything, right? As you say, as an electronic signal go through it. We have a broad area that we cover and we also have a very, very long history in terms of being in this space. Our heritage started off as the original Hewlett Packard, evolved into Agilent, and Keysight was spent out about four or five years ago as an independent company. And we're doing really well in terms of raising our awareness and visibility of a new name because anytime you change names you have to re-educate the market. Hey, this is us. You've worked with us for a very long time and we continue to be leaders in this space. Right, good opportunity for you though, right? That's what they get good CMOs for. I love marketing, so it's great. So the cool thing is not only are you working with stuff that's shipping today, but you guys have good visibility into the future. And as we talk about all the time, there's some really massive megatrends that are coming down the pike that would love to kind of get your thoughts off. One of them is 5G and World Congress was just a couple of weeks ago. I think you were also at RSA. 5G has been getting talked about for a while, but it's coming and we see more and more parts. I think there's actually been a couple of handsets delivered. You probably know way more than I and Tower, so I wonder if you can explain to people a little bit about 5G, when you think about 5G and the potential, because I don't think many people know much beyond kind of the buzzword, that it's bigger, faster, stronger, but it's a pretty significant leap over the current LTE. It's truly a revolutionary and disruptive technology, and it enables so much more than what's available today, which has really been what I would call incremental evolution. With 5G, it's truly transformative because in addition to faster, it is going into spectrum that was traditionally reserved for defense organizations getting into a millimeter wave, so it really changes the technology that we're all used to with the big cell towers. 5G uses much smaller antennas and multiple antennas that actually sit on buildings. In terms of because you're using millimeter wave, it doesn't travel as long distances as what you have with LTE, which is sub six gigahertz. That's all on the technology front. What's really amazing about 5G is it has capabilities such as ultra low latency, and it's supposed to consume a lot less power, so you could almost see it as really disrupting and transforming everything and how we think about everything, whether it's enabling the car of the future and autonomous driving, because now all of a sudden, your car can actually communicate to everything with vehicle to everything communication or cellular vehicle to everything communication. You can think about it as a way that it's transforming IoT and the evolution of everything that's happening in IoT. So yes, it's bigger, faster, better, much more reliable, much more lower latency, and for those of us who care a lot about sustainability, it's supposed to also deliver much lower power consumption. Right, just interesting, right? Because LTE was, I think, kind of the first step into real data space and people figured out that we're using our phones for a lot more than talk. In fact, the data transmission rates are way higher than the voice, of course, all voice over IP and people watch football on their TVs or on their screens, which is unimaginable a couple of years ago, but in 5G, now that's really not necessarily optimized for, but really an enabler for, as you said, IoT and kind of this next level of machine to machine communication. It's not just me texting you with the data and put more of these super high-fast, really require low latency applications in this IoT and the industrial IoT world that everybody's so psyched about. It can't happen without this type of technology. It really can't, I mean the whole industry 4.0, anything in terms of manufacturing and robotics and real-time communication that can happen in that, if you think about a lot of the cars that are out there, if you look at Tesla, they're doing ongoing updates and ongoing communications with all their cars all the time, and so something like 5G enables even a higher degree of communication and understanding of what's going on with the vehicle and as you get into more of autonomous vehicles, understanding what all the sensors and the radar in the car is seeing, basically communicating that to what's happening with edge computing, having all of that processing happen there and being able to send that back and be able to adapt to the environments that are going to be pretty significant and revolutionary. I mean I think in every area, this new technology in some ways, just in terms of what it opens up, will enable us to think of really transformative and disruptive ways of how we do things and it does require going along for the ride, investing early, understanding what it means and I would say it crosses so many vertical industries. We definitely have to have lunch with you and Sandra Rivera from Intel, it would be a really, really fun lunch, but one of the things you touched on with it, I don't think people really appreciate is this kind of new age of connected device and clearly Tesla's an easy example, right? It checks in every night, but as we see more and more devices being connected kind of back to the mothership and the ability for a maker of something to actually know now how are people using it? It's not just I build it, I ship it to my distributor and maybe I'll get a few back every now and then and we can take it apart and see how people use it, but just the whole kind of product management life cycle when you've got connected devices that actually report home into how they're actually being used and how people are using them is such a transformational, both relationship between the user and the device but now the device back to the manufacturer that they never, never used to have before. Yeah and it has both kind of technological as well as I would say society oriented ramifications. If you think about in the Tesla example, you're effectively saying, hey, it's okay for Tesla to constantly talk to my car. A lot of times we're used to the model of once I buy something, it's mine. You know, this is my device, not something that's part of your ongoing network, so to speak. And so with a lot of these evolutions that are going on, there's going to be both a capability shift in terms of what we can enable, but there's also going to come with it somewhat of a society shift of what's now accessed about you. So for example, with IoT, if you choose to move towards this concept of body area networks and having sensors all over you or potentially even embedded in you, how that is being leveraged to provide you information. How do you protect that from a security standpoint from someone tapping into that to abuse that information? So a lot of those topics were really big topics at Mobile World Congress in terms of the coming of 5G and just even kind of the completion of the standard because it's not yet fully ratified yet. So there's ongoing evolutions in that. There's obviously a lot of hype out there on this. We are very much involved with the