2022 007 Charlie Brooks and Michael Williams1
>>Hello, and welcome to the cube special presentation of unstoppable domains partner showcase. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure of web three, all around domains, non fungible tokens, and more two great guests. Charlie Brooks, with business development of ensemble domains, and Michael Williams, product leader and advisor with unstoppable doing gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube partner showcase with unstoppable domains. >>Thanks John. Excited to be here. So >>I love what you guys are doing. Congratulations on all your success. You guys are on the leading edge of what is a major infrastructure shift. Web three is being called, but people who have been doing this for a while, know that you see the blockchain, you see decentralization, you see immutability, all these future smart contracts. All the decentralized applications are now hitting the scene and NFTs are super hot as, as, as you can imagine, you guys are in the middle of it. So you guys are in, in, in the sweet spot of what I call the pragmatic pioneers. You guys are to building solutions that are making a difference like single sign-on. You have the login product, let's get into it. What is the path to I digital identity beyond the web, because we know what web identity is, but now that the web is kind of being abstracted away by this new web three layer, what is digital identity? >>Yeah, I can take that one. So I think what we're really seeing is this transition away from a purely physical identity where your digital life or where your, your online identity is really just a reflection of the, the parts of your physical identity, where you live, where you go to school, all of these things. And we're really seeing this world emerge where your online identity becomes much more of a primary. So if you have a way that you represent yourself in the online world, whether that's an Instagram account or TechTalk or email address or username, all of these things together make up your digital identity. So congrats. If you have any of those things, you already have one. >>Yeah. And we see that all the time with link tree people put their link tree out there and it's got the zillion handles. You're right. We all get up to Instagram and everyone's got like zillion identities. Is that a problem or an opportunity? >>I think it's just a reality. The fact that as our identities are spread across all of these different services and platforms that we use, the problem with something like link tree is that it is owned by link tree. You know, if I won the lottery purchased link tree and decided I wanted to change your personal website, John, I could easily do that. Moving to the kind of architecture that we have. And then if T architecture changes that significantly, it puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. >>You know, I do a lot of cube showcases with folks rent on my machine, learning and AI, and the number one conversation that they bring up. The number one issue is data. And they say when data is siloed and, and protected and owned, it is not optimized for machine learning. So I can almost imagine, as you bring NFTs to the digital identity, you mentioned you don't own your identity. If someone else is managing the service like link tree, this is, this is a cultural shift. This is an infrastructure software shift at the same time. Can you guys expand more about what you guys are doing with the NFT and ensemble domains with respect to that digital identity, because is that power shifting to the users now? And how does that compare to what's out there today? >>Sure. I think so. Our domains are NFTs, so they are ERC 7 21 tokens. And if you think about the past kind of web two identities are controlled by the platforms that we use, Twitter, Facebook, whatnot. There's a really a lack of data portability there. Our accounts and data live on their servers. They can be deleted at any time. So using an NFT to anchor your digital identity really gives you full control over your identity. You can't, it can't be deleted. It can't be revoked or edited or changed without your permission. And really, even better than information you store on your entity domain can be plugged into the services you use so that you never have to enter the same data twice. So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing domain. You're not going to a new site, kind of entering their ecosystem and providing all this information time and time again, and not really having a clear understanding of how your data is being used and where it's being stored. >>So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity and, and a non fungible token NFT is different than say a fungible tokens. So for the folks out there, that's trying to follow the bouncing ball. Michael, what's the difference between an NFT and a fungible token. And how does, and why is that important for identity? >>Yeah. My favorite metaphor here is baseball cards versus like dollar bills. So a dollar bill is fungible. If I have a dollar and then you have a dollar, we can trade dollars. And none of us is richer or poorer. If I have a babe Ruth and you have a Hank Aaron, and we swap baseball cards, like we have, we have changed something fundamental. So the, the important thing about NFT is, is that they are non fungible. So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, they are unique. They're independent, they're owned by each one of us. And then we can kind of swap them interchangeably. >>And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists, because it's like a property, it's a property issue, not so much absolutely changeable, a divisible kind of asset. >>It is a, it is ownership rights in digital >>Form. Yes. All right. So now let's get into what the, the identity piece. I think I find that interesting because if I have something that's an NFT, it's not fungible. It's unique to me. It's property, my property, my login, this sounds compelling. So how does log-in work with the NFT? Can you guys take us through that, that architecture, what does it do? How does it work? And what's the benefit? >>So the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain. So Michael dot crypto, for example, as the authentication piece of a, of a login session. So basically when I, when I go and I try to log in with my domain, I type in Michael dot crypto. I sign it with my wallet, which cryptographically proves that I am this human. This is me. I have the rights to log in. And then when I do so I have the ability to share certain parts of my identity information with the applications that I use. And so it really blends the best of the ease of use from web to have just a standard like login with Gmail SSL experience, with all of the security and privacy benefits of web three. >>How important is single sign-on because, I mean, right now people are used to like, seeing things like