Newsday - Oracle Acquires Cerner, Broward Health Breach, and Cybersecurity Possibilities

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Drex DeFord: Today modern cybersecurity programs have to be built around speed and finding the bad guys fast and kicking them out fast and then sealing up the hole that they came in through. You can build taller castle walls and wider deeper moats. That's sort of an old version of cybersecurity, and it's certainly expected that you're still going to do that. But modern cybersecurity is about speed. And finding and killing off the bad guys quick.

And today is one of my favorite guests. He's been doing this for a couple of years, Drex DeFord with CrowdStrike. Drex how's it going?

Bill Russell: Yes we do. We do a lot of cannabis talk on this show with us. That's our primary topic. No John is, John's great. He's going to kick off our keynote show. We're trying to elevate that show. Just 52 guests this year on the keynote show.

Give us a little, little background on yourself and what's going on to CrowdStrike?

But modern cybersecurity is about speed. And finding and killing off the bad guys quick. And that's really what CrowdStrike's all about. We've stopped breaches.

Bill Russell: Let me ask you this. What should my expectation be of speed? One of the things I talked about last week on the today show was that we need real time, right?

And so you have about two hours. And so through one of our products called Falcon Complete. I feel like I'm totally doing a commercial here, but

Bill Russell: It's it's going to be relevant in a minute. By the way, for everybody who's tuning in to say, are they going to talk about the Cerner acquisition? Yes. We're going to talk about Cerner acquisition, but, but go ahead. We're going to start with a cybersecurity.

So through a product that we have called Complete, where we actually deploy our products, but we actually run them for you too. We have something called 1 10 60. And what we can do with that product is that our SOC looking at all of those feeds can see something suspicious within about a minute. And that's usually the ML identifying there's something. Within about a minute.

If you can. You're good. You can do this 24 7 365. You're good. But that's a real hard model for healthcare organizations to build and run on their own.

Drex DeFord: Found the first one in four days and not eight months.

Bill Russell: Are we layering technologies here? I mean, so, so you're just looking at the end point and finding that thing that's happening, but don't we have technologies on the network that's looking for the exfiltration and the odd movement of data.

That kept the, stopped the bleeding, if you will, from Cerner. I mean, they're just, every time I turned around, it was this organizations moving from Cerner to Epic. So that, that was happening on an ongoing basis. As the sisters used to say no money, no mission. And if Cerner kept losing business, then yes.

Drex DeFord: If we're going to rip and replace that's the direction that they go usually.

But in moving into Cerner, they move into it in big way. What do you think Oracle's play is here? What are they looking to do with this?

Bill Russell: Oh my gosh. The challenges are, are amazing. So the biggest challenge being they're a publicly traded company. So this whole thing is going to transpire right in front of us on a quarterly basis. We're going to, we're going to see.

Drex DeFord: Those will be interesting earning calls, right?

Your, your investors get get antsy and it gets difficult for CEOs who don't deliver numbers on a quarterly basis. And so one of the advantages that Epic has over everybody else. Epic's able to take a 50 year view as a private. And And I think it's one of the things that they've really benefited from.

Drex DeFord: I don't think it's 34 million. Sounds low.

And we're going to move this onto our books. This is healthcare revenue. Therefore we intend to retain this number of clients. We're going to grow the government business because they have these government contracts. I think one of the risks is out clauses. I'm sure the government contracts have out clauses.

They have to shore up those things. And clearly, that's also being rolled out in the public eye and it gets dinged every rollout.

Bill Russell: And maybe Oracle is looking at it, going look, Cerner had no idea what they're doing with the government.

They don't have to worry about an out clause. So yeah, they increase their government contract space. They increase their cloud space. One of Oracle's tactics, which is not not good, and I think other players do this, so I'm not pointing them out specifically, but they tend to get very creative on their licensing.

And so there's that I don't know. It just doesn't feel good as a client to get wrapped up into that kind of a situation. And I think a lot of folks kind of didn't even know what they were getting into. And we're starting to figure a lot of that out now and I wonder how that's going to play in the Cerner Oracle relationship too.

You have to make Cerner clients so much better with their data than Epic clients. And by the way, I think this is doable. I don't think anybody's won that the data analytics and machine learning and AI side of this. And I think that's an area where Oracle can really help Cerner.

Drex DeFord: I like that. The point being things like staff shortages and the what are real problems in healthcare that that's where they focus their energy.

Bill Russell: So you'd let me take over Oracle as their CEO? I wouldn't be

Drex DeFord: No I'm not sure I'd go there.

Bill Russell: I wouldn't go there either. There are jobs I've taken in my career where I didn't really have the credentials, but I knew I could grow into it. I don't think I could grow into that one. That's a little little beyond my pay grade.

Bill Russell: Yeah, I know what I can do now. I know what I can't do. I can be an advisor to Oracle around healthcare, but that's really probably as far as I can.

Drex DeFord: If they're listening, you're looking, you're looking for that gig too.

And the more data you get, the smarter it gets. I think everyone's starting to realize that the battle here in healthcare is for turning the data that we have into solutions that we need better outcomes, better equity better security and those kinds of things, because we are a wash with data and not really sure we know what to do with it all the time.