whole ecosystem that's involved in 5G all the way from chipsets to the devices, to the networks that carry them, sort of looking at the whole end to end to the antennas, you name it, to the base stations. We're involved in that whole ecosystem. And as a key site, we actually have to get in really early because all of those innovators are depending on our technology to test and validate that it will perform as expected. Because you're working with all those pieces of electronics in that whole system. Well Mobile World Congress is interesting. Last week or the week before was RSA. And a lot of the things you're talking about, I would argue are probably going to be more important on the RSA type of kind of view of the world versus the Mobile World Congress, assuming you get everything to work, which I'm sure everybody will. But kind of the legal ramifications and the moral ramifications and the data privacy ramifications when there is so many more connected devices. And as you said, body area network right now, it's my heart rate. I went to an interesting Wall Street Journal conference where people can sell back their 23 and me genomic data back into a pool for researchers who are looking for certain profiles so they can do their clinical trials. And that's basically an electronic representation of literally who you are. And so again, I think you touch on a lot of really important points. That it's the security and data privacy and the moral issues around how that's used, treated, stored, protected are going to be the bigger issues as we just get more and more of these things becoming really software and data. Which we see in the products. Test is a lot more software than it is a car and that's why they can do updates all the time and keep updating the features. Well, even in our business, we're becoming much more of a software oriented business in terms of our test and measurement and how we look at the whole design workflow end to end. So in many ways, everything is becoming software. Just because if you think about this concept of the digitization that's going on of everything, there's a lot of discussions about this concept of digital twins where there's enough information derived from something physical that you can essentially replicate the digital twin and you can do the simulations and in what you're describing basically you could potentially have it model and represent whether it's a robotic process or a car process and anticipate, hey, this is time when this is going to wear down. This is what I'm seeing out there and this almost becomes predictive in terms of what's going on in the real world. So it's really exciting stuff and it's wonderful to be at the cusp of this. Going to RSA, I agree with you. All of those topics were front and center. Very important to understand and have the visibility in terms of a lot of these 5G networks. There's so much throughput going in. How do you, let's say you're a service provider and you want to offer this service. How do you actually measure and have visibility in terms of really that is the service that you're offering? So there's a lot of discussion in terms of providing that visibility and that security in terms of, for those types of customers. Right, it's funny, we've done a lot of stuff with GE and back with the software group with Bill Rue and team and they've talked about, GE talks about digital twins a lot in the context of the industrial products that they build whether it's a turbine engine or whatever to the point that you said you can do testing and you can do maintenance scheduling and all this other stuff. What was weird at the Wall Street Journal conference is they're talking about digital twins for people. Your digital twins, so now I can test how would you respond to certain drug treatments? How might you respond to a different diet regime? How might you respond differently to a different exercise regime? And I never kind of heard that digital twin concept applied to a person and it's really interesting times. But before I let you go, I imagine your business has changed quite a bit as the percentage of makeup of all these devices has shifted from dedicated purpose-built hardware which is probably relatively easy to test to hardware platforms that are supporting a larger and increasing amount of software that actually drive the functionality. Must be good for your business because I'm sure the testing has got to be much more complex, not to mention people are pushing updates all of the time. Really different model than just testing a box. Well it has changed and actually what's, you know, when I talk to our customers, their goal is to innovate and bring their products to market faster and as a company that supports them, our goal is to accelerate their innovation and a lot of times it's how do you share the information as it's going from the design engineer to the quality and test to then go to manufacturing because a designer will build his product and then he'll send it off and say, okay, I'm kind of done. How do you then make sure that at every cog of the wheel you're basically able to share back what his expectation were when he was building it in a CAD system versus what they're actually seeing when they test the real-life product versus what they actually see when they're manufacturing and applying the same tests. So having that consistent software, which at Keysight we call Pathwave, it really allows that acceleration and the sharing across all of those different groups so that you can optimize the flow, so to speak, of your design. The other exciting part is you're right, there's just so much innovation and evolution in terms of the areas that we participate in because all of these technologies are changing. We talked about sort of the autonomous vehicle just as important as the electric vehicle and the growth in terms of how do you manufacture and test batteries in a scale that's gonna be required to keep up with the demand because traditional methods, it takes a long time to test a battery to make sure it's available and can be used. And we have some really innovative technology that allows us to expedite and accelerate that testing. So customers of ours like BMW are leveraging this technology so that they can accelerate their battery production, testing, and deployment. Well, we'll have to have you back another time. We're out of time to just, I'm so excited by the whole kind of change in mobility which is driven by really high capacity, inexpensive batteries, and these really powerful little brushless motors and as those things kind of permeate and all these different form factors, thankfully driven by the high volume car manufacturers since it's the same little cells that run a lot of these things, it's pretty cool space. But we can't get deep into that this time. We'll have to save it all for next time. So hopefully it won't be another two and a half years. I hope not. All right, Marie. Well, thanks for stopping by and really appreciate catching up. Thanks a lot, Jeff. Good to see you. All right, she's Marie. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our CUBE studios in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. See you next time.