log with your kid hub handle or LinkedIn, or, you know, Google, apple. I mean, you're seeing people offering login. Okay. What's the difference here from those solutions and why is it make sense for the user? >>Sure. Yeah. The big differences, what we're building is really user first. So if you think about traditional SSOs, you are the product. When you use their product, they're selling your data and, you know, they're tracking everything you do logging in with unstoppable handles, not only authentication, but data sharing as well. So when you log in a domain or owner can choose to share aspects of their online identity, such as first name, preferred language profile, picture location. So this is a user controlled way of using a sign-on, where they are permissioning, these different pieces of their identity. And really apps can use this information to enable new experiences, such as for example, website might automatically enable high contrast mode for someone visually impaired. It could, pre-populate your friends from a decentralized social graph. So what we're doing is taking the best parts of web to SSL and combining them with the best parts of web three. >>So no more losing your password entering in the same data, hundreds of times, you know, depending on other services, keep your information safe. Logging with unstoppable really puts you in complete control of your data. And, you know, a big part of that is you're not going to have 80 plus usernames and passwords anymore. You know, we have these tools like password managers that exist to kind of put a bandaid on this issue, but it's not really a long-term solution. So we're, we're building is really seamless onboarding where everything can be tied to your domain so that you can navigate to different apps in a much more seamless way. >>Michael, I got to get your thoughts on this because on the product side, it's interesting. My mind's kind of connecting some dots if I have, first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins, right? So, you know, check their little pain, pain reduction. But when you think about what's different, I can now broker my data as well as log in. So let's just say, hypothetically, I'm cruising around some D apps and, you know, doing things and earning reputation or attention or points or whatever, tokens utility tokens. There could be a way for me to control what I own. I'm the product I own the data. Is that kind of where this is going? >>I think it's definitely a direction. It could go say, for example, if I'm a e-commerce platform and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard, you know, one of the things that I could request from a user is their address. I can figure out where they live, what city they're in that will help inform the, the decision that I need to make as a business. And in return, maybe I give that person a dollar off their purchase, right? Like we can, we can start to build a stronger relationship between the applications that people use and the people that use them and try to optimize that whole experience and try to just transfer information back and forth to make everyone's lives better. >>What's the roadmap on the business side, Charlie, when you see companies kind of adopting it, they're probably taking baby steps or crawling before they walk they're walking before they run. I mean, I can see decentralized applications in the future, whether it's FinTech or whatever, having new kinds of marketplaces that take advantage of the paradigm where the, the script flips to the user first. Okay. So I see that. How do people get started now? What are some of the success momentum points that you're seeing companies do now with unstoppable? >>Sure. So a lot of web three apps are very sensitive about respecting the, the information that their users are providing, right? So what we're doing is I'm offering different ways for apps can touch with their users in a way that is user controlled. So an example there is that a lot of web three companies will use wallet connect to allow users to log in using a wallet address, an issue. There is that one person can have hundreds of wallet addresses, and it's impossible for the app to understand that. So what we do is we use login, we attach an email address, some other pieces to a wallet address so that we can identify who a unique user is. And the app is able to collect that information. They don't have to deal with passwords or PII storage. They have access to a huge amount of new data for an improved UX. >>It's really simple to implement and maintain as well. So one example there is if you are a DFI platform and you want to reward your users for coming to their site for the first time, now that they can identify unique user, they can drop a token into that user's wallet all because they're able to identify that user as unique. So they have a better way of understanding their customers. They enable their customers to share data. A lot of these companies well ask users to follow them on Twitter or discord when they need to provide updates or, you know, bug bounties, all these different things and log in with unstoppable, lets them permission, email addresses so they can collect emails if they want to do a newsletter. And instead of sort of harvesting data from elsewhere and kind of forcing people to join this newsletter program, it's all user controlled. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email for your newsletter. You know, I'm supporting your project, want to be kept up to date with bugs or bounties or rewards programs. So really it's just kind of a, a better way for users to, to share the data that they're willing to with dApps and dabs can use it to create all sorts of incentives and really just kind of understand their users on a, on a different level. >>How has the development Michael going on the, on the smart contract side of the business, you know, theories has always been heralded as being very developer focused. There's been great innovations. Just, you still got, you know, gas fees out there. You still gotta do some things. How is the development environment, how are the applications coming? Cause I can see the really, I can see the flywheel kicking in as a developer, Frank gets more streamlined, more efficient, and now you've got the identity piece nailed down. I just see a lot of kind of dominoes falling at the same time. What's the status on the dev side? >>What's your tour? The fascinating thing about crypto is how quickly it changes. You know, when I, when I joined Ethereum was pretty reasonable still for transactions. It was very cheap to get things done very fast. We've looked at last summer that things went completely out of control. This is a big reason that unstoppable for a long time has been working on a layer two and we've moved over to the Pollyanna, our primary source of record, which is built on top of it. The area of course, I think saved well over a hundred