Drex DeFord: I wonder how that looks long term, right? When it comes to then software maintenance and service and support. Because now you've put 20 different chips in your product and you have a different software package for each one of those chips. That seems like a much more onerous ... work.

I do agree with you, obviously we want to reduce the complexity as much as possible, but the companies that are able to deal with the complexity, I mean, you're talking about a multi million, if not billion dollar opportunity for Tesla. Because they can just get cars out there when no one else can.

Drex DeFord: Modifications. Modification, modifying cots products and those kinds of things. Yeah.

Bill Russell: But I think now we're getting to the point of there's there's going to be an advantage in being able to take your digital front door and constantly massaging it to be a better experience for your end users and those kinds of things.

I'm like, all right. What's your plan after that release date? And they just look at me like, Well, it's just, it's going to work.

Bill Russell: Yeah, no, I, I agree. I don't think, I don't think healthcare CEO's are all of a sudden going to go out and hire 20 developers and have them sit in the back room.

Those represent some opportunity for health systems. Maybe we don't have to have full blown coders anymore. Maybe it's more high-end configurators who are building applications on these low-code no-code environments.

But I think those times are largely gone. You may have to go to Oklahoma once a month for a couple of days. Maybe not even during the pandemic, you may not even have to do that. So definitely the market is with the individuals, with the talent now. The companies are going to have to pay whatever they can pay. Especially like in our world, cybersecurity, there's just a massive shortage of people.

Bill Russell: All right. Let me ask you this. Conferences. We're not that far off from conference season are we, I mean, JP Morgan just went virtual attending that on Monday, Tuesday, right here from this chair.

Drex DeFord: Consumer electronics show, a bunch of people pulled out, but it's still went on.

Bill Russell: Yeah. So, what are your thoughts? I think we have Vive in early March and we have HIMSS almost immediately after that. So they're both in state of Florida where I live.

Bill Russell: It's less than eight weeks away.

Drex DeFord: Yeah. I mean, I think we're right. We're pretty close to eight weeks away. And I think a month ago we intended, two months ago, I think we were like, oh yeah, of course we're going.

Bill Russell: What's interesting is the doctor. I mean, there are still deaths because there's Omicron and they're saying that the prevalence is Omicron right now but Delta is still out there and it's still deadly. Omicron is less deadly.

They're also expecting different variants this year. So they're like this could be just a January thing potentially or depending on where you live. Like if you started spiking in January 1st, you could see at the end of January that your spike is coming down.

I'm like, that's a great question. And I went out and found out what they were. I said this, and I was actually kind of surprised at what they were Drex. It's five days. quarantine. Don't have to test to come out. But you can come out of quarantine after five days if you wear your mask for five days. I haven't talked to a doctor about that yet, but that was kind of a surprising.

Bill Russell: It's all new. And people are like, well, this is different than the last one. I'm like, it's a different variant. It's a different disease. There are years where the flu is wildly contagious and deadly and there's years where the flu is nothing. And I think we're seeing that.

Bill Russell: On this show, we rarely talk about this stuff but this is the topic that a lot of people are talking about. And there, in the context of conferences, if you were holding a conference in early March, would you be putting plans together right now for going virtual?

Or would you essentially say now we're doing it either way? Cause it's in Miami, whoever shows shows.

So I wouldn't be betting. I wouldn't be putting all my chips on, come to Miami or don't come to Miami. If you don't come to Miami you're not going to be at the conference feels a little shortsighted.

Drex DeFord: Protocols for HIMSS, have they published?

Bill Russell: I would imagine. Yeah, it costs some money for them to stand that up. They brought in a company, a traveling nurses who do testing cost them some money, but I don't think it's exorbitant the amount of money it costs.

Drex DeFord: Still got to get there.

I mean, it was probably a great content wise and those kinds of things but there wasn't that many people there. And you're talking about a conference that went from 40,000 to maybe 8,000 onsite. That's a big blow financially. That's the second year. If you have a third year of similar performance. I would think you're more prone to say, look whatever we have to do to get people here, let's give them free tickets to Disneyworld. I don't know.

Drex DeFord: Omicron specifically, right. You're talking. It seems to just be amazingly transmissable.

Bill Russell: Yeah. So we're guessing just like everybody else is. I think being able to look at this in hindsight will give us a lot more information, but looking at it forward is almost a fool's errand. Trying to figure out what Miami and Orlando are going to be like.

Drex DeFord: I'm tentatively attending. Oh, we'll see. As things unfold, we'll see how it goes but. My intention to be able to

Bill Russell: That's two full weeks, you're going to be.

Bill Russell: Yeah. I will probably attend both. First of all, it's a drive. And by the way, if you don't want to fly all the way back to Seattle and then come back there, feel free to give me a call. Come over here. We'll hang out.

Bill Russell: Drex, thank you as always for coming on the show. And I look forward to potentially seeing you at some of these conferences.

Drex DeFord: Yeah, my pleasure. I'm always happy to be on. It's always a good time. We always seem to have fun doing this. And I look forward to hopefully seeing you sometime soon.