million dollars in Gaspe is for our users that we're constantly keeping an eye on new technologies that are emerging, weighing how we can incorporate those things and really where this industry is going to take us. You know, in many ways we are, are just as much passengers as the other people floating around the ecosystem as well. >>Yeah, it's, it's certainly getting faster every day and seeing a huge uptake on a theorem. I heard a stat that most people at the university of California, Berkeley, 30% of the computer science students are dropping out to join web three companies just goes to show you this cultural shift and you can see a lot more companies getting involved. So I got to ask you Charlie, on the biz dev front, how are companies getting started? What's the playbook? Are they putting their toe in the water? Are they jumping in full throttle? What's, what's the, what's the roadmap. What's the best practice for people to get started with unstoppable? >>Absolutely. You know, we're lucky that we get a lot of inbound interest from companies web two and web three because they first want to secure their domains. And we do a ton of work on the backend to protect trademark domains. We want to avoid squatting as much as possible. You know, we don't think that's the spirit of, of weaponry at all. And certainly not what the original intention of the internet was. So fair amount of companies will reach out to, out to us to get their domain. And then we can have a longer conversation about some of the other integrations and ways we can collaborate. So certainly visiting our website and several domains.com is a great starting point. We have an app submission page where asking, reach out to us, even request a grant. We have a grant prop, a program to help developers get started, provide them some resources to, to work with us and integrate some of our technology. >>We have great documentation as well on the site. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains, if you're a water and an exchange, as well as what it takes to integrate login within softball, which is actually a super easy integration as well, which we're, we're really excited about. So yeah, I'd say check out the website apply for our grant. If you think you're a fit there, then of course, people can always reach out to me directly on Twitter, on telegram email. We're very reachable and, and we're always happy to chat with projects and, and learn more about what they're doing. >>What's the coolest thing you've seen going on trial with your partners right now. What's, what's the, what's the number one use case that's cool that people are jumping on right now to get in and get some, some, you know, some success out of the gate. >>Yeah. Maybe, maybe gamefied kind of played, earns huge. It's blowing up. And the gaming community is really passionate, vibrant, just expanding like crazy same with there's all this cool new stuff you can do with defy where no matter, you know, how many, how, how big your kind of portfolio is, you're you're able to stake and use all these interesting tools to kind of grow your book. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects and, you know, there's certainly kind of an energy in the community where everyone wants to onboard the general public to web three, right? So we're all working on these school projects, but we need everyone to come over from web to kind of understand the advantages of defy of game fi of having an empty domain. So I'm lucky that I'm kind of one of the first layers there of, of meeting new projects and kind of helping them get access to more users so that they can grow along with. >>Yeah. I remember the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we were giving it away to give the, the community manager was give a, give a Bitcoin to someone that was when it was, you can actually give a Bitcoin to someone what's the, what's the word of mouth or organic viral. I won't say growth hack because that's got negative connotations, but what's the community's way of putting forth the mission for unstoppable. Is it just more domains you guys have any programs got going on? Is it give it away? I'll see you, you can get domains on your site, but what's the, what's the way to get people in gray shaded in and getting comfortable. >>Yeah. So much of what we do is really just all of that, to all that question, to answer that question, we spent a ton of time and energy just on education and whether that's specifically around domains or just general led three, we have a podcast which is pretty exceptional, which talks to what three leaders from across the space and makes the projects that they're working on more accessible. I think we passed over a hundred episodes, not too long ago. There's a ton of stuff that we do that other people do. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to talk about resources. >>Yeah. The part I think you guys are up to one 17, but that's a deep dive that you guys go deep on the podcast. So that's, you know, where you go in, what else is new on digital identity? Where do you guys see the future going now that you get the baseline identity with the NFT? It makes a lot of sense. Create innovation. Good logic makes sense. Solid. Technically what's next. >>Yeah. I think that's really boils down to the way that the internet has grown. Doesn't really feel like the way that the internet should be like our data shouldn't live in these walled gardens controlled by these large companies. Like ultimately people should be responsible for their own identity it's they should have control over the things that they do online, the data that's shared or the benefit of that data. And so the world that we are working towards is very much that where we are giving people the ability to be paid for sharing their data with companies, we're giving applications, the ability to request information from the people that use those applications to improve their experience. We're really just trying to make connections across the ecosystem, through these products to enable a better experience for everyone. So whether that's the, the use cases that I mentioned already, or maybe viewing reviews on something like Yelp or Amazon that just confirmed that the person that you are looking at is actually a real person, not some bot that's been paid to to the loader review. Like the, the interesting thing about these products is they're so universally applicable, applicable. There are so many different games that we can try to plug them in. So have >>It's a great example. It's double-edged sword. You can have a, a metaverse image and have pre-programmed conversations with, with, you know, liquid audio and the video application, you know, or it's a real person. How do you know the difference? You, these are going to be questions, you know, around, around who solves that problem. Now this is time for bots and is it time not for bots? We all know what happens when you get into the, you know, the game of manipulation, but also it can be helpful. This is where you gotta be smart and identity is critical in this future. Charlie, what's your reaction to the future of digital identity? I mean so much to look at here on the trajectory. >>Yeah. You know, I think a big part of it is data portability, right? If you go to a site like Instagram, you're giving them all this content that's very personal to you and you can't just pack up and leave Instagram. So we want a future where most of these apps are just kind of a front end and you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you and not be beholden to the companies that operate centralized servers. So I think data portability is huge and it's going to open up a lot of doors. And, and just going back to that thought on kind of cleaning up web two for a better web three. When I think about the Amazons, the Alps, the Yelps of the world, they're all these bots are all these awful fake reviews. There's a lot of gamification happening that is really just creating a lot of noise. >>And I want to bring kind of transparency back to the internet, where when you see a review, you should know that that's a real human and blockchain technology is enabling us to do that. And certainly enough, two domains are going to play a huge part of that. So I think that having an experience where, you know, and trust the people that you're interacting with is going to be really powerful and just a better experience for everyone. And there's a lot of ramifications with that. You know, politically speaking, we've, we've all seen all the issues with kind of attacking communities and using bots and fake accounts to kind of hit people's pain points is it's kind of sad and, and certainly not something that we want to see continue happening. So whatever we can do to kind of give people their digital identity and help people understand that this is a real person on the other end, I think is huge for, for the future of the internet and really for society as well. >>That's a great call out there. Charlie cleaning up the mess of web 2.0 web two. Well, actually I was, it was 2.0 technically now web three is no nos 0.0 in it, but, but I saw on our listen to the podcast with Matt, this recent one, and he had a great metaphor that went back to when I was growing up in the internet, you got IP addresses, right? And the mess there was, it was, you couldn't find what you want to look and no one could remember what to type in. Cause you can type in IP addresses in the browser back then. And then DNS came out and then keywords that's web. Okay. Now that mess now is fraud. Misinformation, bot manipulation, deep fakes, many other kind of unwanted kind of time to innovate. And every year, every time you had these inflection points, there'd be an abstraction on top of it. So similar thing happening here is that you guys see it too. >>Yeah. I think we're going back to some of the foundational architecture of the internet DNS and really bringing that forward about 30, 40 years in terms of technology. So loading in some work cryptography and some other fancy things to help patch some of those issues from the previous versions of the web. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on and the spirit of our tick talk, you know, I'm only summarize this. Can you guys give us a quick tick tock moment, short comment on, you know, where this is all going, whereas log-in single sign on mean and what should people do to take steps to secure their digital identity? >>Sure. I'll jump in here. So it's time for people to secure their digital identity. That great first step has gone on several domains and getting an entity domain. You know, you can control your data. You can do a lot of cool different things with your domain, including posting your own website that you own forever. And no one can take it away from you. I would certainly recommend the people join. Our discord, telegram community is check out our podcasts. It's really great. Especially if you're new to crypto web three, you know, we do a great job of sort of explaining all the basic concepts and expanding on them. So yeah, I'd say, you know, the time is now, so to get your digital identity and start embracing web three, because it's really exploding right now. And there's just so many incredible advantages, especially for the user, >>Michael, what's your take? >>I mean, I put not, I've said it better myself. >>Like we always say, if you're not on the next wave, your driftwood, and this is a big wave it's happening. It's pretty clear guys. It's it's there, it's happening now. And again, very pragmatic implementations of solving problems. The sign-on the app integration. Congratulations. And we've got our cube domain too, by the way. So we're we're I think we're good. You know, so we've got to put it to you. It's appreciate it, Charlie, Michael, thanks for coming on and sharing the update. Okay. This is the cube with unstoppable domains partner showcase, shout for your hosts. Got a lot of other great interviews. Check them out. We're going to continue our coverage and continue on with this great showcase. Thanks for watching.
SUMMARY :
We got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure So So you guys are in, So if you have a way that you represent yourself Is that a problem or an opportunity? changes that significantly, it puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. So I can almost imagine, as you bring NFTs to the digital identity, So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity and, So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists, because it's like a property, Can you guys take us through that, that architecture, what does it do? So the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain. seeing things like log with your kid hub handle or LinkedIn, or, you know, Google, So when you log in a domain or owner you know, depending on other services, keep your information safe. I have, first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins, right? I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard, you know, one of the things that I could What's the roadmap on the business side, Charlie, when you see companies kind of adopting it, And the app is able to collect that information. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email Cause I can see the really, around the ecosystem as well. So I got to ask you Charlie, on the biz dev front, how are companies getting started? of the internet was. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains, What's the coolest thing you've seen going on trial with your partners right now. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects and, you know, there's certainly kind of an energy Is it just more domains you guys have any programs to answer that question, we spent a ton of time and energy just on education and So that's, you know, where you go in, what else is new on digital identity? that just confirmed that the person that you are looking at is actually a real person, We all know what happens when you get into the, you know, the game of manipulation, you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you and not be beholden to the And I want to bring kind of transparency back to the internet, where when you see a review, So similar thing happening here is that you guys the previous versions of the web. on, you know, where this is all going, whereas log-in single sign on mean and what So yeah, I'd say, you know, the time is now, This is the cube with unstoppable domains partner showcase, shout for your hosts.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :
ENTITIES
Entity | Category | Confidence |
---|---|---|
Michael | PERSON | 0.99+ |
John | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Michael Williams | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Charlie | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Matt | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Charlie Brooks | PERSON | 0.99+ |
Amazon | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
Frank | PERSON | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
30% | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
Yelp | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
apple | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ | |
Amazons | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
NFT | ORGANIZATION | 0.99+ |
twice | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
hundreds of times | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
two domains | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
one person | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
first time | QUANTITY | 0.99+ |
link tree | ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ |
first | QUANTITY | 0.98+ |
Gmail | TITLE | 0.98+ |
last summer | DATE | 0.98+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.98+ | |
today | DATE | 0.97+ |
three leaders | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
80 plus usernames | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
first step | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
Ruth | PERSON | 0.97+ |
single | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
one example | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.97+ | |
two identities | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
two great guests | QUANTITY | 0.97+ |
hundreds of wallet addresses | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
ORGANIZATION | 0.96+ | |
each one | QUANTITY | 0.96+ |
a dollar | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Pollyanna | LOCATION | 0.95+ |
over a hundred million dollars | QUANTITY | 0.95+ |
Michael Williams1 | PERSON | 0.94+ |
Michael dot | ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ |
one | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
zillion handles | QUANTITY | 0.94+ |
Alps | ORGANIZATION | 0.94+ |
ERC 7 21 | OTHER | 0.93+ |
each user | QUANTITY | 0.93+ |
big | EVENT | 0.91+ |
first layers | QUANTITY | 0.9+ |
2022 007 | OTHER | 0.9+ |
over a hundred episodes | QUANTITY | 0.88+ |
Michael dot crypto | ORGANIZATION | 0.87+ |
Ethereum | OTHER | 0.87+ |
university of California | ORGANIZATION | 0.86+ |
three layer | QUANTITY | 0.86+ |
TechTalk | ORGANIZATION | 0.85+ |
Berkeley | LOCATION | 0.85+ |
John furrier | PERSON | 0.83+ |
three companies | QUANTITY | 0.81+ |
Web three | ORGANIZATION | 0.8+ |
about 30, 40 years | QUANTITY | 0.79+ |
tree | ORGANIZATION | 0.76+ |
DFI | ORGANIZATION | 0.74+ |
Yelps | ORGANIZATION | 0.74+ |
single sign | QUANTITY | 0.74+ |
first name | QUANTITY | 0.72+ |
softball | TITLE | 0.69+ |
web two | QUANTITY | 0.66+ |
one 17 | QUANTITY | 0.63+ |
layer two | QUANTITY | 0.62+ |
up | QUANTITY | 0.62+ |
web three | QUANTITY | 0.61+ |
link | TITLE | 0.61+ |
Graham Breeze & Mario Blandini, Tintri by DDN | VMworld 2019
>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. My name is David Lantz. I'm here with my co host John Troia. This is Day three of V M World 2019 2 sets. >> This is >> our 10th year at the M. World Cube is the leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Marry on Blondie is here. He's the C m o and chief evangelist that 10 tree by DDN Yes, sir. He's joined by Graham Breezes The Field CTO at 10 Tree also by DDN Recent acquisition jets Great to see you. >> Likewise, as they say, we're back. I like I like to call it a hibernation in the sense that people may have not known where did Ian or 10 Trias and Tension by Dede and, as the name implies, were acquired a year ago at the M World August 31st of 2018. And in the year since, we've been ableto invest in engineering support, my joining the company in marketing to take this solution, we've been able to save thousands of customers millions of man hours and bring it to a larger number of users. Way >> first saw 10 tree, we said, Wow, this is all about simplification. And Jonah Course you remember that when you go back to the early early Dick Cube days of of'em World, very complex storage was a major challenge. 10 Tree was all about simplifying that. Of course, we know DDN as well is the high performance specialist and have worked with those guys for a number of years. But take >> us >> back Married to the original vision of 10 Cherie. Is that original vision still alive? How was it evolved? >> Well, I'd say that it's, ah, number one reason why we're a part of the DD and family of brands because, as, ah, portfolio company, they're looking good. Bring technologies. I'm the marketing guy for our enterprise or virtual ization audience, and the product sets that cover high performance computing have their own audience. So for me, I'm focused on that. Graham's also focused on that, and, uh, really what continues to make us different today is the fact we were designed to learn from the beginning to understand how virtual machines end to end work with infrastructure. And that's really the foundation of what makes us different today. The same thing, right? >> So from the very beginning we were we were built to understand the work clothes that we service in the data center. So and that was virtual machines. We service those on multiple hyper visors today in terms of being able to understand those workloads intrinsically gives us a tremendous capability. Thio place. I owe again understanding that the infrastructure network storage, hyper visor, uh, weaken view that end end in terms of a latent a graph and give customers and insight into the infrastructure how it's performing. I would say that we're actually extending that further ways in terms of additional workload that we're gonna be able to take on later this year. >> So I know a lot >> of storage admits, although I I only play one on >> TV, but, uh, no, consistently >> throughout the years, right? 10 tree user experiences that is the forefront there. And in fact, they they often some people have said, You know what? I really want to get something done. I grab my tent Reeboks and so it can't talk. Maybe some examples of one example of why the user experience how the user experiences differ or why, why it's different. >> I'll start off by saying that I had a chance being new to the company just two weeks to meet a lot of 10 tree users. And prior to taking the job, I talkto us some folks behind the scenes, and they all told me the same thing. But what I was so interested to hear is that if they didn't have 10 tree, they'd otherwise not have the time to do the automation work, the research work, the strategy work or even the firefighting that's vital to their everyday operations. Right? So it's like, of course, I don't need to manage it. If I did, I wouldn't be able to do all these other things. And I think that's it. Rings true right that it's hard to quantify that time savings because people say, 0 1/2 of it. See, that's really not much of the greater scheme of things. I don't know. 1/2 50. Working on strategic program is a huge opportunity. Let's see >> the value of 10 tree to our end users and we've heard from a lot of them this week actually spent a fantastic event hearing from many of our passionate consumers. From the very beginning. We wanted to build a product that ultimately customers care about, and we've seen that this week in droves. But I would say the going back to what they get out of it. It's the values and what they don't have to do, so they don't have to carve up ones. They don't have to carve up volumes. All they have to do is work with the units of infrastructure that air native to their environment, v ems. They deal with everything in their environment from our virtual machine perspective, virtual machines, one thing across the infrastructure. Again, they can add those virtual machines seamlessly. They can add those in seconds they don't have toe size and add anything in terms of how am I gonna divide up the storage coming in a provisional I Oh, how am I going to get the technical pieces right? Uh, they basically just get place v EMS, and we have a very simplistic way to give them Ah, visualization into that because we understand that virtual machine and what it takes to service. It comes right back to them in terms of time savings that are tremendous in terms of that. >> So let's deal with the elephant in the room. So, so 10 tree. We've talked about all the great stuff in the original founding vision. But then I ran into some troubles, right? And so what? How do you deal with that with customers in terms of just their perception of what what occurred you guys did the eye poets, et cetera, take us through how you're making sure customers are cool with you guys. >> I'm naturally, glass is half full kind of guy from previous, uh, times on the Cube. The interesting thing is, not a lot of people actually knew. Maybe we didn't create enough brand recognition in the past for people to even know that there was a transition. There were even some of our customers. And Graham, you can pile on this that because they don't manage the product every day because they don't have to. It's kind of so easy they even for gotten a lot about it on don't spend a lot of time. I'd say that the reason why we are able to continue. Invest today a year after the acquisition is because retaining existing customers was something that was very successful, and to a lot of them, you can add comments. It wasn't easy to switch to something. They could just switch to something else because there's no other product, does these automatic things and provides the predictive modeling that they're used to. So it's like what we switched to so they just kept going, and to them, they've given us a lot of great feedback. Being owned by the largest private storage company on planet Earth has the advantages of strong source of supply. Great Leverett reverse logistics partnerships with suppliers as a bigger company to be able to service them. Long >> trial wasn't broke, so you didn't need to fix it. And you were ableto maintain obviously a large portion of that customer base. And what was this service experience like? And how is that evolving? And what is Dede and bring to the table? >> So, uh, boy DD and brings so many resources in terms of bringing this from the point when they bought us last year. A year ago today, I think we transition with about 40 people in the company. We're up about 200 now, so Ah, serious investment. Obviously, that's ah have been a pretty heavy job in terms of building that thing back up. Uh, service and support we've put all of the resource is the stated goal coming across the acquisition was they have, ah, 10. Tree support tender by DNC would be better than where 10 tree support was. We fought them on >> rate scores, too. So it's hard to go from there. Right? And >> I would say what we've been doing on that today. I mean, in terms of the S L. A's, I think those were as good as they've ever been from that perspective. So we have a big team behind us that are working really hard to make sure that the customer experience is exactly what we want. A 10 tree experience to be >> So big messages at this This show, of course, multi cloud kubernetes solving climate change, fixing the homeless problem in San Francisco. I'm not hearing that from you guys. What's what's your key message to the VM world? >> Well, I personally believe that there's a lot of opportunity to invest in improving operations that are already pretty darn stable, operating these environments, talking to folks here on the floor. These new technologies you're talking about are certainly gonna change the way we deploy things. But there's gonna be a lot of time left Still operating virtualized server infrastructure and accelerating VD I deployments to just operationalized things better. We're hoping that folks choose some new technologies out there. I mean, there's a bill was a lot of hype in past years. About what technology to choose. We're all flash infrastructure, but well, I'd liketo for the say were intelligent infrastructure. We have 10 and 40 get boards were all flash, but that's not what you choose this. You choose this because you're able to take their operations and spend more your time on the apse because you're not messing around with that low level infrastructure. I think that there's a renaissance of, of, of investment and opportunity to innovate in that space into Graham's point about going further up the stack. We now have data database technology that we can show gives database administrators the direct ability to self service their own cloning, their own, staging their own operations, which otherwise would be a complex set of trouble tickets internally to provision the environment. Everyone loves to self service. That's really big. I think our customers love. It's a self service aspect. I see the self service and >> the ability to d'oh again, not have to worry about all the things that they don't have to do in terms of again not having to get into those details. A cz Morrow mentioned in terms of the database side, that's, ah, workload, the workload intelligence that we've already had for virtual machines. We can now service that database object natively. We're going to do sequel server later this year, uh, being ableto again, being able to see where whether or not they've got a host or a network or a storage problem being able to see where those the that unit they're serving, having that inside is tremendously powerful. Also being able the snapshot to be able to clone to be able thio manage and protect that database in a native way. Not having to worry about, you know, going into a console, worrying about the underlying every structure, the ones, the volumes, all the pieces that might people people would have to get involved with maybe moving from, like, production to test and those kinds of things. So it's the simplicity, eyes all the things that you really don't have to do across the getting down in terms of one's the volumes, the sizing exercises one of our customers put it. Best thing. You know, I hear a lot of things back from different customer. If he says the country, the sentry box is the best employee has >> I see that way? Reinvest, Reinvest. I haven't heard a customer yet that talks about reducing staff. Their I t staff is really, really critical. They want to invest up Kai throw buzzword out there, Dev. Ops. You didn't mention that it's all about Dev ops, right? And one thing that's interesting here is were or ah, technology that supports virtual environments and how many software developers use virtual environments to write, test and and basically developed programmes lots and being able to give those developers the ability to create new machines and be very agile in the way they do. Their test of is awesome and in terms of just taking big amounts of data from a nap, if I can circling APP, which is these virtual machines be ableto look at that on the infrastructure and more of her copy data so that I can do stuff with that data. All in the flying virtualization we think of Dev Ops is being very much a cloud thing. I'd say that virtual ization specifically server virtualization is the perfect foundation for Dav ops like functionality. And what we've been able to do is provide that user experience directly to those folks up the stacks of the infrastructure. Guy doesn't have to touch it. I wanted to pull >> a couple of threads together, and I think because we talked about the original vision kind of E m r centric, VM centric multiple hyper visors now multi cloud here in the world. So what >> are you seeing >> in the customers? Is that is it? Is it a multi cloud portfolio? What? What are you seeing your customers going to in the future with both on premise hybrid cloud public. So where does where does 10 tree fit into the storage portfolio? >> And they kind of >> fit all over the map. I think in terms of the most of the customers that we have ultimately have infrastructure on site and in their own control. We do have some that ultimately put those out in places that are quote unquote clouds, if you will, but they're not in the service. Vendor clouds actually have a couple folks, actually, that our cloud providers. So they're building their own clouds to service customers using market. What >> differentiates service is for serving better d our offerings because they can offer something that's very end end for that customer. And so there's more. They monetize it. Yeah, and I think those type of customers, like the more regional provider or more of a specialty service provider rather than the roll your own stuff, I'd say that Generally speaking, folks want tohave a level of abstraction as they go into new architecture's so multi cloud from a past life I wrote a lot about. This is this idea that I don't have to worry about which cloud I'm on to do what I'm doing. I want to be able to do it and then regards of which clouded on it just works. And so I think that our philosophy is how we can continue to move up the stack and provide not US access to our analytics because all that analytic stuff we do in machine learning is available via a P I We have ah v r o plug in and all that sort of stuff to be able allow that to happen. But when we're talking now about APS and how those APS work across multiple, you know, pieces of infrastructure, multiple V EMS, we can now develop build a composite view of what those analytics mean in a way that really now gives them new inside test. So how can I move it over here? Can I move over here? What's gonna happen if I move it over here over there? And I think that's the part that should at least delineate from your average garden variety infrastructure and what we like to call intelligent infrastructure stopping that can, Actually that's doing stuff to be able to give you that data because there's always a way you could do with the long way. Just nobody has time to do with the long way, huh? No. And I would actually say that you >> know what you just touched on, uh, going back to a fundamental 10 tree. Different churches, getting that level of abstraction, right is absolutely the key to what we do. We understand that workload. That virtual machine is the level of abstraction. It's the unit infrastructure within a virtual environment in terms of somebody who's running databases. Databases are the unit of infrastructure that they want to manage. So we line exactly to the fundamental building blocks that they're doing in those containers, certainly moving forward. It's certainly another piece we're looking. We've actually, uh I think for about three years now, we've been looking pretty hard of containers. We've been waiting to see where customers were at. Obviously Of'em were put. Put some things on the map this week in terms of that they were pretty excited about in terms of looking in terms of how we would support. >> Well, it certainly makes it more interesting if you're gonna lean into it with someone like Vienna where behind it. I mean, I still think there are some questions, but I actually like the strategy of because if I understand it correctly of Visa, the sphere admin is going to see the spear. But ah ah, developers going to see kubernetes. So >> yeah, that's kind of cool. And we just want to give people an experience, allows them to self service under the control of the I T department so that they can spend less time on infrastructure. Just the end of the I haven't met a developer that even likes infrastructure. They love to not have to deal with it at all. They only do it out. It assessed even database folks They love infrastructural because they had to think about it. They wanted to avoid the pitfalls of bad infrastructure infrastructures Code is yeah, way we believe in that >> question. Go to market. Uh, you preserve the 10 tree name so that says a lot. What's to go to market like? How are you guys structuring the >> organizational in terms of, ah, parent company perspective or a wholly owned subsidiary of DDN? So 10 tree by DDN our go to market model is channel centric in the sense that still a vast majority of people who procure I t infrastructure prefer to use an integrator or reseller some sort of thing. As far as that goes, what you'll see from us, probably more than you did historically, is more work with some of the folks in the ecosystem. Let's say in the data protection space, we see a rubric as an example, and I think you can talk to some of that scene where historically 10 Tree hadn't really done. It's much collaboration there, but I think now, given the overall stability of the segment and people knowing exactly where value could be added, we have a really cool joint story and you're talking about because your team does that. >> Yeah, so I would certainly say, you know, in terms of go to market Side, we've been very much channel lead. Actually, it's been very interesting to go through this with the channel folks. It's a There's also a couple other pieces I mentioned you mentioned some of the cloud provider. Some of those certainly crossed lines between whether they're MSP is whether they are resellers, especially as we go to our friends across the pond. Maybe that's the VM it'll Barcelona discussion, but some of those were all three, right? So there are customer their service providers there. Ah ah, channel partner if you want terms of a resellers. So, um, it's been pretty interesting from that perspective. I think the thing is a lot of opportunity interview that Certainly, uh, I would say where we're at in terms of, we're trying to very much. Uh, we understand customers have ecosystems. I mean, Marco Mitchem, the backup spaces, right? Uh, customers. We're doing new and different things in there, and they want us to fit into those pieces. Ah, and I'd certainly say in the world that we're in, we're not tryingto go solve and boil the ocean in terms of all the problems ourselves we're trying to figure out are the things that we can bring to the table that make it easier for them to integrate with us And maybe in some new and novel, right, >> So question So what's the number one customer problem that when you guys hear you say, that's our wheelhouse, we're gonna crush the competition. >> I'll let you go first, >> So I'd say, you know, if they have a virtualized environment, I mean, we belong there. Vermin. Actually, somebody said this bed is the best Earlier again. Today in the booze is like, you know, the person who doesn't have entries, a person who doesn't know about 10 tree. If they have a virtual environment, you know, the, uh I would say that this week's been pretty interesting. Lots of customer meetings. So it's been pretty, pretty awesome, getting a lot of things back. But I would say the things that they're asking us to solve our not impossible things. They're looking for evolution's. They're looking for things in terms of better insights in their environment, maybe deeper insights. One of the things we're looking to do with the tremendous amount of data we've got coming back, Um, got almost a million machines coming back to us in terms of auto support data every single night. About 2.3 trillion data points for the last three years, eh? So we're looking to make that data that we've gotten into meaningful consumable information for them. That's actionable. So again, again, what can we see in a virtual environment, not just 10 tree things in terms of storage of those kinds of things, but maybe what patches they have installed that might be affecting a network driver, which might affect the certain configuration and being able to expose and and give them some actionable ways to go take care of those problems. >> All right, we gotta go marry. I'll give you. The last word >> stated simply if you are using virtual, is a Shinto abstract infrastructure. As a wayto accelerate your operations, I run the M where, if you have ah 100 virtual machine, 150 virtual machines, you could really benefit from maybe choosing a different way to do that. Do infrastructure. I can't say the competition doesn't work. Of course, the products work. We just want hope wanted hope that folks could see that doing it differently may produce a different outcome. And different outcomes could be good. >> All right, Mario Graham, Thanks very much for coming to the cubes. Great. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you for watching John Troy a day Volante. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube?
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. He's the C m o and chief evangelist that 10 tree by DDN my joining the company in marketing to take this solution, we've been able to save thousands of customers And Jonah Course you remember that when back Married to the original vision of 10 Cherie. And that's really the foundation of what makes us different today. So from the very beginning we were we were built to understand the work clothes that we service And in fact, they they often some people So it's like, of course, I don't need to manage it. It's the values and what they don't have to do, so they don't have to carve up ones. We've talked about all the great stuff in I'd say that the reason why we are And you were ableto maintain obviously a large I think we transition with about 40 people in the company. So it's hard to go from there. I mean, in terms of the S L. not hearing that from you guys. database administrators the direct ability to self service their own cloning, their own, So it's the simplicity, eyes all the things that you really don't have to do across All in the flying virtualization we think of Dev Ops is being very much a cloud thing. a couple of threads together, and I think because we talked about the original vision kind of E m r centric, customers going to in the future with both on premise hybrid cloud public. So they're building their own clouds to service customers using market. the stack and provide not US access to our analytics because all that analytic stuff we do in machine learning Different churches, getting that level of abstraction, right is absolutely the key to what we do. But ah ah, developers going to see kubernetes. the control of the I T department so that they can spend less time on infrastructure. What's to go to market like? Let's say in the data protection space, we see a rubric as an example, and I think you can talk to some of that I mean, Marco Mitchem, the backup spaces, right? So question So what's the number one customer problem that when you guys hear Today in the booze is like, you know, the person who doesn't have entries, a person who doesn't know about 10 tree. All right, we gotta go marry. I can't say the competition doesn't work. Thank you so much.
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